Implementing ActivityPub Client-to-Server

I don’t think it’s a problem. It would be more interesting for clients to be able to split a post into the various types and send the relevant objects to the right servers. E.g., a post containing an image could send the Note to Mastodon, and the image to PixelFed. Then you’d have generic clients that can dispatch the objects according to their types, so that server implementations can concentrate on doing one thing and doing it well. And users would then be able to choose their favorite platform for each type. I’m all for moving away from this one big thing that does it all and evolves into a huge piece of bloatware: the Web was not intended that way, and that’s how you build centralization.

Another example: it would be awesome to write a blog about a new song, attaching a video clip to it and have the client:

  • extract audio from the video clip and upload to Funkwhale
  • upload the video to peertube
  • post the whole piece to WriteFreely (including the link to the video and audio files, as one URL each[1])
  • extract the first paragraph including the video link and post a Note to Pleroma
  • etc. ditto for other servers the user wants to use.

@rhiaro is that close to what you described in The ActivityPub Panel? In other words, move away from the app paradigm, make it possible to cooperate among ActivityPub software implementations rather than to compete.


  1. the video and audio could be attached to the post and also posted as is, on their own lines into the post, to be interpreted by WriteFreely as a “OneBox” – much like in Discourse where a video URL is turned into a full-blown video player, etc. ↩︎

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