Since we are in the fediverse, I think it would be convenient to have a fediverse-wide resolvable fediverse URI scheme, that would look like so:
fediverse://
edit: Found a relevant FEP: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/07d7/fep-07d7.md
It’s an intriguing idea and might well be in line with the founding principles of the internet.
As I understand it, the URI is supposed to define the type of data you will find at the address, allowing you to use a client dedicated to that type. So: use a Gopher client for
gopher://data, a newsgroup program fornntp://data, and of course a web browser forhttp://.So the issue here would be to define what “fediverse data” actually looks like. This is quickly becoming quite a technical challenge.
Personally I like the idea of standardizing communication paradigms with a protocol, but you do first have to decide what the paradigms are. A few obvious suggestions:
- IM, or one-to-one message (holy grail! but then not public, by definition)
- many-to-many text message (IRC)
- forum post with comments (this thing right here)
- one-to-many message (Xitter, Mastodon)
Since the ActivityPub protocol seems to be the de-facto glue to this fediverse thing, maybe that’s where to look first.
Changing the scheme doesn’t really make any difference if it’s still just HTTP underneath. The scheme is just for indicating a protocol. So what’s the different protocol you’d actually propose?
Absolutely not. It should run on HTTP, as a website. Unless you want to build a client which would be somehow fundamentally different from a web browser somehow (note: Lagrange and Gopher Browser are just browsers), which would somehow be able to display data from every use of ActivityPub / “the fediverse” in a different context from a web browser, then no. What we need to build is website software more in line with kbin / mbin, collecting together all the different information of the fediverse into one interface.
Not that I’m opposed, but I’m not sure if it’s practical to make a fediverse-wide link that’s resolvable between platforms since there are so many differences and little incompatibilities and developers who don’t directly interact with each other – or even know each other exist!
Even if it isn’t though, it would be nice to be able to do something like
lemmy://(rest of regular url)to indicate data from a lemmy(-compatible) server that should be viewable by all other lemmy clients without leaving your particular client and having to open some other website.silly. this would be like expecting to use IE:// for internet explorer webpages instead of an expected protocol standard like http. defeats the purpose of protocol designed around content not applications.
imagine how shitty email would be if we had to tag the server application somewhere in the uri. silly.
It’s not a particular protocol right now, but it would be a URI that refers to a specific resource. A protocol could also be defined – e.g. a restricted subset of HTTPS that returns JSON objects following a defined schema or something like that – but the point really is that I want to be able to refer to a thread not a webpage. I don’t think that’s a silly thing to want to be able to do.
Right now, I can only effectively link to a post or thread as rendered by a specific interface – e.g. for me, this thread is https://old.reddthat.com/post/30710789 using reddthat’s mlmym interface. That’s probably not how most users would like to view the thread if I want to link it to them. Any software that recognizes the new URI scheme could understand that I mean a particular thread rather than how it’s rendered by a particular web app, and go fetch it and render it appropriately in their client if I link it. (If current clients try to be clever about HTTP links, it becomes ambiguous if I mean the thread as rendered into a webpage in specific way or if I actually meant the thread itself but had to refer to it indirectly; that causes problems too.)
I don’t think
lemmy://is necessarily the best prefix – especially if mbin, piefed, etc. get on board – just that I would like functionality like that very much, and that something like a lemmy URI scheme (or whatever we can get people to agree on) might be a good way to accomplish it.if anything, the op had it correct with fedi:// or ap://
the requests and responses standardized as with any protocol regardless of underlying server.
objects in the fediverse are urls. thats just how it works.
apps (clients) accessing that content are outside the scope of the protocol… its their own implementation problem with how they render stuff (those object urls).
for example; mbin can already consume/ingest a given fediverse thread, post or comment if it has never seen it before (given the url) and render it correctly.
We do.
It’s mailto or mime for the scheme. There’s even mbox as a scheme.
Upside down, as the other comment says. It should rather be
forum://or similar, i.e. a generic self-explanatory term for the type of data. The branded networks like this one would then follow the standard in order to display properly.
How would that work? Who would resolve it?
To what end?
