I would totally use a search engine called dogdog

you can’t review what’s running on the actual server, what did your local admin add to it.

You could level that accusation at any software running on a remote server, including the Fediverse

Keep in mind that OP’s project is already based on a different protocol than the Fediverse for their own reasons. Trying to create and maintain a bridge between different protocols might be more work than to just make modifications to posts in the current system.

Other factors are end user experience and branding. Keep in mind that the average Facebook/NextDoor user isn’t tech-savvy, and could also be put off by the weird software names commonly found in the Fediverse

It’s likely worthwhile for OP to look into flohmarkt, but integration might not be the optimal method

Another idea you could potentially add down the line: what about functionality similar to Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace? Those tend to work by helping you focus on your local area as opposed to EBay.

Granted, Craigslist is largely fine imo, I’m just proposing a way to help you kill off Facebook

Reading through your link, it seems like the main difference in your framework is that there’s auto-propogation of federation built in. Please correct me if I missed anything

Unrelated point: before you throw too much time and effort into building up federation, I want to bring something in the Matrix vs. XMPP debate: caching.

Apparently in Matrix, if a user on server A joins a chatroom on server B, then all of the content on the chatroom need to then be copied and synced to server A. There’s 2 primary problems with this: it’s a lot of duplication overhead that can limit scaling of the network and there’s legal consequences for server A caching potentially illegal content. There’s also a privacy concern as this means more parties that can see various interactions.

XMPP gets around these problems by having the user on server A just directly connect with server B, without server A caching anything.

I haven’t dug into too many of the differences myself, but wanted to bring it up in case it helped

Though I will not be using ActivityPub

If you don’t mind my asking, what drove the decision to not base it on ActivityPub? On the surface that seems to be an easier starting point that building evetything out from scratch

I predict that being a hard sell for lemmings.

Eh, if it’s an open-source application where you can review the code to confirm that the software isn’t tracking you, then it’s not an issue. Especially if you’re running Graphene OS, Rethink DNS, or Exodus to either sandbox or monitor your traffic

I thought that was the only protocol that currently allows for federation. Are there others? Or other ways?

The Matrix and XMPP protocols both support federation, though those are mainly for chat platforms

It’s open-source and self-hostable, so it’s for any group

Why would experienced devs join a vibe-coded project that barely works to overhaul it? Most of the time it’d be quicker and easier to start a new project from scratch with the same goals but coded competently.

You’re bending over backwards just to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse for vibe-coding. But unfortunately, “plausible-sounding” isn’t the same as “plausible”.

Vibe coding might be “good enough” for a tiny private project for someone who doesn’t know how to code and isn’t interested in learning. But LLM’s aren’t good enough to build usable architectures.

And all publicly available human-created code was already trawled years ago, and the creation of more is slow. LLM’s can’t get significantly better at coding by just throwing more data into their training because there is no more data left that isn’t already in the training.

And how is it supposed to get less shit if it’s vibe coded? The programmer didn’t learn anything when making the initial build

It’s like the difference bewteen publicly-traded and privately-owned companies. Publicly-traded companies are guaranteed to enshittify due to fiduciary duty. Privately-owned companies could enshittify, but it’s not guaranteed.

A human programmer could be shit but at least they’re not guaranteed to be shit like the vibe coding AI