Discussion
After a fair bit of wrangling with the plumbing, I've got some very exciting fediverse.party updates to announce!
Firstly, we've removed Diaspora from the landing page. The first update to that page since I became Lead Goose.
Diaspora only federates over its own protocol, which means its accounts can only communicate with accounts on a handful of apps that are backwards compatible with that. It's still in development, so it's still on the All Apps page.
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But in the meantime, the Hubzilla info page linked from the landing page has been updated, thanks to the info provided in a Merge Request by @session (on CodeBerg).
My first attempt to do both of these updates was botched, due to my lack of knowledge about JSON syntax. Huge thanks to @crystal for helping us identify and fix my fail.
My squeaky wheeling about this (before I realised I done it), also exposed some technical debt in the fediverse.party infrastructure, some of it urgent.
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In brief, mirror.fediverse.party uses the old CodeBerg Pages, a dead parrot come the end of this year. So it needed rebuilding to use the new (git-pages) version of CB Pages.
We also learned that Forgejo now has its own CI (Continuous Integration) system called #ForgejoActions. We waste a lot of time wrestling with the Woodpecker-CI instance set up for CodeBerg before that existed. So we asked for help with migrating to Actions.
@crystal kindly did the work on both, in 1 epic MR 💐
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We're still in the final stages of merging this MR. Once that's done - presuming Forgejo Actions does end up working better for us - expect to see a *lot* more updates to the main site in the pipeline.
If our mirror on the new CodeBerg pages works reliably, we might end up making this the production site. @minoru - who has hosted the site at fediverse.party since we moved to CodeBerg - recently secured our domain name, making it easier to make those kinds of changes. Thank you @minoru! 💐
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I'd also like to thank @minoru and @RyunoKi for their reviews of Crystal's epic MR (@RyunoKi has been hosting our other mirror for a few years). I'll be much more confident with this being merged, knowing that both our hosting experts have cast a critical eye over it.
Finally I'd like to thank @aRubes for being a squeaky wheel, exposing just how much of a drag fediverse.party's accumulated technical debt has been having on volunteer motivation. Lighting a fire under me to address the CI.
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In summary, despite not a lot obviously changing on fediverse.party in the last year or so, a *lot* of unsung work has been going on behind the scenes. So this has been me doing some singing about it ; )
Hopefully now there's a deeper appreciation for the often-invisible work involved in maintaining even a relatively simple website. With a bunch of this squared away, we can turn to getting some more visible changes happening on the site itself, over the coming months.
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If I'm mathing correctly, next May is the 19th birthday of the fediverse, see;
https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-12-years-in-2020/
So I aim to have all the info on fediverse.party shipshape and Bristol fashion in time for a modest relaunch of the site on that date.
Then next November, fediverse.party turns 10! See;
https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-party-turns-five/
So I'll be aiming to complete a major technical rebuild in time to celebrate that in style. We recently started plotting that here;
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fediparty/issues/343
Watch this space!
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I plan to fill the gap left by removing Diaspora from the landing page with a question mark icon linked to the All Apps page. It is linked in the 3 dots menu, but since that's where most of the info on the site currently lives, it would be good to make it more prominent.
I'm also considering swapping out Hubzilla for Forte, the latest evolution of @mike MacGirvin's branch of the fediverse family tree. Forte federates over ActivityPub by default, but Hubzilla requires a plugin for that.
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