Extend Takahē to share other document types
davidbrochart opened this issue · comments
Awesome project!
I'm thinking about creating a Fediverse service to share Jupyter Notebooks, comment on them or on specific cells, etc. Observable is probably a good example of what it could look like (but it's not in the Fediverse AFAIK).
Notebooks can be rendered as HTML, so I think it's a reasonable document type to share. But could Takahē be extended to handle that, or is it restricted to sharing text/images/videos?
It's not the server that's the problem here - it's the clients. Clients only render a very limited set of HTML (think links, bold, italic, and paragraphs), so you can't send anything interesting over the wire in a post; the best you can do is provide a link, and at that point I don't think there's a lot of advantage building it into a server!
I see, so we could imagine a specialized client that could render a notebook, the same way GitHub can render this notebook while the raw file would be shown on other clients (.ipynb files are actually JSON).
Maybe, but the thing about the Fediverse is that everyone brings their own clients - so in reality, there's little hope of traction with anything beyond what is essentially a separate website. Even the written-document types don't have good support yet.
I was thinking about using e.g. a Mastodon account (or Matrix) to implement something Jupyter-specific. For instance, using something like toot to post a notebook on which people can comment or make change suggestions. JupyterLab would have an UI that could interpret these replies and do something useful about them, like accepting a change suggestion to the notebook, while in Mastodon one would only see diffs and things like that. So we would basically use Mastodon as a transport layer for a small protocol, but I'm not sure this kind of use case would be tolerated by instance moderators.
Also, GitLab's support for ActivityPub is not too far from what I envision.
GitLab are definitely doing something interesting, but either way, this is not something it makes sense for Takahē to really support, since it is a microblogging fediverse server. You're welcome to reuse some of our core libraries to do things like JSON-LD and HTTP signatures if you want, but pretty much all the rest of the code would be different and it wouldn't interoperate with Mastodon.
OK, thanks for your time in this discussion 👍