FreeGameDev

Hi everyone!

You might have seen over at the FGD projects forum that we are experimenting with a federated microblogging system at https://social.freegamedev.net
It works with a software called HubZilla: https://hubzilla.org
The coolest features about it is that it can interact with GNUSocial and Mastodon instances easily. Also cool is the nomadic identity feature which allows to migrate your account between servers with a few clicks.
A nice overview of the system can be found here: https://medium.com/we-distribute/the-do ... 2204177d4e

Edit: You might also try the Friendica installation directly on https://freegamedev.net however both it and Hubzilla are currently on a registration approval basis, so please mention your username from here

If you want to learn more about the so called fediverse of interconnected apps, check out this page: https://fediverse.party/

As a start I migrated the planets to this new system, meaning that besides subscribing to them via RSS, you can also use your favorite microblogging system and even comment on and share entries.
Have a look at them here:
https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/planet
https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/devplanet
https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/arvrplanet *new*

In addition I am experimenting with using it for the blog and there is also a general discussion section:
https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/freegamer
https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/freegamedev

For now we are not quite ready yet to open it up for public registration (mainly due to EU data-protection requirements), but you could get an Mastodon account for example at on of these places:
Edit: Feel free to register here: https://social.freegamedev.net/register (but don't get too attached to this account as we might move to Friendica after some intensive evaluation)
Or get a Mastodon account for example here:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/
https://gamemaking.social/
https://misskey.dev/
And follow the above channels to interact with them through Mastodon. There are also a few open GNUSocial instances that would work. If you know a game-dev related one, please share

Or maybe even better: get an account at one of the existing public hubzilla site: https://social.freegamedev.net/pubsites as you will be easily able to migrate your account to the freegamedev.net server later on.

So any general feed-back is appreciated and please share your (or any other relevant) fediverse account here Thx!

P.S.: I have a few other (chat related) experiments in the cooker to be revealed soon...or not Lets see how it goes.

*chirp* Not too much excitement about this I see

Anyways... feel free to register an account now: https://social.freegamedev.net/register
(For now public accounts are a bit limited in their service level, but you can easily migrate to a different HubZilla site or set up your own if you are a really heavy user)

The chat stuff is postponed for a few weeks until I find the time to set it up completely. But my experiments with XMPP and IRC bridges are promising. Accounts will be hopefully linked to the Hubzilla site (sorry, but it is highly unlikely that we will ever get them to connect to this forum's database).

I saw this and forgot about it. I've posted as Activated Onion about the physics code I'm preparing for LD42.

Woot, two new members already

By the way: can anyone comment on how well it runs? What about javascript dependence? I am on a somewhat crappy connection right now, so I can't really test it much myself.

P.S.: Did you have to enable ActivityPub federation in the settings manually, or is it enabled by default?

It runs fine for me over Tor. Tor Browser blocks a ton of stuff like WebGL, WebSockets, WebRTC, etc., mostly due to security or because Tor can't proxy UDP.

I ended up turning JS on cause it seemed like image uploads don't work well without it.

More feedback welcome There was a slight server hickup the last couple of days I think with messages coming in late (but mind this is not realtime messaging). But seems to have sorted itself out by now I think.

The next release of Hubzilla also promises to have a bit less configuration overload. In addition the new federation protocol called Zot6 is slowly being integrated and it seems that will also improve federation with ActivityPub further (Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Pixelfed, Funkwhale and many other cool new projects use ActivityPub). Lets see, but there is really interesting stuff happening with HubZilla and the larger Fediverse right now.

Hi! Gratz, this seems very promising! Would it be possible to enable RSS feeds for the stream?

RSS/ATOM works for any channel (just replace the "/channel/" with "/feed/" in the URL), but it kind of defeats the purpose of having this new system as the main new feature of it is that you can comment on and share feed items

Or you mean RSS of the public stream? Hmm, not sure if that is possible. Will check the docu.

Julius {l Wrote}:Or you mean RSS of the public stream? Hmm, not sure if that is possible. Will check the docu.

