I disagree. Decentralization has its own quirks when it comes to usability. This is not a call to exactly emulate centralized platforms, but a recognition of where many of the pain points are, and how we can collectively improve the UX to make it a better experience for newcomers.

Yeah, this is something I’ve been slowly exploring, too. There aren’t a lot of great options yet, and my personal opinion is that we have yet to see a platform that’s purpose-built to be a Fediverse CMS. Hubzilla comes the closest conceptually to this idea, but unfortunately it’s closer to Drupal than it is to WordPress.

Bonfire remains an extremely interesting prospect, I feel as though it might be possible to create something very similar to the Ghost experience with Bonfire and extensions. It might be worth reaching out to their devs and having a discussion about publishing capabilities.

This is what the thread looks like on Wafrn’s side: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/39562254-048e-4224-8445-36bba052ea91

1. From what I can tell, there have been successful tests with posting to the Threadiverse. I’m not sure how good this experience actually is on Wafrn yet, but it’s promising: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/5fa12345-e4ff-4da3-8a95-d1ef1c4bd186/wafrn-a-tumblr-clone-that-federates-with-fedi-and-now-also-has-opt-in-native-bluesky/
2. I don’t think it will natively support RSS anytime soon. It’s not a bad idea, but I’ve only seen platforms from the Friendica family tree and maybe Emissary supporting this. That being said, a lot of publications are on the Fediverse or Bluesky, and it’s not too complicated to set up an RSS bot?

Oh, I misunderstood, I didn’t realize this related to Tumblr specifically…

Still, it might make some of the dev work easier, if they do end up migrating the backend over to WordPress.

That might be more related to what they’re doing with the WordPress-ActivityPub integration, as a way to work around some of the weird limitations WordPress has for representing notifications and activities other than comments. It’s fairly standard for Fediverse stuff.

My pet theory is that PeerTube is slower on the uptake because of two primary reasons:

1. YouTube Monetization
2. Content Production

Many YouTubers are comfortable staying right on YouTube, where they have the maximum impact, audience size, and money-making opportunities. For this group of people, moving off of YouTube just isn’t viable.

Because of this, alternative video platforms have to rely on people who are willing to give PeerTube a shot. This is a combination of early adopters who are also on YouTube, people fed up with YouTube for whatever reason, and people in various social and political bubbles that would benefit from a more dedicated space for the things they care about.

The other thing is, video production is time consuming compared to other social mediums. Microblogging by comparison has incredibly little friction, to the point that people can do it potentially dozens of times per day. Making a quality documentary, review, or soapbox piece? A single episode of that can take multiple weeks or longer.

I actually think PeerTube is seeing some healthy growth, but discovering things I actually want to watch remains a challenge.

No, the GPL is strictly a software license. Even then, most Fediverse platforms are AGPL at best, which only really deals with modifications to the source code of AGPL projects. Content licensing itself is more nebulous and more complicated.

I do all of my writing by hand, the old-fashioned way.

Sorry, our provider had an outage around that time. We should be good now!

Gah. Sorry that it’s still happening, I’m not totally sure why it happens, beyond the server choking while federating. I’ll keep investigating. 😞

To my knowledge, the project isn’t dead…but, it has been moving at a horribly slow pace for a very long time.

Funkwhale is a pretty cool project, but it’s one of those things where the ActivityPub implementation really was bolted on well after the core experience was defined and developed. It was meant to be a Grooveshark clone, while a lot of people were hoping to use it in a more social way, like SoundCloud.

Yeah, I’ll try to look into this for clarity. It really depends on what they mean here - I think they’re referring to curated server following between admins, which is what PeerTube does.

When I tested out the messaging system, I was able to federate back and forth with Mastodon. Maybe it works fine at a user level, it’s just the search entries that don’t get federated automatically?

Oh wow, how did I miss this?!

Congratulations! I’ve been around for roughly the same amount of time, and it’s wild to see how much things have changed.

I still miss old Identi.ca, though.

Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.

I’ve seen some people make the statement that “maintainers owe you nothing”, and I’ve seen people state that “your supporters owe you nothing.”

While I believe there’s nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there’s nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion… there’s only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.

I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I’d devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that’s a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.

Yes, we have an article in the works about it. 😁

I think there’s a balance to be struck between “good defaults” and “customize to your heart’s content.”

Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it’s still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.

Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here’s the docs.

I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.

It’s not that crazy, the Threads devs are already looking at specific FEPs for things like quote posting. If they really wanted to, they could implement Lemmy-compatible community groups.

He’s periodically shown updates on it. From talking to him, there are a number of challenges:

• Being blocked by other features, like a UI refactor
• Compatibility with other existing implementations (less of a problem now with the Group Federation FEP by @nutomic@lemmy.ml)
• Wanting to include Private Groups
• Bringing in moderation, assignment, and delegation tools for groups.
• Dealing with unrelated issues pertaining to the day-to-day maintenance
• Needing to break out new experiments in a branch to see how well an idea actually works

I think the biggest thing is that he probably does spread himself pretty thin at times, and is still learning how to rely on community pull requests and contributions. It can be a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel the need to provide the creative direction for how things ought to work.