this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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The problem with federated web apps (www.devever.net)
submitted 1 year ago by jim@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built on top of the web platform.

The problem is fundamentally this: when building an application on top of the web platform, an HTTP URL inherently couples an application and a resource.

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[–] balder1993@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t get what is the “application” in this context. Is that the Lemmy server or kbin server, which use the ActivityPub protocol? And couldn’t this be solved with a sort of .apub at the end of each resource, like the .json used to work for Reddit?

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 6 points 1 year ago

Application being the Lemmy UI I would guess.

No need for .json or .apub, that's already handled by the Accept and Content-Type header.

Just happens that the browser requests HTML, which loads lemmy-ui, which then requests exactly the same resource again but this time in ActivityPub format, which returns the data as expected in the standardized format.