By this I mean: something that can view and fully interact with multiple different services like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.
Does it exist already?
It’s definitely possible, but it would be a swiss army knife of an app that’s way too hard to make compared to how confusing and messy the end result would probably be
You would have to support each service separately, because they all work differently.
What connects Lemmy, Mastodon and other fediverse services is the ActivityPub protocol, that’s the standardized communication protocol that makes everything run. The individual instances run different software that offer entirely different APIs (application programming interface; basically the language that defines how an app talks to a service) so in order to support Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin, an app must explicitly implement the APIs for those three services.
So an app that generally just supports every service that will be added to the fediverse in the future can’t be made unless we agree on some form of standard API, which we haven’t (yet) and which may not even be feasable, because different services have much different capabilities.
A fediverse discord clone would offer completely different data structures and functionality than Lemmy, so an app that magically just works with both isn’t possible to make.
I wouldn’t say it’s not possible it’s just too hard for the reward. The app would not be user-friendly because of the very different kinds of services that exists. OP just imagine you had an one app that basically lets you access discord, twitter, instagram, Facebook, Reddit and others. It would be possible but it’s a lot of work for a really crappy app. That app would be messy and cluttered and not a good experience.
Well, technically there are apps that let you access all those services. They’re called browsers.
…and I find that Lemmy/kbin/Mastondon (and the rest?) work really well in a browser, obviating the need for dedicated apps. Dedicated apps are nice though.
I remember having an app like that on my old Nokia smart phone. The app supported Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and some other social platform too. I can only imagine how difficult it was to maintain.
I remember that app. It was probably just four separate backends with a common frontend.
As ActivityPub is just an underlying protocol, the question is similar to asking something like “Is it possible to make an Internet app for everything?”.
There will be new ways to use the #fediverse in the future and new applications will be developed and adopted and it makes little sense in trying to provide every possible way to view the fediverse in an ever playing catch-up implementation of a view into it.
Try to look at it as the Internet itself.
It’s an attempt at providing a finite and limited answer to an open ended question. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
To get ui/ux suited for Mastodon, the app shouldn’t use e. g. the same interface for Lemmy.
Then the situation is almost the same as using different apps.
If the various “redditish” projects could agree an shared framework providing access to all the features common across all implementations then sure, it’d be easy. But the thing is, that things are done just different enough that dedicated apps make sense to make use of any unique features.
Also, I’ve been using my phone’s browser to post to kbin and I think it is fine.
Closest thing I know is Fedilab, which works with Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed and Friendica. While compatible with each other, each fediverse service uses different parts and features of ActivityPub (the protocol they all share). It’s technically possible to build an app that does it all, but doesn’t really sound sensible.
Exactly what i was thinking: Possible? Yes, absolutely. A good idea? Probably not, it’d be a confusing mess of an app
Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense to make the app interoperable, when so much effort is spent to make the whole website interoperable, and that allows you to communicate with the rest of the fediverse anyway.
