No, that's accurate. It's basically that, except it's done through ActivityPub federation, aggregates a bunch of different types of activity objects, and makes them sortable / searchable / filterable / rendered in a pretty interface. It can even help provide a lot of that info to other instances connected to it.

Like, aside from some foundational bits, the technology itself is not super special. Actually, Bonfire does a ton of really cool things under the hood, but that's only a little bit relevant.

On the bright side, it does make a bunch of things easier to find, search for, and learn about:

• Groups
• Events
• Articles
• Collections of Actors
• Any type of media

Like, honestly it's an idea that sounds kind of stupid on the surface, but it's basically federated Yahoo with a grassroots bent. But I think there are aspects, from a community organizing aspect, that this could actually be useful. It's like hyperlocalism but for the network itself. You offer ways for people to find communities, read about what's being developed, find some mom and pop business, commission an artist, listen to some music.

I think what might really set it apart is that no one has built a Fediverse instance specifically geared towards that way of thinking. That's what we're interested in trying.

It's going to be, group federation only partially works in Bonfire today. The devs are very close to shipping it in an upcoming stable release.

Should be good now, we redeployed onto a beta release to test out some feature fixes. We're basically dogfooding this every day!

It's not. Dansup has mentioned in the past actually having to reduce some of the design elements because someone thought the previous design was vibe-coded. He doesn't do that.

Dansup actually designed and built both of those.

Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.

Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.

It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.

Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.

Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.

Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.

A significant portion of the code is available, I think it's just a matter of getting the latest code pushed out to public release status. Judging by the server repo, seems like a lot of development is happening out in the open.

https://github.com/joinloops

my view of homeless people changed forever when I learned that more than half of them were foster kids who aged out of the system and were left with no family or resources.

Jesus, that's dark.

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there's some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I'm forced to use Element X, because I can't even log in with Element.

It's disappointing, but there's a ton of issues that aren't so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I'm not sure it'll ever get there.

While I think you're correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.

It's one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I'm trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.

But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you're connecting to a global network that has:

• Hate Speech
• Targeted Harassment Campaigns
• Child Pornography
• Extreme Gore and Violence

Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say "you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it's reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core."

Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says "Hey, this thing doesn't actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion". To me, that's fucking insane.

Posting from another thread:

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

It wasn't just "I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree", it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.

Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.

Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It's slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable...meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.

It's just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.

It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

Actually, there's a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there's literally no reason not to.

Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.

That’s not what this is. It’s more of a feed aggregator / reader with social features, framed as a browser of sorts.

The main thing it’s used for is feed curation and content discovery. You can basically use anything with a feed as a source, then aggregate and filter things.

It’s kind of like a news reader version of Yahoo Pipes almost.

You know, you're not the first person to say that about something I wrote. Neither of us use general AI, and I make a point to avoid all of those tools to do things "the old fashioned way".

It could be due to me being neurodivergent, or it could be that a certain kind of writing got slurped up by AI and that's the default style now. I don't know.

I work hard on everything I write.