Pandacap: Part 5 - ActivityPub

If I'm thinking about how often I use it, the ActivityPub integration in Pandacap really isn't the most relevant part of the application to me on a regular basis (that would be the inbox, and its integration with DeviantArt and Bluesky). It was, however, my inspiration for building Pandacap in the first place. There were a few reasons I felt this was important:

• I believe decentralized social media will continue to be useful, regardless of whether it achieves mainstream success - maybe not to replace big social media platforms, but for its own distinct merits. To hopefully facilitate the adoption of such platforms, I wanted to ensure that the ability to view and reply to my work would be available there, and I wanted to know I could follow and reply to their work as well.
  
• The ActivityPub server-to-server protocol - though it may be somewhat broad and vague - was within my ability to implement (it only uses HTTP requests and is agnostic to the underlying data model), which gives me a feeling of control over my interaction with the fediverse.
  
• Joining an existing server would make me nervous about conforming to unwritten community norms, while using my own Mastodon or Pixelfed instance would increase the cost and saddle me with a tech stack I'm not familiar with. (Pandacap can run on a free web app plan and a database billed only by usage.)

Pandacap: Part 3 - Creating Posts

From a public-facing perspective, Pandacap is essentially just a single person's art gallery (and blog, microblog, and profile, I suppose). One of Pandacap's philosophies is that fundamentally different kinds of content are separated, so there are three types of public posts:

• Artwork - a single image, with a title and description.
• Journal entry - essentially a blog post, with a title and text.
  
• Status update - text, with an optional attached image.

These are, not coincidentally, three of the four DeviantArt post types. The paradigm of Pandacap - the context in which it assumes you're creating and uploading your posts - is heavily based on art sharing platforms like it, some of which predate the rise of general-purpose microblogging.

Pandacap

This has been my hobby project for the better part of the past year, and it's something I've been wanting to make a series of blog posts about for a while. Pandacap is my personal Swiss Army knife web app; it hosts my art gallery and microblog and collects incoming posts and notifications across five different sites and protocols.

The code for Pandacap is open-source (AGPL v3). I don't imagine it will be that useful to many people; trying to ask a non-Microsoft-stack developer to make tweaks to it would be like asking me to contribute to, well, anything in Python. (Plus, the code itself is not very robust, and not at all scalable.) But I've made some very deliberate decisions in the UI of this app, with an eye towards my own psychological well-being. The context collapse of traditional social media kept me away from it for years, and this app (and one of its predecessors, Artwork Inbox) is the reason I can follow artists on Bluesky and Mastodon without giving up in frustration. I'm hoping that someday, these design principles could be useful to other people who find themselves in the same situation.