Valkertown Blog

Well Brainbird is my own laconica instance where I hack around the code from time to time,
I have added few modifications to the current 0.8.x branch of laconica, you can see them here.

While right now they are exclusive from brainbird there’s nothing stopping anyone to grab my changes and use them as they see fit, and that is some of the beauty behind using free software, you can have the features you want, whenever you want. If you’re lucky you can do the hacking yourself, but you can always find someone to do the hacking for you, it might cost you few bucks. That’s the point behind sygn.

If you’re considering moving to brainbird due to my current changes, I have few things to say that might help you:

• Brainbird runs experimental code and I plan to stick with git checkouts
• Expect breaks
• Expect features early also expect bugs early
• Laconica is intended to be federated
• Groups are not yet federated
• You have to follow the people you want, again, one at a time, by hand
• Same goes for your followers, but you never know if they are going to subscribe to your new account
• Brainbird current user count is very low
• Your data is on my hands, so is my data and while I care a lot about my data and I respect your privacy/freedom. There’s no warranty

After this small list, I say, do it, on brainbird or any other laconica instance. Federation is good, it’s cool and prevent’s you from being caught on other people’s problems. Even better, host your own laconica instance with your own changes, while it’s not easy, the freedom to tailor it to your taste is priceless.

Well now a brief list of what’s on brainbird right now that haven’t been merged on laconica:

• 300 Character limit, it will cut down to 140 characters for twitter, omb and sms emails, adding a link to the full notice at the end
• Avatar images and conversation link for xmpp, it only works if your xmpp client renders html messages correctly
• Redent command for xmpp, rd nick, will redent that user last notice
• Join/drop group from xmpp
• Custom theme, I don’t think this will ever get merged on laconica
• Autocompletion plugin enabled, well this is on laconica, I just have it enabled
• Stats Plugin enabled.

Well this is how my gajim session looks for Brainbird

The linked # you see at every message is the link to the conversation, it doesn’t traverse servers, it’s just the conversation thread on brainbird. Problems like this is the reason why I suggest using a federate account, it really needs testing and users get a feeling of the shortcomings and give feedback to developers.

I have few patches for gajim, one is the character counter that helps a bit, the second is the @nick completion, it uses a FOAF url to populate the link and then autocomplete @nicks as gajim does for MUC chatrooms, the code is here, I merge frequently from official, but you can extract patches from my repo and apply as you wish. Gajim with MB patches

Well, enjoy!
EOP

Tags:   brainbird · gajim · laconica · microblogView Comments