So, my main website is currently based on #ikiwiki. I like it because it's #plainText (no #database), I can work on it on my laptop using my favorite tools (#vim, #git), preview it locally, and then “deploy” it to a static set of HTML on the hosting machine. But there are a couple of things I do not like about my current setup. Chiefly:
1. I've matured a preference for #asciidoctor over #markdown
2. there is, AFAICS, no chance it'll ever federate w/ #ActivityPub
The site was intended to be something similar to a #blog (in its original meaning of web-log, i.e. something where I could publish my “thoughts of the day”, but web-accessible), and I was always very skeptical about adding support for comments, mostly relying on the idea that if people wanted to comment in any interesting way they could do it on their own blog or website and then link back or ping back or whatever, even though I never actually added support for the pingback protocol.
However, I did write a wonderful UserJS hack that used “a famous proprietary search engine” to search for links to the specific posts on the website and showed it at the end of each post as comments. This actually worked extraordinarily well with #FriendFeed (anybody remember THAT?).
With growing restrictions in UserJS caps and the search engine removing support for the link: operator, however, the whole thing has become bogus, and my new passion for the #Fediverse got me thinking.
So, #askfedi >
I'd like to migrate to a different platform for my wok, with the following requirements:
1. text/file based (no db), preference for AsciiDoctor support
2. revision control (git, preferrably)
3. static website output (at least; dynamic content possible under conditions);
4. #ActivityPub support;
I'm actually wondering if 3+4 are possible together, since I assume that SOME form of “dynamicity” is required to support #ActivitiyPub —but how much?
Am I asking for the impossible?
(I also need to redesign the website, possibly leveraging some more modern HTML _and_ CSS, but I still suck at design so it'll still be horribly-looking, but with more modern CSS.)
Meanwhile, on an unrelated thread on “the worse microblogging platform” I was pointed to this
https://withknown.com/
I have to look better at its features, but it advertises “#decentralized #indieweb” features, which already makes it quite interesting. I've browsed about, and it seems that this is based on #ActivityStreams, which apparently isn't the same thing as #ActivityPub.
This in itself made me a bit wary, but looking for information on that, I ended up on ...
... the #W3C Working Group on #SocialWebProtocols:
https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
So now I have to do quite a bit of reading to better understand the relationship between all these things (so, for example, #ActivityPub uses #ActivityStreams, but apparently you can use the latter without the former; so when should you? etc).
OK so the idea of the fully static site flies out of the window if I want to support some kind of #indieweb publishing stream mechanism because subscription (to know who deliver updates to) needs to be handled somehow. In the mean time I just realized that there is an #AsciiDoctor plugin for #Jekyll, which would allow me to satisfy the first three points of my requirements, leaving (again #ActivityPub) as the only unsatisfiable one.
@oblomov
> ... satisfies the first three requirements
After that comments-via-AP service suggestion, I had a thought.
A static website only means static page serving, not the avoidance of JS in the webpage that connects to other servers. If there were 3rd-party JS that could pull from a public AP thread URL into the webpage, all responses to the thread OP (your post) would render on the client without involving your static web server.
@oblomov oh, this already exists as @Graycot pointed to carlschwan.eu elsewhere in this thread.