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@matt then it would be WordPress I think.
@ba But does WP federate? I know you can follow blogs and such, but I thought that used a wordpress.com account.
I was imagining something where you could start your own small Medium, and other people could optionally join it too, and all of these little Mediums would communicate just like Mastodon.
@matt according to wiki under multiuser, it does federated services. Now I'm not a WordPress frequent user or fan, but the service does exhibit technology from pre centralized networks. Makes sense it propagates abilities which are considered distributed connected federation now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#Multi-user_and_multi-blogging
@matt however, I'm all for a ground up write.as based federation. Maybe we can do things differently. For one, go's abilities and what we now know of networked tech can only make for a better approach I believe.
@ba Oh yeah, WP was definitely pioneering a lot of that. It's too bad those aspects didn't catch on more early on.
But I definitely think we could make something different and better in a lot of ways by starting from a decentralized standpoint, instead of adding it on later. I'm looking into ActivityPub now to flesh out the technical details, and still wrapping my head around how everything fits together.
@matt that's interesting. I wasn't aware of ActivityPub.
I have been looking at this problem as well but was instead orchestrating something similar using ssb. https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
And pipe dreaming, to use ipfs for permanent archives.
@ba Nice! I'd seen ssb but haven't digged in much -- I'll have to look into that again. IPFS would be really cool too!
I was thinking of ActivityPub especially because I'd seen it mentioned in the latest Mastodon blog post: https://hackernoon.com/m-for-mastodon-4269c0bf6c8b
@matt the only piece I've glanced over mastodon is its underlying layer (OStatus) and how it federates with StatusNet due to it. Howerever, OStatus is what got me interested in ssb in the first place. ssb brings fault tolerance behavior, offline synchronization, and serverless orchestration.
The one downside(geek upside) is I'll require to re-impl ssb on Rust. Memory, immutability, and type safety are all too important on something so error prone at the protocol level.
@matt lol, now you have me reading over the ActivityPub spec. It's interesting. Covers faults in OStatus.
All I have so far in ssb-rs is just the design. So not like I'm fixed with it. But it's a non-trivial case to re-impl the protocol without a true spec to base from (except the flow-gossip paper, which ssb based off).
I'll go over ActivityPub this week and share notes with you. See if we can converge some effort here. Don't like wasting engineering time when it's for the greater good. :)
@ba Hah, awesome! As someone who rarely works directly with these protocols, it's all really new to me. But that sounds great, would love to see what we can come up with.