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GNU MediaGoblin was founded by @cwebber. Inspired by GNU social reviving development of the StatusNet project abandoned by Identi.ca, they developed a vision of enabling federation features between MediaGoblin services, and between those and services running GNU social, GNU FM, etc. To this end, along with Jessica Tallon (@tsyesika), they got involved with the AP standardisation process, which consumed a lot of their time and organising energy.

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#FediverseParty #ActivityPub #MediaGoblin

Sometime after the W3C Social Working Group concluded and the ActivityPub spec was published, @cwebber moved on to work on Spritely. MediaGoblin went into hibernation for a while, and it seemed like it may have been obsoleted by PeerTube.

But many MediaGoblin services continued to run, and more recently, active dev was restarted on the codebase. So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to the MediaGoblin team to see if they have any plans to add AP support;

https://todo.sr.ht/~mediagoblin/mediagoblin/71

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The exchange started out friendly and constructive. But as I tried to get clarity on whether they really were willing to merge an AP implementation from someone outside the team, they got cagier and cagier. Until eventually they implicitly accusing me of having a Trained #MOLE write my responses;

https://todo.sr.ht/~mediagoblin/mediagoblin/71#event-516519

I was not impressed. Forced into a corner, I sent a somewhat blunt reply;

https://todo.sr.ht/~mediagoblin/mediagoblin/71#event-516545

Finally I got the clarity I was looking for;

https://todo.sr.ht/~mediagoblin/mediagoblin/71#event-516566

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I tried to reply once more, to thank them for that, and for the frank exchange of views. Only to find that my email bounced back. Maybe a bug? Maybe they blocked my address, from that issue or from commenting on MediaGoblin issues in general? I don't know.

Either way, here's my response;

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Response to MediaGoblin AP issue part 1;

> That's the clarity I was looking for, thanks. I've seen cases where conflict-avoidant maintainers say 'submit a patch' when what they mean is; 'this is an anti-goal but I don't want you to try to convince me otherwise, so I'll pretend to be open to a patch'. Clearly this is not you, which is a very good thing : )

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Response to MediaGoblin AP issue part 2;

~sturm
> If you yourself are interested in implementing these features, I'd be glad to discuss in detail

Sadly I have neither the time or the skills. But if I hear from a dev wanting to gain experience with AP, and keen to brush up their Python, I will suggest adapting SH's federation library to work with MG as a project.

Thanks for the frank exchange, and keep up the good work.

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