Social Network #2: ActivityPub
I spent a while as a user of Mastodon and absolutely hated it, but let’s see if there’s something I can salvage for my own purposes there.
To recap, the goal is:
Find an existing social network that I don’t have to rewrite social graphs, posts, replies, mentions, notifications, etc etc, and then tweak it so that every post is tied to an item of content in my core content DB
Mastodon is the closest to what I’m looking for here, but the core Mastodon server is in Ruby (ew). GoToSocial is kind of interesting — it’s also an ActivityPub social network server, written in GoLang (which I don’t know, but I’m not averse to learning), and compatible with the Mastodon API (so I could build off existing clients).
The big problem I’m running into is that most of the ActivityPub clients are kind of awful. The official Mastodon apps are written native for Android and iOS, which I don’t entirely see the point of, given that neither of them are doing anything that requires any under-the-bridge work.
The nicest app I saw was for PixelFed, which is ActivityPub’s Instagram replacement. It looks, well, like Instagram, and it’s written in React Native. I don’t really need an Instagram clone, but at least it’s in the right ballpark. But then I looked at the server code for PixelFed, and it’s in PHP. I don’t know what is wrong with ActivityPub developers.
Anyway, ditching this avenue for now. Next up, the utterly bewildering world of ATProto!