Yes, thank you so much!

Sadly not possible to have a RSS feed from the public stream.
See: https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/ ... disabled=0

The Android app that works with HubZilla is now available on FDroid:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.dfa.hubzilla_android/
I have been using it for a while with https://social.freegamedev.net for a while now and it works great!

Edit: Maybe worth mentioning, but the Twidere Client also works (but a lot of the Hubzilla functionality is missing): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/
You need to select "twitter" as the API. Advantage is that is works offline as well (Nomad is just a webview app). If someone is interested in improving Twidere support that would be much appreciated, see: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/addons/issues/115

Edit2: of course this app works too: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.andstatus.app/

The RC of Hubzilla 3.8 has been released. But I plan to wait a bit with the upgrade.
Notable changes are a complete overhaul of the settings to be feature/application specific. This should hopefully much improve the right now quite confusing and overloaded feature settings. Also federating with Pleroma seems to work with this new version (after enabling ActivityPub for your channel of course)... previously only Mastodon etc. worked. I hope Peertube (Federated YouTube) and Funkwhale (federated Soundcloud) will work soon as well.

Looks great, nice work!

I've tried to follow the feeds from Mastodon (@akien) but I get error 404 when trying to remote follow. I can find the accounts in the fediverse though.

Akien {l Wrote}: I've tried to follow the feeds from Mastodon (@akien) but I get error 404 when trying to remote follow. I can find the accounts in the fediverse though.

You need to enable the ActivityPub addon/application. As soon as I update to the new version there will be an option to enable this by default for new accounts though.

Updated to Hubzilla 3.8.5, which makes the configuration much less confusing
I still have to configure the default apps to be enabled, so don't forget to re-enable the ActivityPub and GNU-Social apps if you plan to federate messages with Mastodon/Pleroma etc. or GNU-Social.

Talking mostly to myself here I guess

Big news of today is that Nextcloud officially joins the fediverse:
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/nextcloud- ... fediverse/

Oh and for those wondering what the fuzz is about... Lots of cool interconnected services:
https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

Free the web!

Julius {l Wrote}:Talking mostly to myself here I guess

Err ... hello ... I'm here (lurking as always).

Julius {l Wrote}:Big news of today is that Nextcloud officially joins the fediverse:
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/nextcloud- ... fediverse/

Oh and for those wondering what the fuzz is about... Lots of cool interconnected services:
https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

Free the web!

That's a lot of social platforms (good for social people, I think so), for the moment I like the peace of a less crowded platform

Julius {l Wrote}:Talking mostly to myself here I guess

I guess that's the lot of a forum admin, to be a bit lonely

We do appreciate all your hard work on this

You are kicking ass Julius! I need to help more but am a little time restricted at the moment.

Thanks for the kind words... I would actually like to complete all the half finished stuff on my server... but real-life work is killing me right now

For your information:
https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=11389
(We are evaluating Friendica as an alternative to Hubzilla, feedback apprechiated)
Was evaluated and for our specific case Hubzilla is still better.

https://misskey.dev/

Is another Fediverse compatible (ActivityPub) community that seems to be open to open-source game development.

Updated our Hubzilla to version 4.2. Change summary here.

Some nice improvement on the Activity Pub side of things and also a unified calendar.

Still thinking about how to connect accounts... but unless Oauth2 client support is implemented, I doubt I'll find a solution as I don't want to set up LDAP for it.

Will update to Hubzilla 4.4 tonight. Should not cause any outage I hope.

Really nice improvements to the ActivityPub support again (for compatibility with Mastodon etc.), see:
https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/-/tags

Update to Hubzilla 4.4 seems to have gone smoothly (Edit: quick bugfix, updated to 4.4.1). I also believe the new beta task scheduler should make everything a bit more performant.

In case you missed it, but the event calendar options are integrated with the CalDAV calendar now, which actually makes everything a lot less confusing.

Oh and since the IRC widget thing switched to a nicer KiwiIRC webchat, I also enabled that again. Look under add addons in the right side menu to enable it.