🚀 ActivityPub Rocks Portal: Technical Discussion

[indieterminacy]

Technology Stacks

Incumbent: Haunt

https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html

Skribe (Haunt Reference Manual)

Its used by the Guix website for instance (which I have looked under the hood).
(Like Christine Lemmer-Webber, Im a Lisper and in the Guix community)
(Its a very rare situation where Im ever the one with an incumbent stack :s )

Id prefer it if it gets stated explicitly what technical features are needed to justify moving off any stack
(as somebody who normally is the one suggesting alternative approaches Id expect this reciprocated).

Stay on Haunt until full consensus emerges.
Nothing is worse than things being chucked out while somebody is working on the next big thing.

Formats

Haunt has a couple of additional formats it can read:

• sxml
• html
• texinfo
• commonmark
• skribe

Fwiw, Christine is using the Skribe format

Files · master · Christine Lemmer-Webber / activitypub.rocks · GitLab

i18n

This is pertinent given Guix’s own work with translatable content.

Heres a video regarding this:
https://10years.guix.gnu.org/program/#let-s-translate-guix-together-

If we stay on Haunt Id be happy to liaise with the developer community to ensure that the portal can handle multilingualism - as well as us pooling translatable content.
(the format PO comes to mind, not sure)

Their approach is to use a very GUI friendly translation tool.

And this is Guix’s i18n guide:

Translating Guix (GNU Guix Reference Manual)

It is worth noting that Guix’s website is run using the SXML variant using a GNU orientated stack.
As such, it is operating with better technical solutions which may exclude some volunteers
(no doubt we need to focus on throughput).

Alternative: Vitejs/Astro

This tool for static sites has been very well recommended in multiple website builder threads recently:

Vite

I suspect that Astro will fulfill the criteria of most, though I would like to emphasize the benefits of minimal technology stacks.

i18n

This is Astro’s i18n guide:

withastro/docs/blob/main/contributor-guides/translating-astro-docs.md

Localisation is a win for me, and you have suggested something based upon Vite so I cant feel too aggrieved
(my nostrils were flaring thinking Lisp could still be in play…)

General Points about i18n

One way or another we should feed off already translated content, which both silos can help with.

FWIW, its worth noticing that despite enough views, my appeal for widening diversity for the SH steering group we have come to nothing:

Widening The Talent Pool For Our Upcoming Fediconference Initiative

As one of the steering group members for our upcoming Fediverse event initiative, Im reaching out to encourage potential leaders to step forward. Knowing some of the volunteers and having the opportunity to know the others better, Im personally excited. However, it concerns me that the people who initially came forward fall along a rough homogeneous collection of white males with an anglo centric origin (though I should emphasize that we have different outlooks; motivations; and talents). N…

Perhaps there are more people out there who are keen on demonstrating the value of ActivityPub across different linguistic groups…

Forges

Although, no doubt Codeberg’s page serving stack is low hanging fruit:
https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
https://codeberg.page/

I did something equivalent for SourceHut - which was so simple it felt dastardly:
https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/

IMHO, either Codeberg; Forgejo; or SourceHut are good initiatives.

Other (non HTML) Protocols

Any chance we can serve the ActivityPub Rocks Portal’s content for the protocol Gemini (in parallel)?

Once the technical structure is in place I dont mind doing the building for that.

Federated Technologies

In an ideal situation such a portal would be a living embodiment of federated technologies but I suspect this would require sustained commitment from multiple people for doing effectively.