Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)
I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.
So, if I try to follow /c/technology@lemmy.world from my Mastodon account, then when I pop open my feed what shows at the top is this:
I don’t want /c/technology to “boost” individual posts (edit: comments) from that sub such that they show up with no context in my feed. If what happened was that individual posts from the sub showed in my feed, and comments on the post showed up as replies under that post, that would be swell. IDK the technical details of the issue, or if there’s anything I can do on my end to make this work better, but in my limited experimentation it looks like I just can’t follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon without ruining my feed with these individual context-less comments.
I 100% agree with this. I don’t really know the solution or even understand all the federation details of why they don’t interoperate better, but it’s definitely irritating to me that as far as I know, I can’t:
It’s, like, so close to just being a single global software-agnostic communication place that anyone can rock with. But it’s not. If anyone knows any solution I can use that can do some facsimile of both of those things please let me know (someone suggested Friendica as a solution but I haven’t really looked into it in detail yet).
(Edit: Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that’s not ridiculous. Just have the community show up as an Actor, posts come from the user that posted them and the community Actor “retoots” them or whatever. No I don’t know the internal details of why that way is hard to do or doesn’t make sense, that’s just how I want it to be.)
Right, I’ll check it out (firefish also looks sort of promising…)
You gotta have the concepts the machines are named after change as the nature of the machine changes (and bonus points if the nature of the concept is analogous to the nature of the machine). E.g. if my main machines were planets, then when I added servers they would be named after space hardware (hubble, webb, iss, etc). Raspberry Pis can be ceres, eros, vesta, juno, etc. It actually genuinely helps by distributing around within your brain the placement of which machine corresponds to which concept or which name, and also it frees up more names when you start having tons of machines in different categories.
I’ve had tons of naming schemes over the years (chemical elements and classic video games were two that I used for different banks of machines) and I’ve done that system with good results.
So one thing I’ve noticed that I like quite a lot about Lemmy is that heavily downvoted comments still seem to show up when they’re embedded into a comment chain. I’ve had conversations here where I am accumulating 5-10 downvotes per comment, and it’s fine; everyone can still talk to me, I can still talk to everyone, yes I register your disapproval, but I still get to converse.
I’m working on a project to host bits of Lemmy on peer cache devices run by the community – if you’re interested to take a look or help test/code, I should have code for some of the caching bits within a few days.
Part 2:
(Continued from the post)
What’s the Next Step?
I started touching on some imagined future steps, but this chunk is already a plenty big and ambitious thing. So, here’s an initial plan for how I want to attack taking first steps and bring myself into contact with the engineering reality (as opposed to the rosy broad picture). Hopefully at the end of this chunk of work, the vision will have adapted somewhat to the reality of what’s useful, what’s possible, what the community’s feedback is, what the issues and problems involved are, etc.
(And, obviously, I want to communicate with the Lemmy devs to make sure these ideas are in line with their vision. I’m laying this all out so extensively partly so that the community has a full explanation of what I’m proposing to do and why.)
So, first steps: I’m making a Lemmy instance that I can use for implementing this. I’m waiting for my hosting to go up so I can make it live, but once it’s up, I’ll start working on it + posting from the testbed about what’s going on. My initial coding task list is:
Set up the peer software with the content-addressable store
Start to have my instance do peer discovery, make the app that runs in people’s browsers from my instance become more AJAX-y and begin to request data from the peers instead of the instance.
Once that part’s working on my instance, I’d aim to be able to move pieces of the actual app onto the peers – construct the bootstrap code, continue the AJAX-ification of the code on my Lemmy instance, and have the bootstrapping app construct the end-user application directly from data from the peers.
Start to tackle the browser app making updates to the data store via requests to the peers, which will involve a lot of work and lot of sorting out replication issues, security and trust issues, and performance issues.
That’s already a fairly large amount to take on. I have further ideas about how the system could move forward from there, but even just that represents (1) an ambitious thing to tackle (2) significant proposed changes to the instance software (3) if it works, a fantastically useful tool that instance operators could use to reduce their instance load if they want to. So, I’m limiting the plan to that much for now until I get some contact with the technical reality and with the community.
What You Can Do
So if you’ve read to the end, maybe you think this is a good idea. Want to help? This is a bunch of work already and I’d love it if people wanted to help get it done. Leave a comment, let me know what you think whether positive or negative, and if you want to help, 100% reach out and let’s get it done. I’m skilled with software engineering in general, but I’m actually not too familiar in particular with web backends and AJAX, so someone more skilled than I am could probably help this along in a huge way. Specific things that might be useful:
If you want to run a peer or instance and help test the system
If you can help with coding
If you have feedback on these ideas in general, either positive or else things I’ve overlooked or need to adjust
Hope to hear from you and thank you for reading my wall of text. Let me know what you think + cheers to you.
What’s the right term for what I’m calling an “instance operator”? I realize that anyone could be one, I just need some language to use to distinguish the people who are from the people who aren’t.
Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)