Gazing in my crystal ball and reading some tea leaves, it looks like the Fediverse is going to grow substantially over the next few years as people realize Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter act are acting against their interests. There are a growing number of websites that are federated and interconnected, on top of the thousands that already do so, so leaving the Big Tech companies behind becomes less of an issue.
At the moment, the Fediverse is a bit like the World Wide Web was during the early 1990s. It’s a place of people-in-the-know, the early-adopters, the technically-savvy, and social-media-weary-looking-for-safe-havens. It’s the Wild West frontier of social media, where there are lots of apps, lots of websites, and lots of opportunities to gain users.
Project goals
Work on Amore has always been a bit of fun, playing with code. It’s been a personal side project, nothing more. That was until people started to get interested in it. This encouraged me to do more work on it, and make more of an effort at making a finished product. While working on Amore 0.3, I became aware of other projects that were supposed to make it easy for PHP projects to connect to the Fediverse. As I looked through their code and read their (sparse) documentation, it was apparent those projects wouldn’t work for me. What I needed to do was create my own Fediverse friendly PHP framework, then use that to build Amore. Thus Federama was born.
Federama is meant to provide a bare minimum of ActivityPub functionality. It will be able to stand on it’s own as a Fediverse platform, but can also be hacked to create something new. In my mind, if Federama is properly built, it can be used to create dating software, forum software, help desk software, microblogging software, media library software, translation software, wiki software, knowledgebase software, dictionary software, password lockers, and so much more. If there is a type of software that requires a user to sign in, it’s would be a good candidate for using Federama. That’s the goal anyway.
Put another way, the short-term goal (for the rest of 2019) is to make Federama a viable project that connects to the Fediverse. User should be able to sign in and send and receive messages with users on platforms like Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey. The slightly longer term goal is to build Amore as a dating application for the Fediverse. If Federama works by the end of 2019, Amore should work in early 2020.
Fundraising goals
Along with the project goals for Amore and Federama, I have some vague fundraising goals. In the sidebar are links to my profiles on some fundraising websites. Other than earning my gratitude and a thank you, there are no tiers or perks for donating at the moment. I’ll create goals and perks and levels after I can get Federama to connect to my accounts on Mastodon and Pleroma. That’s my incentive to work on coding.
For now, the main goal of fundraising is to earn money to help pay for hosting, domain registration, and occasional computer issues, like the monitor I had to replace last week.