kopia lustrzana https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox
52 wiersze
2.4 KiB
Markdown
52 wiersze
2.4 KiB
Markdown
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# History
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In order to better understand soapbox-fe, this document tells the story of how it came to be.
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## March 2016, Mastodon
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Mastodon, a federated microblogging platform, was released.
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Mastodon is built with Ruby on Rails and uses React.js for its frontend.
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The React frontend uses [standardized API endpoints](https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/) to handle all actions.
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## July 2019, gab.com relaunch
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In July 2019, Gab forked Mastodon 2.8.4 and migrated to it.
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They overhauled Mastodon's user interface into a streamlined single-column UI with a prettier stylesheet.
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Like Mastodon, Gab's fork is [open source](https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social).
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## August 2019, spinster.xyz launch
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Spinster is a feminist platform I helped launch, forked from Gab's Mastodon version.
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I began to heavily customize it with additional themes, integrated Stripe donations, and more.
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I created the fork early on, and did not adopt many of the features (and bugs) that Gab added later.
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## December 2019, Soapbox
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I decided to rebrand the Spinster codebase to be more neutral, calling it "Soapbox" (coined by `@grrrandma@spinster.xyz`).
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I wanted Soapbox to be something others would use.
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However, Mastodon still had fundamental problems, and I began eye alternatives like Pleroma.
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My goal with Soapbox is to attract non-technical people to the Fediverse.
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In order to do that, I need to experiment and run a lot of servers, but Mastodon makes that very expensive since it requires a lot of RAM to run.
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Meanwhile Pleroma is worlds more efficient, and would make things a lot cheaper for me in the long run.
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## February 2020, HYDRA Social
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I began contracting with Gab to create HYDRA Social, a Node.js Fediverse backend.
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Node.js is also more efficient than Ruby and could have solved the problem.
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For reasons I still don't understand, I was removed from the project after only a month.
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## March 2020, soapbox-fe
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I was in a headspace of making big changes, and decided to take on the move of Soapbox to Pleroma.
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To do this, I would separate the frontend into its own repo to run on top of Pleroma, greatly simplifying the system.
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This is only possible because Pleroma implements most of Mastodon's API endpoints, allowing me to re-use the majority of Soapbox's frontend code.
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At the time of writing, I'm still getting soapbox-fe off the ground by implementing the basic features it needs to power Spinster and other sites.
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