HivePosh and The Fediverse
HivePosh is built for bridging between the Hive network and Web2 platforms. The Twitter bridge came first, and Reddit came second. Now we’re looking into ways to bridge between Hive and the Fediverse.
What is the Fediverse?
The Fediverse is a decentralized social network, popularized in recent years by the Mastodon app. If you’re familiar with Hive front-ends, you’ll understand this concept. Mastodon is one front-end for the Fediverse network. There are other front-ends for different purposes, such as Peer-Tube which focuses on video sharing.
Fediverse network software speaks a language called the ActivityPub protocol. There are competing decentralized social network protocols including AT (used by BlueSky) and Nostr (used by many apps and beloved by Bitcoiners). And of course Hive (learn more at hive.io).
Plugging Hive into Fediverse Starting with Webfinger
Another technology used by Fediverse apps is called Webfinger. Basically it’s a way for web servers to poke eachother and ask a quick question such as: do you have an account with this name?
Mastodon and other apps use Webfinger to do just that. I can make my domain respond to those pokes and say yes, I have that account here. And we’re thinking about doing this for hiveposh.com. The implications are interesting, because adding this bit of code enables account discovery.
It means someone on Mastodon or another fediverse-connected app can follow your virtual Hiveposh account. The identifier will be something like [email protected] Initially this could be enabled only for accounts that have registered on HivePOSH.com, to limit the scope. Maybe it the future it makes sense to enable for all active Hive accounts, to make them all discoverable in the Fediverse.
Next Steps
Adding webfinger support to HivePosh.com is the first step. HivePosh currently serves as a connection between Web2 platforms Twitter/Reddit, and the Hive network. So it seems like a good fit to add connections between HivePosh and Mastodon. Webfinger will make it so that users on Mastodon will be able to discover accounts on Hive. Upon typing [email protected] into the Mastodon search box, the Mastodon instance will reach out to HivePosh.com to get profile details.
After building account discovery there is plenty more to do. We could broadcast Hive blog content to the Fediverse for followers over there to see. We could also take fediverse replies to Hive content and mirror those replies back to Hive.
What other ideas should we explore?
cc: @acidyo @rishi556 @starkerz @vaultec @steevc (all of whom I chatted with about these ideas in the past few weeks)
