Help with potential fanfiction.lol federation? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 19 hours ago by Teknevra@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53839835

I recommended the Fediverse to Brennan Kenneth Brown (the creator and developer of fanfiction.lol: https://fanfiction.lol/, which is an alternative to Ao3, but that uses the same OTW software: https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/).

And he told me to go ahead and implement, as well as create a pull request.

The issue is: I know almost NOTHING about the technical side of The Fediverse (lol).

fanfiction.lol Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/brennanbrown/fanfiction.lol

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[-] ErrorCode@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago

Are you trying to build a federated version of AO3? Most of the fanfic writers I know spend there time there, but it is currently down - maybe this is in response to the suspected hack and anticipated recovery time?

[-] Teknevra@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I was trying to, although I haven't found much luck.

Although I did stumble upon Ourchive

https://lemmy.world/post/53819685

[-] CTDummy@piefed.social 24 points 13 hours ago

I really appreciate that response.

[-] inari@kbin.earth 8 points 12 hours ago

It's a longer version of the classic "patches welcome"

[-] atro_city@fedia.io 11 points 11 hours ago

It would help if you starting writing down what exactly you expect to be federated, which problems you think could be face (moderation?), and how you think it could be resolved.

I don't know fanfiction.lol so it's not possible for me to have a good opinion on what should be federated and what that would even look like.

[-] Teknevra@lemmy.world 0 points 6 hours ago

Here is what I originally wrote

[-] atro_city@fedia.io 7 points 5 hours ago

Thanks.

You could've copy pasted that here. It's much easier to read than a screenshot and people can also search for it.
That text is to convince somebody who knows how federation could be useful to the platform, but it doesn't answer my original questions:

what exactly should be federated?
which problems could be faced?
how could they be resolved?

I don't know much about fan-fiction, but I imagine it works like this:

there are members of the platform
every member can publish their own text
every member can rate another text and leave comments behind

Do publications have to go into a certain communities? If so, that would translate very well to communities on lemmy. Otherwise it would be more of a blog-like thing.

Regardless of how they are published, how would content from other servers show up on the fan fiction server? This post for example, how would that show up on the fan fiction server? If it shouldn't how would it be filtered out and does the Activity Pub thing allow for some kind filtering?

Then we get to ratings: lemmy has upvotes and downvotes, mastodon has... stars? How would that translate to fan fiction ratings? Can servers change their rating systems? 1-5, 1-10, 1-100? How would you solve that?

A fan fiction server shouldn't all of a sudden start seeing posts from !politics or from pixelfed, I imagine. Then it wouldn't be fan fiction anymore.

You have to come up with a fleshed out suggestion. I don't believe you need to understand every technical detail, but you need to conceptually try and understand the different platforms and think what it would mean for them to communicate with each other. With that, you will have a point of discussion for the developers of the fan fiction server's software.

[-] grandel@lemmy.ml 21 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I may be misjudging what's going on here but to me it seems like he's saying that he has other priorities and this is likely a non trivial issue to solve.

Unless you are willing to hire a skilled developer who is familiar with the codebase I doubt somebody will implement this just out of sheer kindness

[-] Teknevra@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

@grandel@lemmy.ml

Unless you are willing to hire a skilled developer

Unfortunately, I happen to be broke

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Of course it's an unpopular opinion among the vehemently anti-AI crowd over here, but you can get a pretty good headstart with LLMs, local ones even.

The thing is that you don't just take what is given and immediately send it back as a shitty PR. Code review it, figure out what works and what doesn't, have a test plan, have unit tests, stand up a sandbox and look at the frontend results, use a second agent for a blind code review, etc.

Hell, if you aren't spending at least the first several hours asking questions and crafting a complete design plan, you're not doing it right.

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 3 points 12 hours ago

It might be a bit much for a beginner but for someone with some programming basics it could be a decent way to learn more. It's all back end stuff, so not much browser madness. Rails has its learning curve but has tons of convenience features. The part I have trouble understanding is why anyone would want this. Say federation appears. Then what? Anyway, OP, if you take this on, I can probably give a bit of technical advice if you want it.

[-] jonathan@piefed.social 5 points 11 hours ago

Someone who only has programming basics is a beginner. ActivityPub is not a simple spec to implement.

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago

It would surprise me if there isn't already an implementation that can be adapted. E.g. as someone said, Mastodon uses Rails .

[-] jonathan@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago

Adapt is the wrong word, you can't just plug Mastodon into the side of this other app. At best someone could learn and borrow from the Mastodon implementation. And that's still not a beginner level challenge.

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

I meant see what AP (Activitypub) aimplementation Mastodon is using, and adapt that implementation, not the entirety of Mastodon. In fact quick web search immediately finds there are multiple pre-packaged Ruby gems for Activitypub, so just use one.

I looked at the Wikipedia article about AP and it's kind of bureaucratic but I don't see much difficult. Yeah it's not suited to a raw beginning programmer but it shouldn't take a big expert. OP, have you done much programming?

I see on Wikipedia that there's a new thing called "AT Protocol" that's supposed to improve on AP. That might also be worth looking into.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 12 points 14 hours ago

The only pointer I can give, is that you would probably want to use ActivityPub for the federation protocol, and you could potentially look at Mastodon's implementation of that, since it's also implemented in Ruby On Rails.

Mind that there can be differences in how the federation should work, for example Mastodon doesn't have post titles, which you would presumably want on a fan fiction site...