Introducing the alpha of kilogram.makeup

I've been working on this for a while and I'm happy to make the first public release of a bridge for Instagram: kilogram.makeup. Just like bird.makeup allows you to seamlessly follow accounts on Twitter from the Fediverse, kilogram.makeup allows you to do the same with Instagram.

Note this is an alpha, which means not everything works, but what works is ready for testing. Right now, you can:

- Search for accounts,

- See their profile

- Follow them

but note that posts are not forwarded yet, nor can you search for specific posts even if you know their id/url.

This alpha also serve as a heads up for fediverse instance admins, that this project is coming fully online soon. If you think bridges are not a good thing for the community you are curating, now is a good time to block. Just like bird.makeup, I'm trying to consolidate bridges to a handful of domains to make moderation easy. 

Roadmap

People will find interesting ways to break what is currently online, so first item is scaling search and profiles. Then over the next few weeks I will do the remaining refactoring to make everything else work, the order of the feature is more about the technical dependencies than product reasons.

The next step is to allow the conversion from Instagram posts to ActivityPub notes. Once this part is there, users will be able to search for post if they know their id. That in itself is not that useful, but having this will make adding pinned posts relatively easy. 

The major step after is the crawling for new posts, and at that point kilogram will have the same feature as bird.  I plan to make it a progressive rollout, enabling a fraction of followed accounts, and progressively making that fraction larger. starting with accounts that are followed from r.town. You can learn more about r.town in my last post.

This project will also allow me to expand what type of ActivityPub objects are supported. I want to federate stories with at least Pixelfed. 

Rebranding to dotmakeup

One thing that has become clear to me while working on bird.makeup is that Twitter is not the only big tech building a needlessly-walled garden. I want to make all the networks interoperable and where users can freely choose their client. I will add further expansions to other networks with equally silly .makeup domain names, starting with Reddit and Hacker News. When kilogram.makeup will be out of alpha, I will rebrand the Patreon, the git repository and the documentation to simply the dotmakeup project. 

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