this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Yea ... I suspect this is a decent demonstration that in a few ways, the ultimate fediverse client is the browser. However nice the UI in an app is, it's all bespoke for the particular platform it's designed to work with. Once the fediverse does something interesting like connect with a completely different platform, any app is likely to have problems, because it's design is so particular. The web though is universal for the fediverse.
Without wanting to be critical of all the work that goes into mobile apps, from a bird eye perspective, I often wonder if it's a bit of a waste of fediverse developers' time when more fundamental and reusable software is needed, including libraries/frameworks for making it easy to make more universal mobile apps.
To be honest, having good frontends for accessing the fediverse on mobile devices isn't really a waste of time, as it helps introducing the fediverse to more people. It's also more convenient for some users, I prefer to access Lemmy through Jerboa for example.
But there are always possibilities to increase compatibility and ease of use between the diverse ActivityPub platforms, there could be something like "templating interfaces" for different content formats, for example. I think it's mostly a matter of time and adoption, the more users something has, the more developers we can have, who'll be interested in making things more accessible and frictionless.
I agree with you about the tempting templating formats. I’ve used pandoc as a rough model for the idea in the past.
And yes, I agree about introducing more people through apps probably works well.
As an overall phenomenon though, I’m just not convinced that we wouldn’t all be better off sticking to the browser and having devs improve web UIs and platforms and the software stacks, but that’s me.
Otherwise I do worry about glue willing developers are to work in things together in things that are not platform or app specific. So far the platforms are all silos AFAICT.