Development status?

[pwFoo]

Hi @Arkanosis,

I compiled microstatus binary. At the moment it looks like it's just a binary with help messages?
Any roadmap or features ready for testing? Current source looks like a minimal binary setup?

[Arkanosis]

Hi @pwFoo ! :-)

Thanks for your continued interest.

Yes, that's pretty much it right now.

Things have not changed much with regards to the time I can devote to the project since we discussed the topic two years ago (two years already! it's crazy how fast time disappears). My goals for this project have not changed either, so you can still refer to my answer at the time for the features I want to implement.

As you can see, I can't commit to any roadmap (I sure wish I could, but the free time I have remains little predictable and is shared among all the stuff I want to do).

In the meantime, interesting projects you might want to have a look at are:

• Pleroma — I'm pretty sure you know it already, but let's mention in as it's the best working implementation that is the less far to what I want to achieve (though it's still very far);
• microblog.pub — This one has less visibility, but is closer to microstatus in terms of scope, and unlike microstatus, it actually works (and it can be deployed using Docker — I remember that was something you wanted).

As usual, feel free to ask if you have more questions ;-)

Thanks!

[pwFoo]

Hi,
I know pleroma, microblog.pub (mastodon, misskey, plume, writefreely ... g). Also found pubgate, which looks like a headless backend with database an api!

If you still will work on microstatus here some ideas for features.

• multi domain support (by host header)
• multi / virtual users (one login, different activity pub actors?)
• Database backend with rest api (like headless cms)

So one person could have different blogs / accounts which independent from each other. Could be used as private and technical blog with different urls and author names.

[Arkanosis]

Hi @pwFoo !

Thanks for the ideas!

Multiple domains and multiple identities are features I want microstatus to provide. My own use case (for which I started this project) includes exactly what you describe (or at least that's what I understand from your description): using ActivityPub as some kind of read-write alternative to the read-only RSS/Atom, but without forcing your followers to read everything you have to share on any topic (like most people unfortunately do on Twitter / Mastodon these days).

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a database backend with REST API, though. Would microstatus be what you call the database then? If so, then that's something I intend to do: provide a REST API for other tools to consume. As I'm a terrible UI designer anyway, that would be a mistake for me to provide anything but a CLI and a REST API :) What I don't know for sure at this point is if this API will just be an implementation of the ActivityPub client-to-server API (which provides the benefit of being compatible with the current growing ecosystem of ActivityPub clients) or a custom lightweight API (targeted towards very basic tasks, like posting / fetching). In any case, I don't intend to make microstatus handle much more than the ActivityPub / OStatus server-to-server protocols; anything else would have to be handled by other tools (like static blog generators, cron jobs, Matrix or XMPP gateways…).

[pwFoo]

I think microstatus could / should handle

• simple rest api for use with for example javascript or php (a blog frontend or admin interface to create posts, cli tool could use api calls too!)
• save / load posts to / from database backends (persistent storage like mysql, postgres, sqlite, files, ...)
• inbox / outbox / profiles server2server
• activitypub client2server api (optional?) to connect activitypub clients, but most clients support mastodon dialect...

[asterismo]

Hi, i'm looking for some text-only activitypub social network. Will this platform offer such interface? It could be a simple web UI without javascript. At the moment i have a honk instance, but it uses little JS. Cheers!

[Arkanosis]

Hi @asterismo !

Thank you for your interest.

There is no plan to provide any kind of builtin user interface, but part of the expected benefits of the tool's simplicity is that it should not get in your way if you want to write one (including with only standard UNIX tools if you want). See this short list of goals and non-goals for more context.

That being said, I'm not actively working on microstatus right now and I can't tell when the development will resume (though it's definitely not abandoned), so microstatus is not what you are looking for if you need it today.

Thanks again!