gotosocial thinking
So what I'm starting to see gotosocial as, is not a whole integrated experience like Mastodon, but rather as a server (like synapse for matrix) with an open and well-documented API, which developers can build their own front-ends on top of.
gotosocial thinking
The idea is that the API would be a superset of the API that mastodon currently exposes, so that you could (if desired) use existing apps like Tusky to connect to it.
gotosocial thinking
This also takes a lot of the pressure off me to produce some kind of slick front-end experience, which is not something I have any interest in at all. I wanna work on the backend server stuff and support different configurations and use-cases.
gotosocial thinking
What would be *really* cool would be if you could use the gotosocial server as a generic backend, and then drop whatever kind of UI you wanted on top of it, to give different user experiences.
Imagine, one UI is made to look a bit like twitter, another could be made to look more like facebook, or tumblr. All using the same API.
gotosocial thinking
Reducing pressure on myself to cook up some kind of spicy frontend experience also means I can focus on spicy server features like clustering, alternative data storage modes (Kafka???), that kind of thing.
gotosocial thinking
So the only question that remains is, once I have a decent MVP server thing up and running, and some very good documentation of the API (using Swagger), how do I attract frontend developers to actually build on it?
fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
gotosocial thinking
@dumpsterqueer hmm, maybe cooperating with (one of the) existing mastodon frontend forks like hometown and glitchsoc, or alternatives like brutaldon to see if they'd be open to supporting the extra features
i do frontend but also perpetually overwhelmed with my own projects so can't commit to anything
gotosocial thinking
@dumpsterqueer right, I was thinking their codebase might be better to strip the frontend parts from, especially as they already have more features and configurability
gotosocial thinking
@f0x hometown and glitchsoc unfortunately aren't just frontends: they use the 'all-in-one' model that Mastodon uses, so they're an integrated frontend/backend. Brutaldon is more like it (that's a dedicated front-end) but it looks like it's read-only now.