You mean like one app to rule them all, something that can access all corners of the Fediverse? That would take an awful lot of work, but there's already Fedilab, which can access multiple accounts on Mastodon, Peertube, and Pleroma. I don't know if they intend to integrate more though.
Would love an iOS version of this
It's my favorite Mastodon client. Would be really cool if you could just swap over to a Lemmy account.
there ... already are multiple ones?
I think they want one that can interact with the whole fediverse, so lemmy, kbin, mastodon, peertube, friendica, hubzilla, pleroma, akkoma, calckkey, misskey etc.
One App to rule them all!
A Fediverse browser that allows you to connect to a range of fediverse platforms would probably be the only thing to get me fully invested in it tbh. I'm quite enjoying lemmy but I've not really had much interest in the other platforms other than mastodon but twitter has all the people I follow so hard to move off of it
Thankfully, I never had Twitter.
Not sure how much sense that makes. It's like "one app for the internet".
Fediverse is an umbrella for lots of different applications. If it was possible to show them all with the same UI, the question still remains whether that is desirable.
I'd rather have a few apps optimized for what I use, than one compromise for all.
To be fair, we do have single apps for the internet. They're called web browsers.
So ... either a somewhat uninformed question (which is totally fine BTW, this is all new for everyone!) or a deep question!
- To the former ... there are plenty of fediverse apps. They're all mostly specific to a platform such as lemmy or mastodon. Most or nearly all of the lemmy apps are still in beta can still be used if you signup appropriately. I think memmy came out with their official version just recently.
- To the latter ... yea ... if the fediverse is a thing then why aren't there "fediverse" apps that aren't specific to any one platform but instead allow you to "surf the fediverse" in the same way that the browser lets you surf the web or an email app lets you use multiple email accounts from multiple providers? And ... that's a good question! There should be one IMO! It'd be somewhat tricky to make though and this whole fediverse thing is arguably still a prototype. But, IMO, it's gotten to the point now where this actually makes a lot of sense and it's quite pertinent to pose the question. Arguably, until it's possible to consume and browse the whole fediverse through one single interface, it isn't really a fediverse but something lesser.
point 2
You mean like how a web browser already allows you do that?
In a way, yea, the browser is the only true fediverse app, at the moment.
But it’s hardly optimised for it and each platform is consigned to live in a single window or tab.
I doubt it. While the server to server communication is standardized with ActivityPub, the server to client (app) communication isn't. This means different Fediverse apps have different APIs to login, fetch and create posts and so on. It's unlikely that we'll ever have a standard API here, because the apps work diffently and have different needs for their APIs. Maybe some kind of common denominator, but that probably wouldn't be feature complete on most apps.
So the one app to rule them all would have to created custom API Implementations and UIs for every Fediverse app, which would be a loooot of work and probably a worse experience than specialized apps.
So there is apparently a server to client protocol/spec/API defined on activity pub. No one uses it, but maybe they should be. I don’t know. I’ve hassled one of the AP authors (Evan) about it and they said they’re writing a blog post about it.
Kaiteki aspires to be just that, but it's currently in alpha
I'm using Memmy for Lemmy on IOS which is heavily inspired by be Apollo App and just recently popped up. So far so good. Still missing some features but it's already a better experience than the reddit official app
Finally, something for Apple. Thank you!
You're welcome!
Try out Liftoff if you're on Android. People also seem to like Jerboa. Both apps support all instances of Lemmy AFAIK
