Now that I’m back in Phoenix for probably the next three months, I’ve started thinking again about the direction I want to take the software for this blog.
While traveling by rail two weeks ago, I made a fair bit of use of the check-ins feature that I created just before departing, and I came up with a number of ideas for making a check-in easier for me.
However, earlier this week, Kathryn mentioned a feature that’s been missing from the software ever since I released it, a deficiency that’s also been noticed and mentioned by other readers. She’d like to have some way of interacting with posts — either to comment on them or just simply to leave a like.
When I started developing the Klaxon software, I designed it around a protocol called ActivityPub, which would let it share content with other servers implementing the same protocol. Because of this, the major building blocks of what Kathryn wants are already in place. For example, I’ve implemented following, but I haven’t implemented a way of accepting follows or pushing content to followers; and I’ve implemented inbound replies, but I haven’t implemented a way of showing them with their corresponding posts. I need to spend some time fleshing out the details.
When it’s ready, interactions are going to behave differently than they did back when I used WordPress. To interact with posts on this server, you won’t create an account on this server; you’ll create an account on another server that implements the ActivityPub protocol. There are thousands of such servers, and many offer free accounts to anyone who asks for one and agrees not to engage in any abusive behavior. I’ll provide more details as I get closer to a concrete implementation.
