First sign of life from Mike Macgirvin's newest project, Forte, yesterday; CW: long (over 2,400 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta
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Oh, by the way, in case you haven't noticed because chances are that you actually haven't: Forte has entered the Fediverse yesterday.
Mike Macgirvin has rebased his private, semi-secret instance from his own streams repository to his most recent project. Just yesterday, Mike sent the very first message from Forte into the Fediverse, a comment on a post from his public (streams) channel. Unfortunately, the whole thread is private, as is the comment.
So, what is Forte?
Forte is the very first and currently only Fediverse project that features nomadic identity via only ActivityPub. It's a fork of
the streams repository, created in mid-August this year.
To put it in a nutshell, Forte is (streams) without Nomad and without support for Zot, purely relying on ActivityPub. Also, unlike (streams), Forte has a name, it has a branding (which, however, can be changed on the instance level just like on (streams)), it has nodeinfo, it has a license, and it's a project again.
At least as of now, Forte may have trouble connecting to Mastodon. This may be because Mastodon doesn't understand decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, it may be because Forte also had some non-standard, Mastodon-specific code removed. Or it may be due to the user agent filter that Mike has introduced to (streams) and most likely also Forte a few weeks ago that actually has the capability of, for example, blocking Mastodon in its entirety on an instance level. Whatever it is that may or may not stand in Mastodon's way of connecting with Forte, Mike declared it "intentional".
Speaking of "intentional", I'm intentionally not posting this to Fediverse News. While this may go largely unnoticed outside the Hubzilla/(streams) bubble, maybe plus Friendica, it may just as well prompt people to set up their own instances. People who haven't even laid their hands on Friendica, much less Hubzilla or (streams), and who don't know how the "Facebook-like" side of the Fediverse looks and feels, much less how nomadic identity is handled. They may expect another "Mastodon + more characters +
x on top", end up disappointed because nothing on Forte looks, feels or works like Twitter or Mastodon, and declare that Forte objectively sucks.
Also, as long as Mike doesn't at least hint at Forte being stable and daily-driveable for people who don't develop it, it probably isn't.
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Forte
