Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
Tried Masto and Pixelfed, left after The Great Sellout to Meta. Trying Lemmy for now but it’s limited in breadth and scope.
I’d like to see a fedi digest app more than anything, gathers it all up and presents it. Then if I want to interact I can sign up for one of them. But first I want to see where things are.
In general, the technically-discerning aren’t going to care as much about quantity, more about quality and features.
I’d like to block every wealthy narcissist and never read their name or see their troubled insane faces in posts, I’m fed up with the narrative on both sides and have other interests.
So if Frontpage gathered it all up and filtered out the paid narratives and shills I get to choose, while letting me follow interesting minds, I’d be very interested.
If it had a prominent link to which instance, it might become clear what instance and software is best for me.
Right now I like Piefed’s ability to filter and not Lemmys militaristic intentional inability to do so.
Masto filtered, but doesn’t migrate well and now federates with the shitasses on Meta, which I don’t want to consort with or support. If I want to sign up for Meta it’s not hard, but I haven’t ever done so and don’t need coercive help from fake empaths running .social instances. I’m not a farm animal, Stux.
I think the fedi got it backwards, new users need to browse first to find what they want. I get it as a techie kind, but right now it’s forbidding to many with all the unknown choices.
If Frontpage, someday, can also interpolate comments and vote between the softwares that survive, that’d be a nice thing to add to a browser that’s already familiar to new users.
But I think it’s way early for that. Kbin is already in the past, Mbin may or may not be a true continuation, the Meta connection nay not be worthwhile for their investors, bluesky is still a pig-in-a-poke for me.
One thing that is missing, again, is a digest to browse.
Is this Great Sellout in the room with us right now? Because Meta did implement an open protocol into Threads, but it has been widely blocked by other ActivityPub instances. That is not a “sellout”.
Sounds like your principles will only lead you off social media, perhaps the internet entirely?
The 2 largest mastodon instances both misrepresented involvement or intent with Meta to their users, then turned around and federated.
Those were/are the best chance for the fedi to leap forward.
They are the most popular and also now the keast likely to be used by tech people, both because if the association and because they misled their users.
The admins of those, one of which is the masto dev, have arguably done more harm to the fedi than anyone else. People left for bluesky right after the bragconfession and openly posted about why.
So it’s not in the room with me, because I dropped their scene and closed all my accounts.
It takes a moral village idiot to compromise the whole environment just to grab some cash for their subsequent honeymoon. Not unlike current Twitter management thinking, and not unlike social media thought-levels in general.