Thank you for putting out that query - short answer is...
Yes. You definitely have a use case here, but first, being just a little familiar with your product I'd like to welcome you to the #Fediverse even though your arrival coincided with the November Rain phenomenon that was much todo about nothing, and in the end, most Twitugees simply returned there after creating accounts here - I'm glad you stuck around! You're product is FOSS, and this is a #FOSS world here in the Fediverse, so it makes sense, this being your natural home and where people can expect to find you :)
Ever since I decided to ditch the proprietary Evernote, I've been using a #Vim Plugin that uploads my buffer to a Gist in an easy peasy way - it would be really kewl if I had a way to send (encrypted or unencrypted) notes to myself as a Fediverse DM, or share some of them with a select group of others in such a manner - Maybe (if it's textual in nature) actual clips I've saved. The graphics, well, if they are uploaded as a graphic that will work too, and they can even be sent to #Pixelfed accounts (if there is a graphics or movie file).
So, you're concerned about having to setup a centralized server or something that your userbase can be recognized on or something? Perhaps like a relay of sorts? I don't think that's the way to go actually. It sounds like a lot of heartache that might not even surivive beyond the intial proof of concept is rolled out - Spam being just one reason that makes the likelihood of failure a distinct possibility.
Here's what I think you can try doing, and it will alleviate any grandiose plans you may have been kicking around - Keep it in the client. A feature mechanism that either lets you clip and post it as an #ActivityPub NOTE to a user's actual instance (server) where they already have an account - You can collect the user's Fediverse account credentials and use that to post to their own existing account - no additional infrastructure is required on your part.
Those posts can be a single post to oneself (a private Fediverse DM to themselves) or it can include a list of recipients - just like any other post you can make.
This will also afford you the absolute maximum in #Spam_control too! You don't have to accept any registrations obo your Fediverse features - you're merely allowing people with existing Fediverse accounts to enter their credentials into your client and then your users make the decision as to whether they want to use your existing store or their Fediverse account to publish the clips to their stores there.
Since you've been around here for a while now, I'm sure you've realized how severely limited mastodon is when it comes to ways you can exploit the existing capabilities in the Fediverse - I've already mentioned Pixelfed, but there's a lot of other platforms that support HTTP signatures necessary for backfills and e2ee constructs; the support for BBCode and/or Markdown; post containing text with character counts greater than the paltry 500 characters that masto can muster, #LaTEX (actually, only Misskey and Firefish support that at this time AFAIK); local only posts (shared only with those who have accounts on the same instance), and a host of other unsupported features in masopub.
I appreciate that you made the effort to address this as an ActivityPub and Fediverse capability, and not simply, "yet another mastodon branded feature". Especially when mastodon won't be able to take advantage of many of the advanced features you already offer that other more capable Fediverse platforms can make use of :)
Platforms like #Friendica, #Firefish, #Mitra, #Hubzilla, #SocialHome, #Soapbox, #Peertube, Pleroma, #Epicyon, #Castopod, #WriteFreely, #Quanta, #Drupal and even #WordPress - those latter three have potentially, especially ambitious use cases with clips and notes being able to be actually published on platforms already built for long form or 'blobs' to be pushed to them. Hubzilla, #Streams, and Friendica have special features to accommodate your products notes too :)
If you focus on adding support for people to enter their Fediverse account credentials, or multiple accounts like #Takahe and #Fedilab and #Misskey support, Then those are the servers you need right there! The spam problem remains as it is with the particular instances, since they control the new account registrations.
There's also the rapid adoption of #smolweb and single-user focused Fediverse platforms too, such as:
- MicroBlogPub
- Tapir
- Bovine
- And of course, any platform, now matter how heavy or resource intensive can be deployed as a smolweb or single-user instance (even the klunky kludgey mastodon). And speaking of which, there are several popular forks that don't have these limitations that are very popular like #Hometown and #Glitch-soc, Etc.
There may even be some use cases for #Lemmy and #Kbin too, as link/discussion boards too - perhaps posting from a users vault/store to those platforms? There's a lot of different possibilities but ActivityPub can open up a huge market for you while at the same time Fediverse is exposed to large numbers of people who will discover that they too may have a good use case to adopt for themselves a Fediverse account :)
tl;dr: Basically, yes! there's a huge use case for your thoughts there - and if you're reading this on a Mitra, #Pleroma, Soapbox, #Akkoma, Firefish, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Misskey server, you'll see some very pretty formatting in Markdown - if you're reading this on a regular mastodon server (not one of the really good and popular forks), then... not so much - but at least mastodon does degrade Markdown and HTML somewhat gracefully :)
Well I hope that helps and do feel free to reach out to me via my contact methods listed in my profile or in the Fediverse-City Matrix room, and I'm sure that we can get a few of some of the more prominent Fediverse platform devs to round-table with you for some wire framing sessions.
I'm confident that you'll find a lot of support in your endeavor to achieve this initiative.
Well I hope that helps. Enjoy!
#tallship #Notesnook #Federation
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attached: Fediverse logo in gummy bear jelly colors
