deadsuperhero

Yeah, I'm aware. I think the Nostr space in particular is doing a really great job, and has some good ideas on how to make it work. Why this development is significant, though, is that it's happening in ActivityPub space. It's not as robust, and doesn't have all the answers. But, the existence of such a project means that people within the space are already thinking about how to make this concept viable for the Fediverse.

Good question. For now, we have a basic process for submitting icons, which requires adding details about the project repo, information on the icon, and Copyright attribution for whoever created / owns the brand.

We recently incorporated a JS library that allows us to generate the font from the SVG files themselves, which also builds the preview pages that can be viewed at icons.wedistribute.org. With a bit of extra automation on Codeberg, we could basically update the preview page and generated set every time a new icon gets merged in to the main branch.

Our goal is to get to a point where new releases automatically get created, and an archive of the assets gets attached as well. That way, once a milestone gets completed, a new release will get put out with minimal amounts of work.

Interesting insights!

The original reason we started this was actually for our own development. Our site includes project icons and colors in dedicated tags, which link to dedicated topic hubs. As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn't a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.

Those symbols that you see are typically Unicode. Icon fonts are generally a CSS hack, in that a collection of SVGs have been converted into a font. The Unicode strings can be thought of as "letters" for that font. You're absolutely right that there are accessibility limitations, but the tradeoff is that people get an easy way to use their favorite project icons to represent where they are on the Web.

At the very least, you won't have any uBO problems with our site, as the font is incorporated directly into the theme we're using. We'll likely explore making a WordPress plugin next, so people can add these to their profiles and menus and other places.

Honestly, this is the first I'm hearing about it. Maybe we'll try to submit project SVGs.

That's not really enshittification, is it?

I was under the impression that Cory Doctorow's definition was largely based on how social media platforms entice people with "free" offerings, then gradually tighten the screws over time to make service worse. This usually happens when a platform becomes the dominant player.

Not yet, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to add in support for that. I think one of the core ideas here are that you could take NeoDB and use it as a foundation for any review system you want to integrate. Hook up to a service on the search side, support data import on the backend, suddenly you have a way to not only create the reviews, but populate the objects being reviewed with the necessary metadata.

Google Fonts

Yeah, I need to work on that. It's been on the back burner, because writing and publishing has kind of been a main focus for me in recent months. But, this hasn't been the highest priority, mostly because modifying WordPress and making it behave correctly can be a massive pain in the dick.

I'll get around to it when I'm able.

Honestly, self-hosting is kind of the way to go, so long as you stay on top of your backups and storage. There are a lot of Object Storage providers out there that offer reliable storage for cheap, it's a good investment if you plan on uploading somewhat frequently.

It's actually not too bad to run, it's just that my community instance has grown a lot, and is close to four years old at this point. Issues crop up, I mostly wrote this guide to share some insights on how I deal with things.

Yeah, I kind of screwed up. In hindsight, I should have just made the question accept a text answer, rather than a multiple-choice one.

I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/

I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.

It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.

Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.