#swanye

To answer your question – as the post is now restricted, for commenting –, things are still moving, albeit at somewhat of a pause (right now).

The whole family caught COVID, back in August (which our bodies did not take well, this round; gentle reminder to keep yourselves and others safe and keep masking), and I was let go from my job, after that.

As you might imagine, most of my time and energy is focused on trying to reemploy myself, at the moment; so a bit of a lull in development.

But I have every intention to continue working on Swanye, once I have a guarantee of income.

For newcomers, I lay out – at a high level – what I want Swanye to be and what I want it to do here: https://www.tumblr.com/swanye-fediverse/690187019453890560/what-this-project-is-all-about.

While that can be useful, – for some people – that format can be hard to get excited about so here're images of all the stuff that's been developed, so far:

Alright…; well, I was going to but Tumblr won't let me put any more than one video in this post so I'm afraid this is all I can show, here. But you can take a look at the original posts I uploaded, when I had been developing the feature, at the bottom half of this post: https://www.tumblr.com/swanye-fediverse/701303664961323008/swanye-fediverse-with-people-from-twitter-heading. I go into a little more detail in them and there are video descriptions, as well.

And I try to tag posts which talk about ideas I have regarding Swanye (that aren't development related), when I remember, with Swanye Meta.

In case Tumblr ever does actually go down, I have an account on Mastodon at https://fosstodon.org/@Swanye.

I, unfortunately, do have a habit of updating the Mastodon account more than here but I've also been tied up with various responsibilities.

Most recently, I've done some work to cleanup how data is stored and to, hopefully, make Swanye better able to interface with other ActivityPub implementations.

Half a year ago or so, I may've been light on details regarding this or just shown a .gif or video of another small feature so it didn't feel, to followers, like no development was being made.

But, then, Musk started tanking Twitter and, suddenly, a good chunk of the population knew what Mastodon is. And then Reddit decided to charge for use of their API and a bunch of people suddenly knew what Lemmy and Kbin were.

I'm sure that there're still plenty out there who don't but the distaste and disgruntlement people have with corporate social media grew well more than I expected and people are aware of alternatives.

So, though I've mentioned it before, just a reexplanation that, though I plan to make Swanye similar to Tumblr, it is also software that will be able to interface with other ActivityPub implementations.

That means you'll be able to view posts from Mastodon, reblog videos from PeerTube, like photos on PixelFed, and comment on Lemmy threads – all from your Swanye account, without having to leave your Swanye instance's website, due to its decentralized design.

And, because all of these softwares are open-source and free, you or anyone else will have the option to spin up your own server (that can talk to any other server running an instance of the same software) and set the moderation that you might hope for or expect.

I always worry that I'm communicating the possibility and idea well but – at this point in time – the thing that has me most excited is the amount of alternatives we're seeing. A corporation will always be driven towards more profit; they will always need to figure out a way to extract more.

In contrast, software that anyone can use or view will always belong to the commons, can always be picked up by someone else, can always be able to be used and bettered.

I think most people joined social media in the hopes to connect with others and make communities; when we have more control over our platforms, I'm hoping that will – simply – just remain trivial, rather than a battle.

And, because I still always worry that too many updates without any visual update on anything can feel just like vaporware, here's the most recent change I made.

I always thought the the icon of the poster/reblogger scrolling with the post was a neat way to remind you who did the post (especially on long posts); and I was scrolling through the Tumblr mobile app. and realized that there was no similar behavior which I thought kind of sucked.

So I modified Swanye's mobile to do just that:

[VD: A screencast of a web browser with a small enough window width to cause Swanye to go into mobile mode.

The page is scrolled downward and, as it goes down, the top part of a post which says who reblogged the post from whom moves downward, as well, once it hits the top of the page.

My first post to this account was detailing what all I hoped to achieve but it was written as, well, a post and that can be hard to quickly tell what the contents are, for many people.

So, for anyone who may have questions, I hope, with Swanye, to create social media which

will never have ad.s

will always be available as a free option, never requiring that you pay for it

will absolutely never collect and sell your data; you will never be the product

will prioritize disability accessibility

is always open-source

requires any who use the source code to make accessible their version as open-source and viewable by anyone

will have tools that allow any instance of the software that you run to administrate and set the rules for your community

will never use an algorithm to modify the order of posts on your dash or try to shoehorn in people you don’t follow into your dash

things like recommendations of people to follow based on hashtags or likes will have an option to turn off or opt-out

any algorithms for such things will be transparent and readable since the project is open-source

namely, attempts to put control of your online presence and your data back into better control of you

I may edit this if I think I’ve forgotten any; but these are definitely the reasons I started making this (and felt there was a need to make it).

There’s absolutely no reason everything you interact with online should be a product with decisions about what happens with your interacts left up to others; the internet – and social media – was supposed to be a way for people to better be able to make connections with other people about the things they love or are passionate about and it was what excited me about the Internet, originally.

I want some of that back; and I think that federated, open-source software can do that.

I always assume that people will just inquire, if curious about something, and that, if I was unclear or confusing in my first post of this account (or this post, right here), people would just inquire about Swanye.

But that can be daunting, especially if you don’t quite understand what the thing is, to begin with.

So, hopefully, this drills right to the heart of what I think Swanye can do; and, if any of that sounds interesting to you, absolutely feel free to ask about it.

Part of this account is not only to detail the features that’re being developed but to answer any questions or possible hopes for an improved Tumblr anyone might have.

Just being told these things are to be approached with wariness can feel like a lecture or just not make sense.

Rather, we should do it in a way that feels approachable.

Until I can figure out how to do that, just want to pop in that alternatives to big corporate social media sites do exist!

Swanye is social media that you can own since no one’s allowed to own the code; even if I decide to monetize the code or stop developing, you’ll always have access to run it and modify it.

This means you can spin up your own instances of it and run it yourselves; and, because it’s build to talk to other instances, you can still form a network of other people without giving up control of your instance.

It’s also built to talk to similar software like Mastodon so you can follow and interact with your friends there, as well.

I’m still in the process of building it though you can see progress and updates to its state both here and our Mastodon account: https://fosstodon.org/@Swanye.

i’m having some incredible conversations over on mastodon about accessibility and classic tumblr federated clones 💖

[ID: A screenshot of the right side of a Swanye dashboard.

The button to view notifications has the number 2 on it, indicating 2 new/unseen notifications.

The notifications section of the sidebar, a little further down the page, lists three notifications: one that you've been mentioned, another that the person has followed you, and the third that you've been mentioned, again.

The first two are in a text color of white with colored icons while the last one has an icon of muted color that's similar to the text color's muted tone. end ID]

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Trying to go through and cleanup any loose threads I had from before I took a break on this or things I was like, "I can just get to that later…;" now is, in fact, later.

While the change is small, it's super helpful; I, actually, hadn't implemented notifications for when when someone mentions you, yet.

The screenshot demonstrates what it'll look like in your notifications, including one you've already viewed.

[ID: A screenshot of the dashboard of my local, test instance; on the right, towards the bottom of the screenshot, is the notifications for the user.

The cursor is resting over the word "post" in the notification and in the shape of the pointer, indicating that the user can click through to the post which has been liked. end ID]

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It's a small adjustment but I always find myself instinctively trying to click on the "post" part of notifications to see which post had been affected.

Seems reasonable for that use-case to be an option so adding that.