@RickiTarr I worked in the oilfield one winter and yeah... that was hard AF. "If you can't get it, you can't stay!" was screamed at me while I wielded a 3-foot long crescent wrench down in a hole while tons of steel hung suspended and spinning above my head and literally geological forces were being held down below me by ... mud.
Sometimes the weight of the mud is wrong, and it blows back out... a geyser of mud raining down while you're trying to stab another ton of steel into the pipe fitting.
One time I had a cat-line tied around my waist and had to wade/swim out into the mud pit to get all the loose trash that had blown onto it. It was like 19 degrees F. It was always like 19 F.
I got more stories like that, all in about a six month period.
Then I failed a piss-test (Mary Jane is my mainframe) ... thankfully. Ended up in print publishing for the next decade.
I wanna do an ActivityPub API that's really just that... a robust, general purpose backend capable of serving a variety of client apps.
Maybe v2 would have customizable API for compatibility with existing clients.
First things first though... I checked with Awesome ActivityPub to see if there were any active projects already doing something like this that I could just jump in on.
Different clients are going to have different requirements, right? A macroblogging client has different needs from a microblogging client, and both are different than the threadiverse, or something like PixelFed. Even Mastodon has different reqs than Sharkey between the backend instance and the client.
And yet, the backend's relationship with the Fediverse, itself -- via ActivityPub -- is very similar in each case.
An AP-based backend is basically a two-faced API. One API faces the client, and the other faces the rest of the Fediverse. This project would provide a robust, configurable backend for a variety of frontend client implementations.
Then AP-based applications could focus on the frontend.
More I think about it, the more I think it's a good idea, and right up my alley.
Like an ActivityPub framework, made for web devs, not users. Due to the nature of AP, it would have to be configuration-over-convention (more like Django than Flask), but theoretically it could do all the heavy lifting between client-server and server-fediverse APIs.
Devs would have to do a bunch of config to say "this server will map these APIs in this way," but a lot is going to be boilerplate and mappings with transformer callbacks and the like, right? It would reduce the work for new implementations, and reduce idiosyncratic client-server-fediverse implementations.
I'm open to suggestions, here! Or any feedback. Would devs find this interesting? Maybe they would consider it for an AP-based project? What language? I'm most comfortable in Python, but by nature this project would need multiple elements, and many pieces could be fulfilled by already existing tech.
It sounds like a transformation layer between APIs to me, which means it could be systematized and implemented in multiple languages. A set of SDKs?
Yeah... that's the approach to take: a backend like this is gonna be a docker compose kinda thing, with orchestrated pieces, anyway... regardless of language.
Python's a great language for prototyping, so with the SDK idea in mind... anything written in prototype Python that is not public in the SDK could be rewritten later in another (faster) language -- either piecemeal with C modules or in entirety.
I'm just spitballing, here, but I'm really warming to this idea.
@steve@smallcircles I'm thinking that, out-of-the-box, it could provide a basic, vanilla AP client-server API to get a project going, but that the power of such a project would be in customizing that API to work with different client API requirements -- including pre-existing APIs like Mastodon's.
This is all very much in the "Big Idea" stage right now, and a couple folks who clearly know more than me have already warned me that it's gonna be hard.
@lovelylovely I love him... we got lucky, because he's the most competent prez since FDR, IMO. A technocrat who works the ropes, wearing his opponents down with relentless determination and uncanny ability to take a blow.
@lovelylovely That's my plan. I live in a deep red state, tho... so I think I'm gonna have to go with donating $$ instead of effort. I'd rather donate BOTH.
New paid ads I saw on Facebook today. This is just 3 of the 8 I reported. Very disturbing. There appears to be zero standards or regulation on social media.
So #Threads is slowly killing off #Twitter, & #TikTok Shop is spamming users to the point they are reopening #Instagram‽ I can not wait to introduce people to #Pixelfed! 🕺🏾
@DopeGhoti@darnell@badtux Yup! And all of the #Fediverse uses #ActivityPub so anyone -- hobbyist or engineer -- can write their own client and app, even their own client-app API. It's a lot of freedom.
I think the Fediverse is basically inevitable. I've been around a while and there's some network effect happening.