Stages of app maturation

[erlend-sh]

The closest thing to what we're trying to make is this: https://home.omg.lol/ (more so than Linktree et.al.)

It's a wonderful site and we hope to be very friendly interop partners with them in the future. However, Weird has a slightly different philosophy, which we might even call a minimalistic theory of change:

• Identity is central to the whole thing. In particular OIDC as a cornerstone.
• All components of the application must be open software. It’s very important for one’s little corner of personal space on the internet to be open enough that there’s no lock-in effect.
• Along with being open, the software must be self-hostable, to enable credible exit.
• While Weird intends to integrate with the fediverse, it also intends to become its own kind of network.

The Weird.one service will be built incrementally, in several stages. Each such stage could take anywhere between 3-12 months to complete. Many can be done in parallel however.

Through various milestones of increasing feature complexity, weird-app will evolve as:

1. an identity keeper: a personalized calling card
2. an identity aggregator: defragment your feeds and profiles
3. an identity connector: Network of Shared Purpose

Identity Keeper

The most effective way to make Weird usable by regular people is to offer it as a regular cloud service. Since all the hard work of auth is already provided for us in Rauthy, our first Job to be Done should be quite simple.

🐣 early adopters: The 1000++ people on GitHub with a linktree page in their profile.

Linksapp cloud-service

• authenticate with Rauthy (which now supports github as an upstream provider)
• HTML5-based WYSIWYG, drag & drop linkspage builder (advanced prior art in editable-website)
• generate page with plain JS/TS; looks like we've settled on Lit.
• store data somewhere (most likely SQLite)
• give each user a unique sub-domain and/or sub-directory.
• As a preliminary step towards identity aggregation, we're gonna make it super easy to verify your domain on Mastodon et.al.

Offline linksapp

Offline is online with extreme latency

Seeing as Weird is all about online identity it doesn't quite make sense for the app to be all the way local-first, but we do share a lot of the same ideals.

Identity Aggregator

As it matures, Weird-app is meant to give netizens back ownership of the data they’ve created and stored on other platforms. As such, Weird will be an increasingly capable aggregator of disparate web identities and their respective content silos — siloed no more!

We’re gonna start off dev-centric and gradually work our way through all user types from there. Any identity-serving platform with an open API is ultimately up for grabs; POSSE provides some prior art here.

🐣 early adopters: Fedizens in need of personal websites.

Feeds & profile collection

1: Single-source

Enter GitHub/GitLab profile, get personal web page. The GitHub equivalent of https://www.polywork.com/

Screenshots

2: Curated content

Handpick what source-content to use from source platform.

Some initial prototyping for this was done in uda-api and node-uda.

3: Feeds

Add blog feeds (multiple) & twitter/mastodon.
A new tab will be added. See linksapp-fresh.

'Hey Creators, Please Make Firehoses!'
https://github.com/jonbell-lot23/rssblend

4: Multi-source

Add itch.io, stackoverflow, deviantart. Refine source-curation to facilitate easy combination of multiple sources.

5: Advanced feeds

Add getpocket/raindrop and pocketcasts/listennotes for ‘what I’m reading / listening to’ feeds.

6: ALL THE SOURCES

By this point we will have some sense of the best practice for adding additional sources, probably arriving at some sort of standardized plug-in system & docs to facilitate self-serve. First and foremost for devs, but also with an eye towards regular users.

Feed integration

Unlike the pulling in of various feeds as described above, it's a different task entirely to be a feed source.

ActivityPub

Our most likely trial run of this will be with https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial because of:

• Feature completeness
• Mastodon compatibility
• OIDC
• Focus on safety features
• Eminently self-hostable

ATproto

At some point we will run our own Bluesky/ATproto PDS. However, our first foray into this protocol will most likely be via bridgy-fed.

Blog

Eventually, it will make sense for Weird to offer its own blogging plugin as a built-in option instead of deferring to external integrations. Becoming a blogging engine is also indicative of other CMS capabilities. Useful references include Quartz and PostOwl.

• https://github.com/commune-os/weird/issues/8

Identity connector

• https://github.com/commune-os/weird/issues/3

[erlend-sh]

Mastodon

Extra utilities for Mastodon integration:

https://pinned-posts-organizer.stefanbohacek.dev/

[erlend-sh]

Scrapers

https://github.com/CEREBRUS-MAXIMUS/Surfer-Data

Would be great to let users run this from within their profile:
https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock
https://github.com/jonaylor89/sherlock-rs