jv:

Ok, what am I doing with Tumblr and the fediverse?

Basically, I made a fork of Firefish (which itself is a fork of MissKey) and started working over it.

The plan is to end with a platform that:

1. Looks and feels close to the latest version of Tumblr desktop
2. Supports all the things that make Tumblr different from other social media: inline media in text posts, reblog threads, talking in tags that doesn’t distribute with reblogs.
3. Keep supporting the things Tumblr uses that comes out of the box with MissKey: likes, comments, plain reblogs, themes, content warnings, etc
4. Federation ready: I’m not planning of paying for a server that can host thousands of people myself, the idea is that anyone could pay for their own €10/month server, install this thing, invite their friends and the server integrates with all the other servers running this thingie, creating a “single community” experience

What I’ve done to this point?

• Make Firefish work on my machine. You may laugh, but it took me two weeks and changing plenty of code.
• Support reblog trails. Now you can see the entire reblog chain of a post in your timeline.
• Html in posts. This will allow for a tumblr-like experience.
• Themed the dashboard a bit to make it look Tumbly.

What it’s left I’m comfortable doing myself:

1. Expanding post, username, etc size limits
2. Deal with notifications and make sure the new reblog system notify the OP when someone reblogs a reblog.
3. Add a different editor that allows inline media. Maybe even Tumblr’s editor itself.
4. Remove a lot of features MissKey has that I have no intention to learn about or have to support them!
5. Make some MissKey native features (polls, “read more”, etc) to play nice with reblogs
6. Add a new field to store tags outside the post content.

What it’s left I’m not sure to be able to do it myself properly:

• See how to do to package this thing properly so it’s easy to install on a server
• Everything related to the federation: check how to make the changes I’m doing activityPub-friendly.

And that’s it, that’s the thing. Don’t expect anything you can try in months, probably, and any help would be accepted and appreciated 🙃

capribornio:

@vergess Thoughs on this?

vergess:

I’ve been trying to follow this project for a while now, but having trouble figuring out who the fuck is running it and where to get more info, so like!!! I’m HUGE HYPE about it.

I’ve been saying (privately, I think? Maybe here on tumblr too) that getting as much of this website federated and open sourced as possible is going to be the best chance at long term survival.

The to do list seems very manageable for a skilled and experienced dev, which to be clear to those who don’t know, JV is a major major tumblr dev who was Big Time Fired for not adhering to the most capitalistic motives in Automattic. So this is a project that could, indeed, see completion in a useable format.

And since it would be federated, I wouldn’t have to put up with the weird content limitations of someone else; I can just host whatever is legal in my country and fuck off into the sunset.

Like, I cannot say enough how excited I am to hear this is still ongoing. I lost track of it… in… spring? Of this year?

Thank you so so much for finding it!

And OP, if you’re reading this, thank you so so much for the immense amount of skilled labour you’re putting in for a user base that is astonishingly hostile to…. just everything.