Feature Request/Fork: Diaspora and/or Friendica

[lebochequirit]

Dear Dan,

thanks for bringing tinfoil to us. It is the app that lets me use Facebook at all. I think the wrapper architecture would be great for the Diaspora and/or Friendica networks. What these Networks really lack to be mass-compatible is an app like tinfoil.

I know you're frequently asked to tinfoil whatever apps. But wrapping Diaspora and Friendica would be a huge service to the community indeed.

As far as I know both networks are compatible to the statusnet API.

Thanks for any effort.

L.B.Q.R.

[Foggalong]

I know I'm not the creator, but I'm going to chime in anyway. The whole point of Tinfoil to provide a safe environment to use Facebook away from the tracking it does. Given that Diaspora and Frendica don't employ such tracking and webclients exist for them both (D & F), why make another?

[velazcod]

What @Foggalong said.

@lebochequirit what would be the main usability for this?

[lebochequirit]

I guess it's more a side effect to the wrapper thing. Within tinfoil, you store login data and have an app to point the share-dialogue to.

That makes the difference to simply using the mobile web page of Diaspora as well as Friendica within a browser. You can't share, say, a Picture to a browser tab. And if you have a simple webapp, you always have to sign in.

"Normal" people want alternative networks to work like the Facebook app, that is: click on a picture, choose "share to foo" and off you go. It's one of the main reasons people tell me as a reason not to use those networks. So I think there's a real need.

The two existing clients mentioned by @Foggalong do not hit the market. The Friendica client is a catastrophy in terms of optics, usability and stability, the Diaspora Webclients have the lacks I described before.

Tinfoil in contrast is established, stable and does

• store your password
• act as a sharing target
• look good

So I think you might have (or be able to deliver) what D and F desperately need.

[Foggalong]

From what I've experienced the Diaspora client does what you asked? That might be worth filing with them if you've found otherwise, rather than just making another client.

[velazcod]

I'm not familiar with either of these networks, so I'm not very interested in doing this work at this time.

However, if anyone is, they are free to fork this repo and make the appropriate modifications to use Tinfoil for those other networks, someone else has done it for "Tinfoil for Twitter" and it works for them and I have no problems with it. I'd just like for it to stay open source and things are credited accordingly.

For a future task, I'm thinking that I could possibly abstract some of the functionality of Tinfoil a bit more and make some sort of builder that gives you a wrapper for any network you'd like.

[lebochequirit]

@Foggalong Neither the official Diaspora Webclient nor the newer 'Pusteblume' are apps you can share things to.

@velazcod Abstracting means some kind of framework? That would be of some interest, I think.

[velazcod]

Yeah, like to generate something like this:

WhateverNetworkWebActivity extends TinfoilWebViewActivity {
  @Override
  protected String getBaseUrl() {
     return "www.disapora.com";
  }

  // Other settings go here
}