Information about project status and future
TL;DR, the project is not dead, and development is accelerating. The original purpose
of the project may no longer be needed, but it will offer a lot of functionality that
can be very useful when living on federated social media.
As announced previously on the mastodon account, development on the kotlin project
has ended. Distributions to different platforms have been too complicated, and while
there are clear advantages with running applications natively, in OSX, Linux or Windows,
it also leaves out a large amount of users that would prefer using mobile or tablet.
Maintaining desktop and phone support, with all the distribution challenges that comes with
this, would require too much time. As a result, a new project was started, with a complete
rewrite. The goal is to create a PWA, progressive web application, that can run on any browser,
regardless of device. Cellphone, tables or regular computers.
This does not come without challenges for a backend developer with minimal UI experience. There
is a jungle of frameworks out there, and trying to navigate and make a good decition is difficult.
It has been ages since I wrote much JavaScript, and, well, it is not my favourite language. Nor
did I feel comfortable jumping right into TypeScript without first getting a foundation in pure
JavaScript, or frameworks like React/Vue, wihout understanding what plain non-frameworks offered.
This bit is often vital to understanding how to building an application properly. It is, however,
not the most fun process in a language that often makes it very easy to make mistakes, and
very hard to figure out what the mistakes are.
About a week ago, the step was taken into the "framework" phase. JavaScript code will be rewritten,
though this process is a lot more straight forward than going from Kotlin to JavaScript.
From a personal perspective, this means the project has gone from a "do I want this pain?" phase to
a "wow, this is fun!" phase. For the velocity of a "spare time project", that bit is highly
important.
The project is far from dead, but as the origial purpose of the project, detecting when you
are disconnected from your friends, is mostly solved by Mastodon software directly, there
is no point rushing out something just to have a "did I loose a friend?" tool. TrunkFriends will
offer a more broader friends management approach, with backingup / restore functionality,
and usability spanning several different platforms.
With Facebook going the path it is going, X going, well, we all know, TikTok facing uncertain
times in one of the largest markeds, BlueSky being the "non-federated-pretend-to-be-federated",
having soon to make up their mind wtheck they want to be, we are living in "interesting times".
The time for distributed social media has never been better, PixelFed is having a major influx
of users and, well, eyes are being opened.
This is NOT the time when I want to toss in the towel and say good bye to this project. What is
going on rather makes me more eager to accelerate coding. It will no longer be a mastodon-only
project, and should offer funcitonality to any social network that exposes usable APIs.
I want to be careful with giving any estimate on when the first release will be ready. I am,
however, hoping to be a month or two away from being comfortable enough with the codebase to
change the visibility setting for the new repository from private to public.
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