if you had have told past me that i would get so dedicated to a passion project that i made an ERD for it, i would say "really? fuck"

hmm i could either work on more frontend stuff or try to convert this ERD into SQL

i might work on the SQL stuff since it's been a while ​

known issue: fedibooks will stop working after 4,294,967,295 people connect their accounts

looking over this SQL is writing is making me feel very Powerful

i could change fedibooks to only allow one user per instance and all it would take is a single word

i could cause privacy issues and wasted disk space by just deleting one rule

i could change a single column's data type and break pleroma compatibility

SQL is actually good imo

i actually kinda like working with databases, i just don't like database theory

i fixed up some of the issues with the entity relationship diagram and it's looking pretty solid now ​

fedibooks can store (2^64)-1 posts

that is a lot of posts!!

i'd probably run out of disk space before getting anywhere near running out of post IDs ​

a difficult thing to determine is how high should i set the post length limit

my instance has it set to 65535 to ensure i never run into issues, masto defaults to 500, pleroma defaults to 5000

i guess this is supposed to be a microblogging platform so it doesn't make too much sense to allow them to be overly large, and that does technically expose me to some jerk filling my DB with posts that are gigabytes long

65535 it is ​

the frontend stuff is getting along well

as for the backend stuff, well, there's more SQL than python, and i haven't even hit 100 lines yet, so

okay, the frontend stuff is getting close to being ready. when fedibooks first goes live, some features won't be ready yet. the basic stuff will all work just fine, though!

the backend stuff is gonna be a lot harder than the frontend, but i'll hopefully have it done before too long!

also worth noting: the whole site works without javascript ​

there are a few features that will require it, but so far it's 100% JS free

which is nice because i'm bad at JS

i like javascript and i think it's important, but i also like avoiding it where possible to make everything as lightweight as possible

what do you typically call the "@user@instan.ce" thing? i call it a handle

achievement unlocked

​

the SQL is (probably) finished and it is beautiful

https://github.com/Lynnesbian/FediBooks/blob/master/setup.sql

one of the best parts of webdev is having to implement input validation on both the client and the server

hmm i wonder how i implemented input sanitisation in my last project

...oh! i didn't!

well time to shut cg.lynnesbian.space down forever

i can be a real dingus sometimes

wait a minute never mind i overreacted it DOES sanitise inputs

phewwwwwwww

okay curious greg is back up so you can use it again now

even though it's really buggy and shit

the signup page works! 0u0

things are coming along well ​

how strange that some instances don't seem to work properly ​

fedibooks authentication is working ​

the bot creation process is done now. it doesn't handle errors gracefully yet, but apart from that, it's ready!

this means you can now create a bot with fedibooks 0u0

now for the learning from posts part ​

i passed 100 commits

things are coming along very well! you can create a bot and add accounts for it to learn from. there's a few basic things left, and then it's on to the actual ebooks stuff - downloading and making posts!!

unfortunately, the bots are incapable of self improvement

531 (significant) lines of HTML, 328 lines of python, 174 lines of CSS, 76 lines of SQL, 1 tired bune

comparitively, mstdn-ebooks is "just" 387 lines of python

according to this arbitrary chart i'm about halfway done for fedibooks' first release

it's been a while i last updated this thread, because it's also been a while since i did any major work on fedibooks. i've kinda pushed myself way too hard on it and i'm taking it more slowly now.

that said, i do have some new features to show off! firstly, fedibooks is now capable of scraping user posts. this is one of the key steps towards implementing full ebooks functionality. the first screenshot shows that fedibooks has successfully scraped all 63 of this account's posts.

secondly, there's now a nifty little bug report form for those of us without github accounts, shown in the second screenshot.

fedibooks is now capable of:
. authenticating with mastodon/pleroma
. scraping user posts
. generating and submitting its own posts

this means it can do nearly everything mstdn-ebooks can, and all that's left is replying!! ​

uh oh, looks like you're out of gems! your ebooks bot will stop posting until you have at least 3 more.

[ wait for gems to recharge (3h27m) ]
[ watch 3 ads ]
[ buy pack of 15 gems ($4.99) ]

there are a few minor features left now, and one major feature - replying. once that's done, fedibooks will be complete.

unfortunately, testing the reply functionality requires me to actually deploy fedibooks to a website, since i can't test it with localhost. this means it's going to be a bit of a hassle to implement.

however, i've looked at what needs to be done for reply functionality, and it seems pretty easy with web push - mastodon will automatically send a request to fedibooks with some info, which fedibooks can then reply to. it should be pretty simple 0u0

i want to implement reply functionality and bot settings, and then i'll release the first version of fedibooks for all to use! ​

once fedibooks is released, i'll be shutting down my paid ebooks hosting service in a week (since it's available for free now). i'll implement an "import from mstdn-ebooks" feature to ease the transition.

thank you so much to everyone who supported me on patreon!