Exploring Interest in a Social Option

[Jake W]

Hey guys,

So I've been on and off talking to/working with the developer at Yarn.Social, which is a federated self-hostable microblogging app that should actually work on Sandstorm as it currently is. It's not nearly as popular as ActivityPub-based networks, but it is a (small) established federation model that Sandstorm servers could participate in as well.

https://yarn.social/

It uses a format called twtxt, which is, in short, a text file notation for tweets. The beauty of this is that of course, you can pull someone's feed via the fact that it's a static-published text file, which is compatible with our web publishing. (Technically, you can manually craft a text file on a Davros grain right now, and it's twtxt-compatible... albeit not an interface to follow other people's posts.)

I think between using the Powerbox proxy, static web publishing, and some auth integration, a Sandstorm package for Yarn.Social with Sandstorm's current API should be possible, and James Mills, the developer, has already gotten the app running inside a Sandstorm sandbox, though none of the integration work has been done yet.

I am curious if there are people who would be interested in this app in Sandstorm, and if there's anyone who would be interested in helping with the packaging/integration work. (Yarn.Social is written in Go.)

[Dan Krol]

I can't say I would likely make use of it often; I don't use Mastodon enough as it is. But I do think it's really cool. Maybe the draw to use it could be to stay in the loop with other Sandstorm users?

And you know - Down the line, I could imagine some interesting Sandstorm integrations. Supposing we some day implement a way to identify users and allow logins between sandstorm instances. You get into a Yarn conversation with 3 people, you create a text editor document, you click on each of their profiles and click Share. You get a powerbox popup saying "choose a grain to share with j...@jim.sandcats.io" And then Jim is allowed for the moment to log into your instance. (Though, I could see potential security issues there, trusting the app to identify the right people).

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[Dan Krol]

"Sally just shared a new Lychee photo album"

"See all of Sam's photo albums"

[Jacob Weisz]

We've done a capability flow for sharing other grains before (Rocket.Chat has it, for instance), though this wouldn't particularly apply well here.

In this case, twtxt is entirely public, so there's not an idea you'd share content with just one person or group. If you share a grain sharing link, it would be available to anyone. And since it uses web publishing, you would use your normal non-Sandstorm domain to represent your pod/server here, so it wouldn't really be deeply integrated into the concept of Sandstorm federation.

(On the topic of federation, I think the first step for that might be to allow your Sandstorm server to hold capability URLs for accessing grains on other Sandstorm servers, such that we could allow grains from other servers shared with you to appear in your grain list and in your grain UI. It wouldn't necessarily require each server trust each other, because capability-based security means us holding a capability for that grain gives us access to it.)

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  Jacob Weisz

  goo...@jacobweisz.com

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