Fervently Anticipated Questions

What

What is Gush!?

Gush! is a social media service that is federated using ActivityPub

What makes Gush! different from Mastodon, GoToSocial, etc.?

The point of Gush! is to talk about things you love! Every conversation can have a context, which you can comment on, share your experiences, review, and follow – however, you can still interact with your fediverse friends, shitpost without context, etc.

What can I gush about?

The first version is focused on video games. It should also interoperate seamlessly with BookWyrm instances, in terms of handling books as conversation context, although books are not currently "first-class citizens".

What's planned for future versions of Gush!?

• General
  • Make everything better/smoother/less (unintentionally) weird
• For users
  • Different types of gushables: films, music, …I don't know? tabletop rpgs? sportz?
  • Customizable audiences: instead of every post being blasted to all your followers, set up groups for different interests
  • Tighter integration with other non-microblogging fediverse software, e.g. owncast, peertube, etc.
  • Easier themability
• For moderators
  • Richer moderation UI
• For instance administrators
  • Non-local media storage (e.g. s3)
  • Better maintenance tooling

Why

Why did you make Gush!?

There are a lot of reasons:

• I really enjoy BookWyrm, and I wanted to see what a similar concept revolving around a different medium, or even media-agnostic, would look like. (The original working title for Gush! was Gameslug.)
• I was interested in exploring how federated social media could be stretched in a different direction
• I'm interested to see what kind of modern web application can be made using primarily html and css, with minimal to no javascript
• I was interested in experimenting with some of the different underlying technologies

Why did you start from scratch instead of using/joining/forking SomeProject?

Honestly, I probably considered it for most values of SomeProject that I knew of at the time. I spent a long time playing around with different applications, frameworks, libraries, and tools before starting active development with anything approaching the current technology stack, asking: "Can I just build a module on top of this?" "Can I join or fork this project?" "Should I use this framework? What about this library?"

In the end, what I ended up with was the best compromise, from my viewpoint, between reinventing the universe and being shackled to something that doesn't meet the project's goals or that I don't like. Probably another person would have chosen differently.

Why does it look like that?

Sorry, I'm an engineer.

When

Now!