(2/?)
Friendica designed their own protocol, DFRN, that incorporated private sharing. Then later added support for OStatus, within the limits of what could be federated using it, and after Mastodon and others started using it, ActivityPub.
But by the time they did, they were in a network dominated by Titter leavers on Mastodon services. Plus GNU socialites who were used to a public-only network and distrusted Mastodon's Direct posts for private messaging. Thus the bias towards public posting.
As you may have heard, Discord alternative Revolt has been renamed Stoat;
https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat
Stoat is designed as a centralised service. So in theory the operators could sell it to Discord, or Xitter, or anyone, at any time.
To be clear, they show no signs of doing so, and claim they're getting plenty of donations to cover costs. But this was true with Gitea ... until it wasn't. Devs with control over the project accepted VC money, leading to the Forgejo fork.
(1/?)
The claims in this post are from a blog post written by one of the devs of Fermi, a client for Stoat competitor Spacebar. I haven't fact-checked this yet, so take with a grain of salt;
https://blog.fermi.chat/discordAlts/revolt/
They said although it's technically possible to self-host Stoat, the client apps are hardcoded to point to stoat.chat, not your instance. Also a bunch of the code it depends on is under proprietary (Source Available?) licenses, and can be hard to find, as it's not all in one repo.
(2/?)
There's a massive opportunity here, for someone to build a UX that would be comfortable for someone used to Discord. 100% Free Code, and connected to a federated server that can provide all the necessary functionality. Whether that's using;
* XMPP for interop with the Jabber network,
* Meg/Olm for interop with Matrix rooms
* ActivityPub for interop with the forumverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Discourse, nodeBB, etc).
* Something else(?)
(3/?)
Hey Stripey.. do you think you could draw up something like this? Bonus points if you’ve got enough design chops to make an HTML mockup.
The #Emissary inbox is fully programmable, and you can use different layouts for each “folder” in the system.
This could be as simple to do as making a new folder layout. Or, we might need something more sophisticated.
I can’t do a #Discord view on my own (sooo overcommitted) but how’d you like to make a first pass at what it should look like?
@benpate
I'm flattered you think I might be capable of this. I've got my hands full at the moment with personal survival and family commitments, and any spare energy for focused work needs to be reserved for figuring out how to do fediverse.party updates.
Maybe throw it that suggestion out to the massive, with a bit more detail about how you see it working, and see if anyone bites?
@strypey I understand being crazy busy, and I respect the struggle.
Yes, I just might do that. I think it would take someone with a really good vision of the usability, some design chops, and some patience.
I'm able to work with others to make this happen, but I'm also waaay to busy to try taking the lead on something like this.
It could be fun to have a friendly competition where one team designed a Discord-a-like UX and interface, maybe using PenPot. Then a team from each protocol camp put together the apps and server using their preferred protocol. Reusing existing components would speed things up, like an AP team building the apps as clients for a fork of the Lemmy server.
Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks!
(4/4)
@strypey We're moving forward with end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub. https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-e2ee/ MLS, the encryption technology, was meant to scale to hundreds of thousands of people, but my guess is that AP E2EE chats will more likely scale to the more personal handful, max a couple of dozen. I don't think it's a Discord replacement, but it's in the mix.
@evan
> We're moving forward with end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub
I'm aware and watching with interest.
> I don't think it's a Discord replacement, but it's in the mix
As @reiver pointed out in a post I replied to earlier, E2EE is not needed by the majority of communities leaving Discord, who use it more like a web forum than a chat room system. Even if their Discord "server" is not public, it's not necessarily sensitive enough to need the overhead of E2EE.
@evan @strypey Because we don't already have enough incompatible interpersonal electronic messaging systems, huh? 😲 https://bookofadamz.com/the-smartest-messaging-method-is-not-a-segregated-mess-of-whatsapp-signal-telegram-sms-slack-teams-facebook-instagram-wechat-etc/
