Smithereen

Oh yeah I added a CLAUDE.md to my project the other day: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/blob/master/CLAUDE.md Is it a good one?

The problem is that all mainstream social media has degenerated into entertainment. Staying up to date about the lives of people you know irl is seemingly no longer their intended purpose. But people's need to connect in this way — just updates from those who they chose to follow, displayed chronologically, and no other content whatsoever — has not gone anywhere. That's why I'm also working on my own project that implements this type of social network with ActivityPub support: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen It's beta quality for now and I'm not promoting it much yet, but I hope to bring it to 1.0 by the end of this year.

> BTW, would you mind sharing how you got that job? I started working with Pavel Durov in 2011 on the VKontakte Android app, after winning several of his developer contests, and it all just went from there. I was the last one of the "old" team to transfer to Telegram. My main job was actually the libtgvoip[1] library and its integration into the Android app (the other platforms were done by their corresponding devs). I got fired in 2019 because the calls weren't working satisfactorily for Pavel. He got furious when he was unable to call some journalist, cursed at me in front of the entire team and sent me a termination notice. In hindsight, I should've definitely not taken building a VoIP library from scratch alone upon myself. It's a massive undertaking. But at least I learned a lot, and many people say that my implementation performed n

In my fediverse server project[1], I convert all user-uploaded images to high-quality webp and store them like that. I discard the original files after that's done. I use imgproxy[2] to further resize and convert them on the fly for actual display. In general, I try my best to treat the original user-uploaded files like they're radioactive, getting rid of them as soon as possible. I don't do videos yet, but I'm kinda terrified of the idea of putting user-uploaded files through ffmpeg if/when I'll support them. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen [2] https://github.com/imgproxy/imgproxy

They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any specific instance of it requires less work to get a network effect going. :)

My ActivityPub project, Smithereen, is built on this. Though I had to fork it to add the ability to stream responses. By default it really insists on rendering everything fully into a string and only then serving it to the client. I also updated its dependencies and added support for Java 21 virtual threads. https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen My fork of Spark: https://github.com/grishka/spark

https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen A Facebook-style ActivityPub server. Has wall posts, groups, and events. Not yet "ready" — 1.0 would need much better moderation tools, photo albums (with tagging), discussion boards (in groups), and a client API. Direct messages are a work in progress right now. I myself use it daily for my participation in the fediverse.

Unfortunately I don't think it fits any of the projects I work on (and I don't use VSCode to begin with, never had it installed, bit I do see an IntelliJ plugin as well). I have one project that's a server application (https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen), but since it uses lots of custom stuff on top of the Spark micro-framework, your plugin would probably not work on it. I imagine it does expect projects to be structured idiomatically for the framework they use, at least to some degree. Spark also doesn't know anything about databases, so that is all custom as well. Oh and I also hacked it a bit with reflection to allow streaming responses.

I'm building a fediverse project that aims to fill this exact niche. It's basically a recreation of an early-ish version of VKontakte (Russian Facebook) but federated and in green instead of blue. It's not really ready yet, and there are lots of important features missing, but I do use it daily for my primary fediverse account. I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for. https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

I'm building an ActivityPub thing of my own: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen It's not quite ready for mainstream use just yet, but I'm getting there. The next update will improve moderation tools by a lot. One after that will, at last, add private messages.

I'll keep building my federated Facebook replacement. https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

He's also the creator of Smithereen. "Federated, ActivityPub-compatible social network server with friends, walls, and groups". It is modeled after VK and federates with Mastodon. https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

My project[1] will have discussion boards in groups at some point. But not exactly "broadcast", it's more like Facebook groups that you join and do things in. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

Oh, no, it's now kinda useless for that too unless you somewhat go out of your way. They've signed contracts with recording companies and "legalized" most of the music several years ago, killing off the public API (audio.* methods), adding ads (which I've never heard thanks to my ad blocker, but still) and imposing ever more nonsensical client-side restrictions in mobile apps (which I use an old version of) that are removed by buying a subscription. But — despite Mail.Ru Group doing its best to ruin it, it's still way better than Facebook. There's a chronological feed even! And they aren't brave enough to ruin that. Full disclosure: I worked at VK on the official Android app for 5 years, most of that as the only Android developer in the entire company. I quit in 2016 because of growing disagreement with the management about our goals. VK

I know of Smithereen[1] that is an attempt at a full fledged social network similar to VK on top of the ActivityPub vocabulary. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen