In the early days of social media, there was a lot more interoperability. You could auto post to Twitter from Facebook, Instagram could post to Twitter, subscribe to subreddits via rss etc.
Social media companies wanted to grow their share and one way to do that was make it easy for people to post from one platform to many.
But with the rise of social externalities (bots, spam, political ops) and the plateauing of growth, lots of these companies closed down their APIs. YouTuber Tom Scott talks about this era some here: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0
One of the major things that attracts me to the fediverse is the renewal of interoperable promise.
A tool that a lot of people used back in the day and now less so due to the lack of api support is “post once, publish everywhere” tools.
Does anybody know of such a tool for the fediverse?
The use case I see: I post some pictures to my pixelfed account, those automatically get posted to my mastodon account, and if they have certain hashtags or something then get posted to relevant lemmy communities.
I think one thing the recent “alternative frontends for lemmy” shows is the universality of a lot of content for different user interfaces.
Different frontends serve different use cases (following people on mastodon versus mutual friendships on friendica versus following subject matter groups on lemmy) and their user interfaces create different kinds of community (thousands of followers on mastodon in a porous discourse versus tighter private communities focused on specific subjects on lemmy).
It makes sense to decouple to a degree content and frontend. I think having the ability to post once distribute to many different frontends and community types is powerful and something unfederated media simply can’t provide.
Thoughts?
you could setup a bot to follow your own pixelfed from your mastodon and repeat every post. but, why? if you instead only post your photos to pixelfed and other stuff to mastodon, people get the choice of following either your photos OR your links and microblog posts (as we used to call them over a decade ago when the fediverse was called the federated social web) OR they can follow both. and that way, when someone on friendica or another mastodon replies to your pixelfed post, pixelfed-only users can see their reply, right? (i don’t know, i haven’t actually used pixelfed…)
the feature you’re looking for is called “cross-posting”, and there are many tools that do it, but this is an inferior stopgap solution to the problem of lack of interoperability in the incumbent platforms… which activitypub is attempting to provide a better solution for.
another downside to cross-posting is the lack of deduplication: if i want to just use one thing and follow your mastodon but i also want to see the comments on your pixelfed, i might end up following both and then seeing all of your posts twice.
(NB activitypub is also a technically lacking architecture in many ways… but it is better than cross-posting)
tldr you can post on your mastodon (and/or put in your profile there) “you can also follow my pixelfed (probably using whatever you’re using to read this) if you want to see my photos too”.
there’s def potential confusion for people to double follow stuff.
I don’t like have to upload an image multiple times, simple as that. It’s not a particularly broad sweeping or universal reason. It’s me being a “lazy” user. I want less friction.
“publish once, distribute everywhere” isn’t quite the same as cross-posting, though it is a related concept and they both require some level of interoperability. I don’t think the mere existence of interoperability eliminates the use case for me.
The reason I think this is valuable is because there are actual real differences between communities based on their structure. An open asymmetrical follow system like mastodon/twitter produces a different kind of community interaction than a closed symmetrical friending system like friendica/facebook.
At the very least I think this friction point is worth considering.
I was thinking a bot might be a solution but was hoping someone had already done the work for me lol. Like I said, I’m a “lazy” user :D