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by rigelk 3006 days ago
ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested).

In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
1 comments
nathcd 3006 days ago
> and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.

Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat.

> [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media.

ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)?

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attach...

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rigelk 3006 days ago
It is, but I don't see how web browsers would need to interact directly with ActivityPub. That's just a way to settle on a json structure everyone will be using in their web application (that acts as AP client), as is the case in Mastodon.

Here with PeerTube the client interface doesn't interact with AP to watch videos or get them. It just requests the list directly to the server.

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