Should be good now, we redeployed onto a beta release to test out some feature fixes. We're basically dogfooding this every day!

It's going to be, group federation only partially works in Bonfire today. The devs are very close to shipping it in an upcoming stable release.

It's not. Dansup has mentioned in the past actually having to reduce some of the design elements because someone thought the previous design was vibe-coded. He doesn't do that.

No, that's accurate. It's basically that, except it's done through ActivityPub federation, aggregates a bunch of different types of activity objects, and makes them sortable / searchable / filterable / rendered in a pretty interface. It can even help provide a lot of that info to other instances connected to it.

Like, aside from some foundational bits, the technology itself is not super special. Actually, Bonfire does a ton of really cool things under the hood, but that's only a little bit relevant.

On the bright side, it does make a bunch of things easier to find, search for, and learn about:

• Groups
• Events
• Articles
• Collections of Actors
• Any type of media

Like, honestly it's an idea that sounds kind of stupid on the surface, but it's basically federated Yahoo with a grassroots bent. But I think there are aspects, from a community organizing aspect, that this could actually be useful. It's like hyperlocalism but for the network itself. You offer ways for people to find communities, read about what's being developed, find some mom and pop business, commission an artist, listen to some music.

I think what might really set it apart is that no one has built a Fediverse instance specifically geared towards that way of thinking. That's what we're interested in trying.

Yes! The event site has a lineup: https://fest.nham.co.uk/

It's a long-established Content Negotiation bug in the WordPress ActivityPub integration. Despite improvements to the codebase and the plugins I use, it still happens occasionally. I'm not sure why.

No, I just tend to break up my thoughts into different segments and structures, because otherwise the whole thing feels like I'm just rambling about a bunch of stuff.

You know, you're not the first person to say that about something I wrote. Neither of us use general AI, and I make a point to avoid all of those tools to do things "the old fashioned way".

It could be due to me being neurodivergent, or it could be that a certain kind of writing got slurped up by AI and that's the default style now. I don't know.

I work hard on everything I write.

So, I used messaging here in the broad sense. One possible application for it is instant messaging, which there are ActivityPub implementations out there doing that. But it can also be used for statuses or pretty much anything else that gets federated.

It's not, the demo video actually shows that being one such use case. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing a chat service in ActivityPub. But this can also apply to statuses, media, all kinds of other stuff.

Yeah, it was kind of an obscure project to begin with. Still, it struck me as an excellent way to prototype federated services that all hooked into a singular identity.

Hopefully, it inspires future work.

Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It's slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable...meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.

It's just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.