Behind the scenes

Activity Pub not afpub!

I'll have to read about indieAuth, that's a new one to me! ActivityPub vs atproto, very popular debate 🙂 With atproto I really like the PDS and separation of parts, I can participate in big social sites but all my data still lives right in my basement, very cool! The single sign on is great too.

I've also found it quite a bit easier to get started with atproto, both from a self-host perspective and from a developer experience perspective. I also really like the vibes and the other folks I've encountered while working on atproto stuff which has been very motivating.

This reasoning is admittedly a bit in reverse, however. Before I started on this project, I had already picked up a lot of interest in atproto and wanted to dive in with something bigger, I honestly hadn't considered building a forum platform on ActivityPub or elsewhere.

I’m excited for it though! Even just being able to have a consistent identity across a bunch of forums feels cool to me, I think of it kind of like what if Discord were forums. I hope to make it easy to find and join other communities (that want to be discovered)

A concrete idea I have in the backlog is to add theming support, where a lexicon exists for themes and operators publish them to a PDS. An AppView could then be collecting /all/ themes, and you could allow an operator or user to pick and choose from any theme that’s ever been created!