this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
110 points (99.1% liked)
Fediverse
33010 readers
169 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're not, they're a different kind of object on the ActivityPub level. Lemmy and some others use the unofficial extension called Litepub which includes a custom ChatMessage type, while Mastodon and others have chosen to repurpose the Note object (used for posts and comments on Mastodon and comments on Lemmy) with limited visibility and weird mention rules.
Sounds like the protocol needs an upgrade if people are doing funny stuff like that. No?
So many AP platforms are made by a couple of guys in their garage, it's not even funny, and the mentality of "just dicking around" means what gets used is whatever the whims of the day dictate, rather than the standard.
"If it works, it's not stupid" and all that.
But that kind of work lacks real world testing, and depe concern for public expectaton or desire.
Plus, you have to keep in mind that the idea of interplatform interoperability isn't this core conceit of ActivityPub. It's a potential use case, but it's not an expectation. There's no reason anyone should expect interop like that, other than some developers wanted to try it.
But some didn't, and now that their platforms are gaining audience, they're refactoring to meet that audience's expectations.
There's no spec for private messages at all, there's no standard to implement. See also my explanation/rant as the other reply I made to the parent comment.