August 31st: Mike Macgirvin has resigned from maintaining the streams repository and let the community take over

@Fediverse News

Today, on August 31st, 2024, @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ has officially resigned from maintaining the streams repository. He won't shut it down, and he said he will add contributors if anyone wants to contribute, but he won't actively work on it anymore.

No link to the the source because the source is private.

The streams repository is the home of an intentionally nameless, brandless, public-domain Fediverse server application which its community semi-officially refers to as (streams). Its features include, but are not limited to:

• federation via Nomad, Zot6 (Hubzilla) and ActivityPub (optionally, but on by default)
• multiple independent channels/identities on the same account/login
• nomadic identity
• virtually unlimited character count
• full blogging-level text formatting using BBcode, Markdown and/or HTML, including in-line images
• advanced, extensive permission controls for privacy and security second to none in the Fediverse, customisable for each individual contact with 15 permission settings
• optional individual word filters per contact
• optional automatic reader-side content warning generator
• support for flagging images sensitive for Mastodon
• built-in file space with WebDAV connectivity per channel
• built-in, headless CardDAV and CalDAV servers per channel

(streams) is the latest stable release in a family of server applications that started in 2010 with a decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark, now known as Friendica.

The evolution in the family started in 2011 when Mike invented the concept of nomadic identity, the simultaneous existence of the same Fediverse identity with the same content on multiple server instances, to help overcome the issue of server instances shutting down and their users losing everything. It was first implemented in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012 which was turned into Hubzilla in 2015.

The streams repository came into existence in October, 2021, with a whole tree of eight forks between it and Hubzilla since 2018. Just a few weeks ago, Mike forked it into a new project named Forte, almost nothing about which is known yet, and which is probably very experimental, seeing as Mike has been working on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub as of late.

There hasn't been any statement about Forte's future either, but Mike is known to pass stable, daily-driver projects on to the community when he starts something new, such as Friendica in 2012 when he started working on Red and Hubzilla in 2018 when he started working on Osada and Zap. And as small as (streams) may be, seeing as it's sitting in roughly the same niche as Friendica and Hubzilla, it has become a stable daily driver for about a couple dozen users.

(streams) won't go away, but its development will slow down dramatically because new maintainers have yet to be found, and until now, Mike has pretty much done all the work on it. It will probably take longer for the dust to fully settle after (streams) has introduced portable objects as per FEP-ef61 on its way to nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Also, @silverpill, the maintainer of Mitra which currently is the only other Fediverse software to implement FEP-ef61, will have other and more people to talk to.