改版: GoToSocialのα→βへの移行予告と誕生から現在までの財務状況

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Mastodon APIのサーバー実装のみの軽量な分散SNS実装のGoToSocialが2024年の開発予定として、3月までにα→β版への移行予定を発表していたので紹介します。

以下の投稿と「gotosocial/ROADMAP.md at 02668756a73ce48ab1d0b5485e1f59fc2f116611 · superseriousbusiness/gotosocial」で発表されていました。

2024-01-23T11:19:38.000Z

GoToSocial|gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org

At some point in this first quarter of 2024 we plan to mark the Alpha development phase of GoToSocial as completed, and “officially” enter the Beta phase. This will happen prettymuch whenever we get account migration working properly via the Move activity, and also implement a basic sign up flow to augment the current manual account creation process done via the CLI tool.

Every software development process is different, but in our case, Beta will mean that we consider most of the very basic features to be complete, the software is reasonably stable, and we can then start adding other cool stuff like better moderation tools, better oauth tooling, status edits, and that sort of thing (see our roadmap for more details).

It’s been a long and interesting alpha period. tobi started GtS as more or less a hobby project during a period of day-job burnout at the start of 2021. They got GtS federating fairly quickly, started seeing the potential in it for more than just a hobby project, and then other folks like kim, daenney, f0x, and maloki jumped in to work on the project too, as well as a whole bunch of semi-regular and drive-by contributors. tobi kept working on the project during their absence from work, and then kept going after they left their job and started taking unemployment benefits, and then continued (spending their last savings) after the benefits dried up.

In late 2022 when Twitter shat the bed for the umpteenth time, we saw interest in GoToSocial skyrocket, which was both scary and exciting. Suddenly way more people were running the software and finding bugs and reporting issues, which was overwhelming and stressful but also very, very helpful for the stability of the software.

In 2023, we managed to get funding from NLnet to continue working on the project, which couldn’t come soon enough since tobi was, by the start of 2023, completely broke. Thanks to NLnet, tobi could now work on GoToSocial full time without worrying excessively about money, which was a huge relief.

Now in 2024, kim is also working full time on GoToSocial, having also got an NLnet grant, which gives us a lot more confidence in terms of the sustainability of working on the software. It’s going to be a good year for GtS 🙂 Big thank you to NLnet for believing in us.

Throughout this whole period, people donated over and over to our liberapay and opencollective, which helped us to pay for our CI/CD development machine, and gave us a buffer for unexpected bills and shocks. Thank you so much!

Over the course of alpha we discovered a whole bunch of weird bugs, leading to many headaches and late nights toiling over fmt.Printf statements and writing tests. We made the software way more resilient and flexible in terms of how it federates, poked through the code of other AP implementations to discover and work around edge cases, and generally worked very, very hard on stability and compatibility. We’re not 100% there yet in terms of which other softwares GtS can properly communicate with, but given how divergent AP implementations are from each other, and how many softwares do wacky undocumented things, we think it’s going pretty damn well.

And we found time to add features too! In 2023 we merged support for:

• hashtags
• polls
• status language tags
• allowlist federation
• account notes
• timeline markers
• lists
• partial search
• profile fields
• request tracing
• prometheus metrics
• pinned posts
• (most) mp4 videos
• bookmarks

So, there you go! A little potted, messy history of GoToSocial so far. Probably missing a bunch of important things that happened but memory is fickle.

Thanks for your ongoing support and kindness, and here’s to a fun upcoming beta development period in a few months :gtspat: :under_construction:

今後の予定と、2024年の実装予定機能、2021年の誕生から現在までの財務状況なども併せて報告されていました。

2024年の第1四半期のどこかでα版を完了として、正式にβ版に入る予定です。具体的には、Move activityによるアカウント移行と、CLIツールによる基本的な登録フローの実装でα版の完了です。

GoToSocialにおいて、β版は一般的なActivityPubサーバー実装とおおまかに比較可能な機能セットの提供という位置付けです。多くの問題なく、基本的な動作が可能になります。APIが比較的安定した状態にもするつもりです。

GoToSocialのα版は長期間でした。著者のtobiは