cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53839835

I recommended the Fediverse to Brennan Kenneth Brown (the creator and developer of fanfiction.lol: https://fanfiction.lol/, which is an alternative to Ao3, but that uses the same OTW software: https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/).

And he told me to go ahead and implement, as well as create a pull request.

The issue is: I know almost NOTHING about the technical side of The Fediverse (lol).

fanfiction.lol Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/brennanbrown/fanfiction.lol

  • grandel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    23·
    1 day ago

    I may be misjudging what’s going on here but to me it seems like he’s saying that he has other priorities and this is likely a non trivial issue to solve.

    Unless you are willing to hire a skilled developer who is familiar with the codebase I doubt somebody will implement this just out of sheer kindness

    • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      22 hours ago

      Of course it’s an unpopular opinion among the vehemently anti-AI crowd over here, but you can get a pretty good headstart with LLMs, local ones even.

      The thing is that you don’t just take what is given and immediately send it back as a shitty PR. Code review it, figure out what works and what doesn’t, have a test plan, have unit tests, stand up a sandbox and look at the frontend results, use a second agent for a blind code review, etc.

      Hell, if you aren’t spending at least the first several hours asking questions and crafting a complete design plan, you’re not doing it right.

    • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      It might be a bit much for a beginner but for someone with some programming basics it could be a decent way to learn more. It’s all back end stuff, so not much browser madness. Rails has its learning curve but has tons of convenience features. The part I have trouble understanding is why anyone would want this. Say federation appears. Then what? Anyway, OP, if you take this on, I can probably give a bit of technical advice if you want it.

      • jonathan@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Someone who only has programming basics is a beginner. ActivityPub is not a simple spec to implement.

        • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          19 hours ago

          It would surprise me if there isn’t already an implementation that can be adapted. E.g. as someone said, Mastodon uses Rails .

          • jonathan@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            18 hours ago

            Adapt is the wrong word, you can’t just plug Mastodon into the side of this other app. At best someone could learn and borrow from the Mastodon implementation. And that’s still not a beginner level challenge.

            • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              17 hours ago

              I meant see what AP (Activitypub) aimplementation Mastodon is using, and adapt that implementation, not the entirety of Mastodon. In fact quick web search immediately finds there are multiple pre-packaged Ruby gems for Activitypub, so just use one.

              I looked at the Wikipedia article about AP and it’s kind of bureaucratic but I don’t see much difficult. Yeah it’s not suited to a raw beginning programmer but it shouldn’t take a big expert. OP, have you done much programming?

              I see on Wikipedia that there’s a new thing called “AT Protocol” that’s supposed to improve on AP. That might also be worth looking into.