I’m about to go to sleep but I’ve got a burning question about #Sharkey & maybe some of you amazing Fedi people can offer an explanation (so that I’ll have an answer when I wake up).

Elena Rossini ⁂

Remember how this summer I did lots of experiments & added my #Pixelfed & #Friendica accounts to made-for-Mastodon apps like #Ivory & #MonaPro? I could see their feeds, post, reply & follow.

With Sharkey I’m having issues: an error message while adding the account on Ivory; an empty feed on MonaPro. I wonder why?

Andy Piper

@_elena what is the error message? I assume some API incompatibility.

ilja :pumpkin_owo:

@_elena first important thing to know is non of this has to do with activity pub. (i say this bc from the last article i got the impression that this was possibly an assumption.)

Applications talk to each other through an interface. Interfaces between applications are generally called API's.

Mastodon created their own API to communicate with clients (eg web browser, smartphone apps...). Others have implemented a similar API so that Mastodon apps could also work with them. Pleroma and Akkoma both have this, I'm pretty sure Pixelfed also has this, possibly Firendica too.

That's why it works, the Mastodon app sends requests, the server understands them and provides a proper reply. Misskey never did that. Sharkey was forked from Misskey, so unless they added that, it won't work because Sharkey doesn't understand the requests that the Mastodon app is making.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

I haven't implemented the Mastodon API in my own work because it's ultimately based on Twitter (we implemented the Twitter/StatusNet API back in 2010 and still provide it - even though there are very few clients remaining).

The problem is that the Mastodon API (and the Twitter/StatusNet API) don't support more than about 25% of our software functionality; which is closer to Facebook (although with a decade and a half of enhancements) than Twitter/X. We also support the ActivityPub API -- but alas there aren't any viable clients. And don't tell me about AndStatus. That's supports the ActivityPub API but which can only be used with undocumented features of Pleroma's implementation of the Mastodon API. So we're back to the Mastodon API and Twitter. Nope. And nope.

We use Progressive Web Apps anyway. The two app stores controlled by corporate oligarchs have to die.

Elena Rossini ⁂

@andypiper the Ivory error message I got was that they only support Mastodon servers (which is technically not true because I added my Pixelfed and Friendica accounts to it).

@ilja ‘s superb explanation about APIs makes so much sense!

Elena Rossini ⁂

@mikedev thank you for the explanation Mike! And apologies for the belated reply but I didn’t get a notification for this - just stumbled upon your comment in replies.

I’ve heard so many great things about Hubzilla that I will definitely try it next.

And now I’m educating myself on APIs (from the POV of a non-developer)

Andy Piper

@_elena @ilja yes, that is a very good explanation!

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

apologies for the belated reply but I didn’t get a notification for this

Interop is like marriage. If only one partner is trying to make it work out, it doesn't usually end well.

In this case there was a complicated interaction between the streams repository and Akkoma (my reply was to @[email protected] and Mastodon -- which resulted in you not getting a notification. It should be fixed going forward even though it isn't technically a streams bug. It's just a confluence of misunderstandings and project policy/implementation differences.

Not sure how Hubzilla relates to any of this. Yes, I created that software years ago; but gave it to the community in 2018 and moved on to other things. I'm retired now.