I am wondering if there is a discord (ironic i know if there is something equvialent let me know) where I can get into contact with people developing in this space.

I am hoping to get some questions answered such as:

How does a different architecture like kbin@social ui (and possible backend) communicate with posts from lemmy? Is it through ActivityPub?

Could someone from lemmy login to mastodon with their same account? Why or why not?

Could two different fediverse apps technically do all the same things if they used the exact protocol to do the same things with a different ui?

If someone wanted to go about making their own fediverse app where is a good first learning step?

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[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I am wondering if there is a discord (ironic i know if there is something equvialent let me know) where I can get into contact with people developing in this space.

I assume there are probably some discords somewhere, but I'd encourage you to communicate on the fediverse about the work you're doing to improve it. Experience with the fediverse helps people understand the ways in which it can/should improve. And also highlights the ways it NEEDS to improve, if you yourself prefer to use discord even to talk about goings on in the Fediverse, then figuring out WHY you prefer that is probably the first improvement you want to work on.

How does a different architecture like kbin@social ui (and possible backend) communicate with posts from lemmy? Is it through ActivityPub?

Yes, ActivityPub is what allows this, though different apps use ActivityPub in different ways, which pragmatically leads to different levels of useful interoperability.

If you want to learn more about this, I'd recommend setting up a private Lemmy, a private kbin, a private mastodon, and maybe others you're interested in. Try to federate them and see how it works and what it looks like from each app.

For example, with Mastodon Federating with Lemmy, I've heard that a Lemmy community looks like a Mastodon account to follow, posts to the Lemmy community looks like toot threads, and comments look like replies in the toot threads. It feels a little weird as a Lemmy user to see these things out of their normal UI context, but that's how Mastodon handles the elements of the AcitivtyPub protocol that Lemmy uses. And it works pretty ok for casual interaction with a Lemmy community, though I'd generally prefer using a real Lemmy account to interact with Lemmy communities because it represents these things in a more intuitive way to me.

Could someone from lemmy login to mastodon with their same account? Why or why not?

You can't use your Mastodon account to log into a Lemmy instance because accounts are bound to an instance. What you CAN do, is use your Mastodon account on your Mastodon instance to "follow" a Lemmy community through federation. Then Lemmy posts will appear in your Mastodon timeline as toot threads, and comments as toots in those threads.

Other fediverse apps may usefully interoperate with Lemmy in different ways, or they may not interoperate in a useful way even though they both use ActivityPub because they use it too differently.

Could two different fediverse apps technically do all the same things if they used the exact protocol to do the same things with a different ui?

Yes, kbin and Lemmy are fairly close to this. I think kbin tries to have a Mastodon-like toot interface as well, though I'm not that familiar.

If someone wanted to go about making their own fediverse app where is a good first learning step?

Good first learning steps include:

Making accounts on different well-established fediverse apps and using them. I've learned the above answers just by doing that.
Installing your own instances of Fediverse apps you like. This will force you to understand how they work more deeply as you set up federation and see more of their internals.
Find ways to help existing projects. Right now, there's a flood of newcomers to Lemmy. Just watching for questions like this and answering takes stress off Lemmy devs and other established community members who are too busy to get to them all. Submit well-formed bug reports, or pull requests that improve performance or fix bugs on existing app projects. Help instance admins debug performance and other issues, or new admins set up their first instance.

I would advise NOT trying to make your own fediverse app. The fediverse is littered with failed vanity projects that either never worked well enough to use, or that worked well and didn't get used anyway. Much more than new apps, what the fediverse needs is community members populating the existing fediverse apps with interesting things to do and talk about, and developer communities helping the overworked devs of existing projects mature the best fediverse apps faster than the current devs can do alone.

[–] nosurf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you want to learn more about this, I’d recommend setting up a private Lemmy, a private kbin, a private mastodon, and maybe others you’re interested in. Try to federate them and see how it works and what it looks like from each app.

This is a great idea, had not thought of this.

Thanks for all the answers, it fit together exactly what I was missing.

I will say this, it from my small exploring of this it feels weird to me that all these fediverse apps dont share a sso or openid auth for all of them. Like since mastodon is the big player in this all other apps should support using them for auth to get easier entry into all of this as a new comer. Though this is kind of all about decentralization so maybe not?

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I will say this, it from my small exploring of this it feels weird to me that all these fediverse apps dont share a sso or openid auth for all of them.

I equally found this weird, and it kept me out of the fediverse for a long time even though I was following the tech through non-federated news sources. "I don't want to choose a server" is also a very common UX critique of the fediverse. I don't really have the federated app design chops to critique this choice, but I speculate it went something like this:

Your "account" is more than your identity. It's also your data. So I have a post and comment history on Lemmy.world, and they would have to store that and federated instances would need to be able to find it even if both supported oath to determine my identity.
And data is "heavy". You don't want to make the choice of home-server transparent and then have a heavy user with thousands of posts or followers hopping around from instance to instance dynamically all day. And most volunteer fediverse instance admins want to approve account sign up anyway because they don't want to host child porn or some wildly aggressive idiot so nobody is going to enable highly dynamic account migration anyway. So even though you have federated identity, you STILL need a home instance and a manually initiated account migration process to handle all the expensive data movement.
So supporting federated identity doesn't actually elide the need to make a server choice and doesn't make your account all that much more portable. In fact, it adds an ADDITIONAL choice for your identity server. And lots of fedi people get persnickety about the major oath providers. I could imagine tons of fedi instances saying "fuck google, we're not accepting them as an oath provider", and now the choice of identity provider becomes every bit as confusing and fraught as the choice of home instance, and you need to pick both.

And of course, federated identity is super complicated. I suspect people decided it just didn't pull it's weight in complexity. Anyy, that's a lot of wild speculation... but it's my theory about why federated identity never quite took off in the Fediverse.