July – September 2023
Soapbox OpenSats Q1 Report: July – September 2023
First quarter of OpenSats funding. Launched Ditto alpha with Mastodon API support, built-in Nostr relay, and began Soapbox modernization.
Building Connections
Alex spoke about his work on Ditto, ActivityPub, and Nostr on the Thank God For Nostr podcast with Jon Staab, and appeared on the Minds Town Hall livestream during their launch of ActivityPub.
Ditto Alpha Released
An initial working version of Ditto was released with the following accomplishments:
- Mastodon API support including basic posting, profile editing, following, likes, reposts, replies, and more
- Home feed, hashtag feed, community feed, and public feed
- Trending hashtags
- An integrated Nostr relay for full native Nostr functionality
- A firehose module that autodiscovers new relays
- A mixer module that combines events from multiple sources
- Nostr streaming and Mastodon streaming for realtime updates
- Notifications support
- NIP-46 (Nostr Connect) for signing events using a separate signer app
- Full-text search of users and notes
- Admin privileges and site customization
- Media uploads to S3 and IPFS
- Proof-of-work signup with NIP-05 username
- ActivityPub actor support
Soapbox Modernization
Soapbox, the web UI for Ditto, received several key improvements:
- Added NIP-07 support for direct Nostr event signing
- Added NIP-46 support, making Soapbox a fully-fledged signer app
- Nostr client functionality connecting to Ditto's relay
- Switched from Webpack to Vite for 10x faster devserver startup
- Removed legacy code, saving roughly 1MB