Monument

For the last couple of years, I've been working on and off on a Mastodon-like microblogging server called kepi.

I have reached an impasse: I've done all the interesting stuff (Mastodon API and ActivityPub support) and what's left is dull (the HTML/JS interface, which TBH wouldn't need to be much different from Mastodon's own anyway).

Unfortunately, a microblogging system you can't use from a browser isn't all that useful for most people, and a lot of work would be needed before you could. It could work if someone wrote the bits I'm not enthused about, but I've asked around a few times and nobody seems interested on collaborating.

However, a lot of kepi would work well as standalone libraries. In particular, trilby (the Mastodon API support) would be useful for other people in other places, and indeed I've been playing with adding it into GROGGS. And bowler (the ActivityPub support) is something a lot of people might need. There are also some functions in busby (support for some .well-known services) which might be useful to others.

I'm not confident enough about writing general-use standalone Python libraries to do this at present. In particular, I don't have a reasonable grasp on all the possible use cases for something like bowler. I will read up on it, but help would be appreciated.

I have been building an ActivityPub/fediverse library for Django, called django_kepi. It seems to me that kepi would be much more useful if it was a general-purpose system service: a daemon which nginx (etc) use for the ActivityPub parts of a site. It accepts HTTP requests only from localhost.

Suppose you post a blog entry. Your blog software creates an Article in kepi, linking it to the blog entry's URL. Kepi gets on in the background with notifying your followers and so on. When someone "like"s the entry, kepi will run a hook that sends you a notification or whatever.

django_kepi is pretty close to working. Do any of you want to helping me turn this into a useful daemon?

Existing Python 3 code with tests is at https://gitlab.com/marnanel/django-kepi. Let me know if you need a hand getting it working.

Feel free to share to people who might be interested.