On March 19th, I started The Fedibook Project as an experiment — Can I show a concept of a "Friends First" social network for the Fediverse that I would like to have myself? Looking at the feedback from the initial users I very humbly dare to say yes! I think there is something to build on here.

So now is the time to be just a little more informational about the direction. Not because the direction was unclear to me — but because supporters, operators, and critics deserve to know where the project is headed now that the initial free-wheeling discovery phase has proven there is something here worth developing further.

This is the first stated roadmap for Fedibook. It describes two releases and the eight themes that run through both of them. It is not a schedule with dates. It is a shared understanding of priorities — what matters, what comes first, and why.

The roadmap will change. Your experiences, feedback, and ideas will all shape what gets built next. If you want to influence that, the issues tracker and the About Fedibook group on fedibook.net are the right places to start.

I can't offer any committed dates for releases — it depends on available free time, shit that hits the fan, and motivation. That said, I'm very keen on finishing Discovery and starting to think about a long-lived product and team. I would love to have Discovery more or less done by the end of June, enjoy the summer, and kick off Delivery after summer. No promise!

Project themes!

The project has a set of themes that on a high level describe the scope of the application. Each release, new feature, change, or fix should keep the themes in mind. "Why are we doing this?"

• Friends First — The one that matters most. Fedibook should be a useful social tool in real people's everyday lives. Everything else serves this.
• Your Friendly Neighborhood Social Network — Or just Friendly for short! Fedibook is not a project to copy Big Social. The project must work to build a more friendly and healthy social media platform. What that means must be constantly discovered, and old ways of living with social media must be challenged. On one hand, Fedibook must deliver what users demand as a good alternative to Big Social — on the other hand, Fedibook must be more Friendly.
• Ease of Deployment — Simple to install and run. A self-hosted network is only useful if people can actually host it.
• New User Experience — Welcoming and familiar, especially for people coming from Big Social.
• Stability and Performance — Built to run on modest hardware. Fedibook must be stable both while running and after maintenance.
• Fediverse Member — Fedibook is a member of the Fediverse. It works well with Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms. Federation that breaks is federation that isolates. Features are designed with the federated Fedibook network in mind for the full user experience, while still being a good Fediverse member — i.e., enabling users to be "Friends" with a Mastodon user.
• Moderation and Safety — Basic tools for operators and users to keep their communities healthy.
• Data Sovereignty — Users own their data. They can export it, delete it, move to other servers, and take it with them.
• Operator Experience — The people running instances are part of the network. Their experience matters.

Fedibook Discovery

Fedibook Discovery is the first public release of Fedibook — the one running at https://fedibook.net right now — an active exploration of what a federated, Friends First social network can be.

The goal is to get a working product in front of real users and learn from what they actually do with it. Features will ship fast, some ideas will be tried and dropped, and the distance from idea to code will be short. No waiting, no committees, just ideas and code.

Discovery is done when the feature set is solid enough that users are willing to stay even as the project slows down to build Delivery properly.

Mandatory features

Feed: Posts, comments, and likes working for friends and groups

Notifications: For comments and likes on your posts and more

Moderation: Some solution to report group posts to the moderation team

Profile management: Possible for users to export, import, and delete their entire profile.

Fedibook federation: Friend feed, group feed, and group management must be federated Fedibook-to-Fedibook so that the Fedibook feature set is truly distributed. Friend feed must work with Mastodon.

Image posts: Possible to put images in posts in feed and groups (working but needs improvements)

Optional features

These are features that may or may not be implemented in Discovery — if they hold back progress they will be addressed later.

Fediverse friend federation: Friend feed with Mastodon friends. Very likely to be included. Already solved but not finalized.

Fediverse group federation: Group messages including Mastodon users are working but comments are still broken.

Video posts: Possible to put video in posts in feed and groups (working using backend PeerTube but needs evaluation).

Fedibook Delivery

Delivery is where the pace deliberately slows down to build something that lasts. A team comes on board, the codebase is hardened, and technical debt is paid down systematically.

The eight themes continue. Delivery just advances them with more people, more structure, and a longer time horizon.

Delivery is where Fedibook earns its place as a platform others can build on and contribute to with confidence.

The ongoing use of AI-assisted coding will be reframed with the kick-off of Delivery, but for the time being I think it fair to state that I do believe it will still have a role to play. We will still need to discover and deliver fast to keep pace.

Features backlog

Potential stuff to come.

Local language: Implement local language translations i front-end.

Events: Invite to your event

Personal info: Birthday, contact info etc. (optional for the user)