This post is written on https://normals.me/ and delivered to !fediverse@lemmy.world over #ActivityPub, so if you are reading it the basic plumbing works. Now let me explain what is this.
Normals is a forum with communities, threads, and questions with an accepted answer. It is a single instance, not software you can host, and the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons. The federation module will be published separately with implementation notes (FEP-67ff).
What federates today Every community is a Group actor following the Lemmy model (FEP-1b12). Follow @selfhosted@normals.me or any other community from Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin or Mastodon.
Posts and comments go both ways. Replies from your instance appear in the thread on Normals, replies from Normals go back to the origin.
Remote content is labelled with its origin, links back to it, and is never copied. Media loads from the source.
Signed fetches, so it works with instances that require authorized fetch. NodeInfo 2.1 is up.
Policies, in case they matter to you, it has no ads, and no paid reach, and of course no AI training on posts. AI crawlers blocked by default, public mod log with reasons, and no automated removals. Numbers at https://normals.me/transparency so please take a look.
If something from your instance shows up wrong here, or something from here shows up wrong on yours, reply with the URL and I’ll fix it. Andy Piper mentioned NodeBB uses the same group model, if anyone runs a NodeBB instance I’d like to test against it, if possible.
I hope we all have fun. Cheers!
Lots of people are getting pissed at it being closed source. I get that it isn’t the norm. But, there are closed-source paid software on the Fediverse. This isn’t anything new. Also, there’s ways to disagree and share opinions without being hostile - we are not children here nor teenagers lacking a fully developed brain
As a counterpoint, sloppy projects are being shared all over and it’s basically spam at this point. Even /r/rust had to disallow code projects, because there was simply way too much slop being posted all the time.
People share projects because back in the day, a project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code with a cool website and a lot of features were evidence of a lot of hard work, a lot of design decisions and a lot of tradeoffs.
Vibe coding has made that a bad metric. These things no longer mean that any actual work has been dedicated to this project. Anyone could use an afternoon prompting an agent to build the same thing. There is no value in sharing such a thing. At best, it’s worthless and at worst, it’s borderline a scam, an attempt at disguising a project as something it isn’t.