In the typical web marketing infrastructure, a company signs up for an email account for private messages, Twitter/X account for microblogging, YouTube account for video sharing, and Reddit for forum discussion.
With the Fediverse/ActivityPub model, currently a typical user might register a PeerTube account for video sharing, Mastodon for microblogging, and Lemmy for forum discussion. But the data under all those is the same infrastructure, right?
Facebook as a mature software platform has areas of its app for private messaging, microblogging, and video-specific content, all using one user account.
Is it likely that Fediverse apps will evolve toward a similar structure, where a person or company would only need one account and could push out content of all types there, and interact with others’ content with one account?
It’s entirely possible that a fediverse platform emerges that’s capable of performing many different kinds of activities. But, the far more likely outcome is that platforms eventually implement the Client-to-Server half of the ActivityPub protocol, which currently very few platforms implement.
The idea is that virtually every Fediverse platform could, in theory, act as clients for one another, enabling a “one account posts everything” possibility with different frontends accessing different subsets of data.