I wonder what is going to be the future of all of these ActivityPub-based services.
I'd like a real integration within all of them. It would be great if people could interact with any of these systems regardless of the services/instance where they created their account.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we are far from that. My understanding is there are some features that don't federate well. Like even within the same services, take Mastodon for instance, I think the number of "likes"/"favorites" of a given toot are different depending on the instance you are accessing the toot.
Regarding Firefish/Calckey, they keep presenting Firefish as a Mastodon with extra features but I don't know how well the extra features federate. If someone reacts to a post using a particular emoji, how that is going to be interpret by the other apps? I think there are similar issues between applications that considers upvotes/downvotes and applications that only consider upvotes or even worse, none of them.
I don't want to jump from one social network A to another B just because B added some X functionality. And in many cases, the social network B is not a superset of A, as there might be some features in A not existing in B.
And btw, talking about that, I'm starting to see some sort of "aggressivity" from Firefish user's towards Mastodon. The way they present these features is a bit pushy. I'm not a Mastodon fanboy and I wish well for both communities.
For sure I'll give Firefish a try (even though I prefer more text-post than post full of emojis) but as I said before, I don't want to jump from one social network A to another B just because they added a brand new minor feature, specially if A is getting well established and I see more activity there.
What are the features of Firefish that don't federate well with Mastodon? and in the case I use them in my posts, to what level are they integrated into Mastodon? Will my Firefish posts still be visible and discoverable from Mastodon?
I use rebased which is another non mastodon back-end that supports many of the same features. I think that generally speaking you're not going to have to worry. Yes, your emotes won't show up on their post for them because Mastodon doesn't actually support that, but it'll show up as a like. If you use quote reposts then it'll just show up as a link to the original comment.
That sounds reasonable. What about if I use rich text in my posts? Will Mastodon try to show something or it won't even recognize the post at all?
It’ll try to render it, even if just as markup (like if you try using and Latex markup for math).
I can't say with certainty, but I'm pretty sure that it'll just find a way to gracefully degrade. The fact is that Mastodon is literally the elephant in the room, if you make your thing incompatible with it, you screwed up.