Ben Pate 🤘🏻
Piece by piece, we're connecting #Bandwagon to every corner of the open web.
Today, we're improving how links to your songs and albums display when someone shares them on Mastodon, Facebook, and others. It's a small thing, but immensely valuable to the social web.
As an example, here's an album I've been listening to on Bandwagon.fm: https://bandwagon.fm/671667a8d7963fa9c589401e
silverpill
@benpate This object shouldn't have actor property. It can only appear on activities: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-actor
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
The deeper I dig into the #Fediverse, the more I realize that we aren't building a "federated" group of individual apps. It's a single, integrated system. Something like a digital hive-mind, and everything is connected.
Those once isolated websites and services are like individual cells in the body whole, making connections between (API's, protocols, etc) even more important than the individuals themselves.
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
@silverpill Thank you! I’ll double check the ActivityStream data.
silverpill
@benpate Do you really need two types there? I know, technically array is a valid value for "type", but a single type can be understood by more services.
(I think Article is a good choice for representing music album.)
silverpill
@mariusor @benpate My software can handle it, but Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey can't, as far as I know. So if wider interop is desirable it would be better to use Article.
marius
@silverpill @benpate in fairness there's already a schema.org document for music releases:
https://schema.org/MusicRelease
Bandcamp uses them on album pages.
silverpill
@mariusor @benpate https://funfedi.dev/support_tables/generated/object_types/
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
@silverpill @mariusor This is an excellent resource. Thank you! Fun Fedi keeps getting better and better.
I think I was trying to follow FunkWhale’s model, to be as compatible with it as possible. But the two object types probably will be more trouble than they’re worth.
I’d love to use these definitions from schema.org, but I don’t think they’re supported anywhere on the Fediverse, are they? If the goal is compatibility, this might be a footgun.
silverpill
@benpate @mariusor Most services have hard-coded lists of supported types, and will drop any object with unusual type like MusicRelease (see FunFedi data, only Mitra accepts objects with arbitrary types, because it uses duck typing).
>I think I was trying to follow FunkWhale’s model, to be as compatible with it as possible. But the two object types probably will be more trouble than they’re worth.
Can it handle [Album, Article]? If so, that might be a good argument in favor of that value.
Their docs describe Album object, but say type should be a string.
silverpill
I think duck typing is great. Articles can be identified by name and content properties. Music albums can be identified by other properties, e.g. artists and tracks. Now you can use all these properties in one object. Music services will display it as a music album and blogs will display it as a post, interoperability is easier that way.
I have a document where I collect ideas like this one, as well as best practices and common-but-undocumented requirements:
https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/d85d/fep-d85d.md#types
Schemas could be useful too, I've been exploring this idea as well:
https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/d85d/schemas/activity.schema.json
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
@silverpill @mariusor I haven’t gotten far enough to test FunkWhale’s object type handling, so I couldn’t say for sure.
All of this is just a perfect example of the issues in our other “ActivityPub Improvements” thread.
The JSON-LD dream of “everything can be anything” sounds great, but nobody can actually use it. At the end of the day, RDF data doesn’t cut it as a UI. We’ll all be better off when we go back to some kind of structured schema and move forward.
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