Hello IndieSky folks,
In light of Zeppelin.Social ceasing development and dev activity on Deer.Social slowing down, I wanted to gauge the IndieSky community’s interest in the continued legacy and usefulness of these types of appview projects.
Northsky Social’s plan for Phase 2 of our development (after Phase 1: PDS Migration), is to set up a fully functional appview stack and begin expanding it in a variety of ways, including:
- In-app Moderation Capabilities
- Interface customization
- and more!
Since we’re committed to expanding off of the social-app project, we were wondering if there’s interest in an intermediary, maintained, testbed/sandbox appview that we maintain to help others in the ecosystem who are wanting to test features, lexicons, etc…
Bluesky Appview → Intermediary Social Appview (we maintain) → Our fork / Your fork
We figure since we’ll be needing to keep our version up to date with Bluesky (with some notable exceptions) that it might be helpful to the overall developer community for us to take this on. It might be something we seek additional funding for too.
What do you think? Would this be helpful? Sound off below!
3 Likes
I’m very much in favour of this.
IMO this would have been amazing when I’d started on Bluemoji. I spent several evenings trying to fork social-app in a way that preserved the existing code base such that it could be rebased against upstream (so I wouldn’t lose PBC’s improvements to the codebase but could bolt on my own lexicon/UI), but I figured it’d be too much work to maintain long-term. In the end I decided to write my own frontend, and… Bluemoji still isn’t released. 
At the very least it’d be a useful testing environment for new lexicons that are meant to interact with app.bsky’s. More meaningfully, it could possibly allow projects like Northsky to spawn their own derivative app infrastructure while still being able to track upstream improvements to the platform.
Yes this is an interesting idea!
I think the web front end is relatively simple to build / host?
The hard part is perhaps how to manage PRs and other things?
And I guess this sort of ends up potentially like a maintained deer social. In that they’ve done some work in pioneering how to add custom features but maintain with upstream.
A lot of this setup feels like git workflows, permissions, and CI / testing flows.
For what it’s worth, BlackSky’s rsky (pronounced risky) has laid a of groundwork for this, I think? Might be worth joining forces for a greater good. FWIW I forked BlackSky’s fork of the front-end and I run it on my own little k8s cluster, it’s pretty neato. Risky’s a bit more involved but there’s a ton of work on relay, appview api server, etc there.
Edited to remove the direct reply, still getting used to the forum software.