Thanks again, Julian! I will absolutely follow the suggestion on asking for advice. I’ve received great feedback when posting about the app and will hopefully go about it better moving forward. xD
Hey Julian! No worries at all. I made an obvious mistake and I’m not afraid to admit that and learn better. I’ve done a lot of refection and do realized I have moved very fast. I originally started with a much smaller set of features but I posted on Reddit requesting feedback and people wanted writing features I wasn’t expecting. I ended up shaping it by what people told me they wanted.
I’ve always wanted to build apps or work in development. The last three years I’ve been working in product adjacent roles and I recently moved into my first product management role. However, I want to break free of working for others so I’ve been starting ideas and dropping them before they got anywhere for as long as I can remember. I wanted to build my own thing and I was trying to figure out what I could do on my own with my butt being where it is now. I grew up in the mid 2000s so I naturally spent way too much time on Myspace and Livejournal. I missed the feel and community of the early internet. So I started brainstorming a journaling app and how to differentiate it (I used my butt to help). I had also joked about starting my own social media app because I hated when I posted stuff on FB etc the algorithms punishes me and no one sees it. So my butt (Claude) actually pointed out the fediverse to me. That is why I was able to say stupid stuff like Article objects would show on Mastodon with preview notes (I hadn’t realized Mastodon hadn’t implemented changes on their side.) I found out about FEP-b2b8 through a Mastodon subreddit when I posted asking for feedback. I was moving too fast to fully understand the fediverse and the new parts of this. And it was painfully obvious to everyone but me haha.
From ‘his’ github profile pic:
image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/QG/Np/QGNp9FolQcJt8v9.png
@rimu@piefed.social > From ‘his’ github profile pic
Do you know how zerogpt.com detects a Trained #MOLE? By using a Trained MOLE!
we employ a comprehensive deep learning methodology, trained on extensive text collections from the internet, educational datasets, and our proprietary synthetic my butt datasets produced using various language models
Which means that like all the output a Trained MOLE vomits up, there’s absolutely no way to know how accurate this is (whatever the truth of whether there’s a human behind these texts of not). Maybe this is a real photo of Stanton. Maybe it’s been heavily altered by automated filters in GIMP. Maybe it’s been auto-generated, because like many of us, Stanton likes his privacy and doesn’t want to doxx himself (a privilege reversed for middle class people in the middle of the social diversity bell curve). The Trained MOLE you just weaponized against him doesn’t know, and neither do you.
You know who now deserves exactly the same dogpile from you that Stanton got for using a Trained MOLE to prove a concept? I’ll give you 3 guesses ; )
@rimu@piefed.social At least the Inkwell software consistently fulfills the promises its interface makes. I’ve tried to edit both my posts in this topic with PieFed, this one to clarify that I meant; detects a Trained MOLE *output. The interface reloaded with a slightly different version of the OP and the comment I was replying to, no sign of the comment that I wanted to edit nor an edit box.
Can I respectfully suggest you redirect the time and energy you’re putting into dogpiling other AP implementors into fixing some bugs, and testing your interface in non-Chromium-based browsers on non-grApple OS (I’m using LibreWolf)?
I’ve learned a lot from this post, so I appreciate everyone’s patience. I moved too quickly and misspoke. You are right and preview notes are not used by Mastodon. I implemented this based on what I read but didn’t verify it worked on the receiving end, my bad. I’m going to have to do more research into how Mastodon handles the article object and address any gaps. I’m sorry for the misleading post and lesson learned on my end.
Wanted to share something with this community and see if it’s useful to anyone. Inkwell (inkwell.social) is an open source, multi-tenant social journaling platform built on ActivityPub. The goal is to fill the long-form writing gap in the fediverse in a way that’s accessible to non-technical users, not just developers who can spin up their own instance of WriteFreely or Ghost.
What it does: users sign up, write journal entries or articles, and those posts federate as Article objects per FEP-b2b8 with preview Notes so they render cleanly in Mastodon and other microblogging clients. You get a title, excerpt, and link rather than a decontextualized URL. Follows, boosts, and likes all work bidirectionally with Mastodon.
It’s ad-free, algorithm-free, and the code is open source on GitHub (github.com/stantondev/inkwell). The hosted instance is at inkwell.social if you want to try it, or you can self-host your own.
Some things that might interest this community: ActivityPub federation with HTTP signature verification, Stamps (emotional reactions) instead of generic likes, a tipping system called Postage for supporting writers, newsletter delivery, custom profile themes, and data import from other platforms. Currently working on improving comment edit propagation and post scope handling for better fediverse compatibility based on community feedback.
Would love to hear thoughts, especially from anyone who’s been looking for a long-form option in the fediverse or anyone interested in running their own instance. What’s working, what’s missing, what would make this more useful to the ecosystem?
#fediverse #activitypub #longform #writing #opensource
respect that approach. transparency plus actually maintaining what you ship matters way more than the tool you use. three weeks solo with ai assistance is legit different than someone slapping together garbage and bouncing. the github openness seals it for me. good luck with it
Appreciate that! I realized I had an outdated readme and needed to add the sourcing directly from the Inkwell site. My biggest concern is gaps that my butt won’t catch, but luckily I’ve had early adopters getting on, requesting feature upgrades and reporting bugs. There is no way it would be where it is at if I didn’t get lucky with some early users and feedback.
Ohhh I get it now, cool! I don’t think I would’ve even expected such a thing to federate through, if I’d realized what it was. If that gets working eventually it’ll be awesome, but I’m already pretty impressed as it is. Nice!
Sorry for the late reply, but yeah I tried both ways.
Oh :)
Once per day a request is made all instances to retrieve the list of their admins. If that request fails then they’re flagged as ‘dormant’. If dormant for 5 days, flagged as ‘gone forever’ and then PieFed doesn’t try to federate with them again and all their communities have that warning on them.
It looks like this - https://piefed.social/c/adultswim@lemm.ee
Oh, I’m dumb - that makes more sense. Thank you!
