i see a lot of people on here wanting a plugin architecture for mastodon or mastodon-alikes. what do y'all _actually_ want out of that? like, which things do you want to be able to implement and how?
i'm interested because i've been thinking about how to do this in #rustodon, and that's highly dependent on what applications people care about
@er1n for a while, I was thinking of making a highly-modular AP system, separated into independent libraries that could be loaded by any high-level language. but this is all very pipe-dream and I don't know if it's applicable to Rustodon, so I don't know if I should spam your mentions with it
@impiaaa hmmmm interesting, i'd love to hear more abt it
ideas, long 1/2
@er1n the idea is you'd have a "core" library that just implemented the bare minimum to be considered AP compliant, and it wouldn't necessarily even depend on a database, just a web server (and that would be pluggable).
then you'd have a layer to make it twitter-like. and a separate layer for the client API, and a separate layer for the web interface. and they'd all have ways to add fields to models, and add hooks to do things when creating/editing/deleting entities.
ideas, long 2/2
@er1n so that way, you could have a mastodon-like, or a instagram-like, or a googleplus-like, all with the same core engine. privacy levels would become a plugin. markup systems would become a plugin. or all the fancy features masto has nowdays.
@er1n for me as an admin what I want is the ability to install custom features without having to manage merge conflicts every time the base project code pushes a new version
@er1n specifically, local only posts would be a great module
@er1n Build an API for getting new posts that a bot was @'ed in and replying to them? That would make it easy to port some of our Signal bots...
@er1n Oooh, this kinda makes me want to make a bot to feed audio/video clips into DeepSpeech for transcription/subtitling, though that would probably work better if it were integrated as an accessibility feature in the frontend of <insert Fediverse software>.
@er1n modular overrides, mostly. i'm thinking of something like koken's plugin system where you can install something like photoswipe as the lightbox, or add bits of code into certain places, or load web fonts, or convert spotify/rdio urls into rich embeds, etc etc
in general, a plugin system should allow people to share snippets of code to make the experience better. consider: markdown, rich text editing, theming, and basically any longstanding PR/request in mastodon's github
@er1n that's the catch-22 of this stuff; it's "easy" to do anything but to validate the time and energy spent is way harder if no one is there to use it.
Like I can see things for a tumblr clone being popular esp with the right frontend
@nightpool @jalcine @er1n AP Tumblr but only on the CLI. I'm sold
@nightpool @darius @er1n lol yup all Is
@jalcine it's really difficult when people seem to want things but don't really know what they want the interface to do them to look like exactly
@bamfic @jalcine @AceNovo i wouldn't say "violently against it", just "didn't know how to implement it cleanly in a portable way" https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1629
@diodelass @AceNovo n-no? as far as i know, i → 1 has nothing to do with rust. i did that because @erin was taken on mastodon.social two years ago when i initially signed up there
@diodelass @AceNovo also i wouldn't say i'm a member of the "rust cargo cult" (even in jest wrt package manager); it's just a language i happen to be comfortable with that i thought was well suited to writing a fast activitypub server; rustodon was a name that was never meant to live longer than a month or so
> @er1n is working on Rustodon. If you couldn't tell by the name, she's a member of the Rust "cargo" cult.
I didn't know there was such a thing (as Rustodon or the Rust cargo cult...) But I don't get out much. And I barely know how to spell Rusk.
Anyway, Hi Erin! There's two devs working on a ValueFlows-based economic foundation in Holochain. If their project survives the upcoming translation to Rust, maybe some code-sharing would be possible...Alex, do you like Rust better than Elixir?
@er1n This probably doesn't directly answer your question, but I've seen people ask for things like Pleroma-style markdown, arbitrary attachments, auto-collapsed hugeposts, Tweetdeck-style inline thread expansion/replying, etc