I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm getting tired just thinking about the testing path you would need to follow in order to fork mastodon and keep it as an in-place upgrade from baseline.1. stand up a baseline mastodon instance2. federate with...
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm getting tired just thinking about the testing path you would need to follow in order to fork mastodon and keep it as an in-place upgrade from baseline.
1. stand up a baseline mastodon instance
2. federate with some peers
3. fill it with realistic data
4. migrate to the fork
5. test the fork
6. test federation
7. repeat across several combinations of mastodon base versions and other fedi servers
8. rapidly, during development -
If in-place upgrades aren't the goal, then just build something new. Or contribute to one of the various preexisting projects. Don't adopt mastodon's tech debt for no reason. It's not worth it.
I know I'm eager to have more help, if existing projects suddenly sound better.
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@jenniferplusplus you mean build a new thing using AP rather than a mastodon fork?
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Extremely not comprehensive list of ActivityPub microblogging projects you could contribute to, instead of forking mastodon
https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey
https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app
https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox
https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma
https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/Iceshrimp.NET
https://github.com/Letterbook/Letterbook -
@jenniferplusplus This is the way.
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@jenniferplusplus This is ftr exactly where I land.
I thought for a bit about what it would take to be able to maintain an upgrade path in the future and keep that tested and up to date and got exhausted just thinking about it. The amount of work is just _so_ much and it is _grinding_ work, not fun work or exciting work.
…but if that isn't the goal, then there are other projects that desperately need people, or you can roll your own if you want to scratch an itch or tease out some ideas.
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@hrefna @jenniferplusplus
I think that working with other projects could be useful even if one's goal is eventual Mastodon migration/replacement. One could try implementing some of the ideas about safety/etc. in other projects (which have less inertia than Mastodon), then work to bring those implementations to Mastodon (or a fork if still necessary).IMO a call for a fork should have some concrete implementation, not just a general call for other people to do work.
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@wikicliff @hrefna Exactly this. If the goal is to make mastodon better, then history suggests the best way to do that is to make improvements in other apps to the point that gargron gets fomo about it.
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I made a more thorough, yet still not comprehensive list
More than mastodon
More than mastodon. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
Gist (gist.github.com)
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@jenniferplusplus fedbox is not targeting microblogging. It's just a dumb ActivityPub server without any frontend that encourages any specific usage.
For CRUD operations I think it supports the full ActivityPub Object vocabulary.
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@jenniferplusplus when I talk about it I call it "generic activitypub server". I started it as a "reference implementation" for the GoActivityPub library.
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@jenniferplusplus It's nice that there are alternatives to Mastodon out there. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of the third party clients (e.g. Ivory) rely heavily on the Mastodon API and break badly on alternatives such as Akkoma. Hopefully these cross compatibility issues can get worked out in the future. That is the primary reason why social.arazil.net runs Mastodon instead of Akkoma or something else.
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@arazil Given how difficult it will be to actually achieve the goals people want from a fork while maintaining compatibility with baseline, I think contributing improvements to Akkoma's mastodon api implementation is the better plan. Or, best plan: contribute Akkoma API support to some clients.
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@jenniferplusplus I feel like there's a need for an ActivityPub Q&A service project.
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@ChrisHunt Like a federated stack overflow?
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@jenniferplusplus : :blobfoxfingerguns:
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@ChrisHunt As is often the case, mastodon made a lot of design decisions that make it hard to build that, unless you just forego interop with mastodon and every software that speaks mastodon's AP dialect.
That said, it's probably worth doing either way, and I would encourage you to be the change.
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@ChrisHunt every software*
*actually, ActivityPubSharp's types and parsing is sufficiently robust that you probably could codify and handle multiple dialects of the same base ActivityStreams primitives. I would be inclined to support such a Q&A dialect in Letterbook.