Emissary is a revolutionary next-gen Web platform that lets you tinker with every little bit of it. It works with the Fediverse, is built on IndieWeb principles, and looks incredible.
I am sure it is fantastic in every way, but when I read that it “lets you tinker with every little bit of it” I read “requires you to tinker with every little bit of 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.
The main issue I notes about this is that, if I wanted to set up I Lemmy system, I would go for Lemmy itself, not another tool that I then had to configure to work as Lemmy. Same goes for a microblogging service, I would set up a Mastodon service, not a service that needs to be configured into being Mastodon.
As for it being used to develop mockups for new Fediverse experiences, I don’t think it will do that either, since if you are doing a mock-up, you are looking an not only how a possible new design would work, but also the backend, to get a sense of what is needed in terms of storage, compute and other software layers.
A system this diverse will be very dificult to reduce the complexity and give a good idea of what kind of environment is needed for someone to invest.
What it could do is serve as an inspiration tool for students, it could absolutely serve as a technical demonstrator of the ActivityPub as the teacher can build simple systems and show what parts of activity pub they use.
I remain skeptical of the future of this type of system outside of the classroom environment, though I do wish the developers all the best
Add comment