[quantadev]

Did anyone ever create a good open-source library that apps can use, so they can build Fediverse features (sending posts, receiving posts, etc) into pre-existing web apps without having to implement the protocol from scratch?

I know the protocol looks fairly simple at first glance but it takes about 2 man years to build a decent implementation, which frankly just means it's too complicated. Sending text ultimately should not be that hard. One huge point of friction I found with the protocol was the failure to just make things type-safe. You have lots of object properties that are "Sometimes a string", "Sometimes an array", etc. That makes all your models super ugly and all your marshaling super ugly.

By comparison, Nostr proved you certainly can avoid all the complexity. Nostr got it right. Nostr kept it simple. And Nostr is censorship resistant unlike the Fediverse which is full of politically motivated admins who love to maintain "block lists" to be sure no "Other Viewpoints" (that disagree with their own) are allowed to proliferate. Admins were having their entire servers blocked simply for saying something nice about some POTUS candidate for example. That just creates a very toxic environment, from all the people who of course claim they're fighting toxicity.

[DeadSuperHero]

Check out Fedify. There are still advantages to bespoke protocol implementation, but this is the closest we've gotten so far to "protocol-in-a-box", and it's great.

https://fedify.dev/

[mariusor]

As a biased[0] party I must mention that the Go programming language has at least one and a half libraries in the form of Go-Fed[1] and Go-ActivityPub[2].

[2] https://github.com/go-ap

[1] https://github.com/go-fed

[0] I am the dev of the later one.

[quantadev]

Fedify looks like exactly what I've been hoping for, for a long time! Thanks!