Truth Social Head of Engineering Resigns to Build Ditto & Bring Best Parts of Mastodon to Nostr

• "Soapbox is an open-source web frontend for decentralized social media. Founded in 2019 by Alex Gleason, Soapbox is used today by over 2 million users worldwide," AP wrote.
• "Soapbox started out as a fork of Mastodon in 2019 with additional features and an improved UI. For the past 4 years it has been a source of innovation on the Fediverse, implementing features such as emoji reactions, quote posts, and events," Gleason wrote in a blog post.
• "However, there are problems with the ActivityPub protocol championed by Mastodon. The main issue is that user accounts are tied to a single server," he explained.

"When a Mastodon server is taken offline, all of its users permanently lose their accounts, leaving a hole in the network. For large servers, this can have devastating, lasting effects on the growth of the network. In addition, users on Mastodon can get banned for unfair, arbitrary reasons. Too many bad experiences add up, and leave a sour taste for users. Nostr is a reimagined protocol that fixes things with cryptography."

• Just over a week ago, Soapbox received a grant to build the Ditto project from OpenSats.
• "Our new project, "Ditto", is a competitor to Mastodon. It is an open-source, self-hosted social media server for online communities. While it borrows many ideas from Mastodon (including its API), it is built on the Nostr protocol."
• “Centralized social media is not sustainable, but Nostr empowers people to take full control of their lives online,” Gleason said.

“The funding Soapbox received for Ditto will allow us to connect some of the most powerful decentralized networks, empowering users who currently face an overwhelming number of choices in the Twitter-alternative sphere.”

• "Ditto brings the best parts of Mastodon to Nostr, including dozens of native apps, and several new features not normally available on Nostr."
• "Ditto is open-source software licensed under the GNU AGPL. It is being developed in the open and has a proof-of-concept demo."

“I’m excited with Soapbox’s Ditto project as it has the potential to bring all sorts of people and diverse communities to Nostr,” Fiatjaf was quoted as saying.

• "In February, Soapbox announced the launch of Mostr, a bridge between the ActivityPub and Nostr protocols. The bridge marked the first widespread integration of major decentralized social media protocols," AP wrote.

AP Article / Archive
Blog Post / Archive
GitLab Repo