Authorized Fetch, laziness, and the rust way

We work on plume. It's actually pretty strange that we haven't talked about that at all, given that so many people write blog posts about their work. What we've done for plume thus far is:

1. Fixed federation between mastodon and plume when the user being fetched has a very large number of posts.
2. Added syntax highlighting.
3. Fixed a bug with parsing mentions and hashtags in code blocks
4. Added an email blocklist that should towards addressing spam on open registration instances

If any of those things seem impressive, they aren't really, in any grander scheme. And for all our contributions, we'd have been lost without the help of the maintainers of the project and their kindness, especially when we were starting out.

Plume has a long way to go, and given recent changes in the mastodon/Pleroma ecosystem(namely the introduction of authorized fetch), we have a lot to catch up on. What Plume needs, by a few bits of feedback that we've gotten from friends who have tried it out breaks down into the following:

1. Privacy controls for blog posts.

   Many people don't quite see the point, but, it's important to give the user at least as much control over visibility as mastodon and pleroma offer.

2. Moderation tools

   Unless we want open registration plume servers to become hives of scum and villainy, robust moderation tools from administrator to user are required.

3. Comment control

   As much fun as it is to comment on someone's terrible blog about how terrible it is(Please don't, people don't need extra unkindness in their life), the authors should have control over the presentation of the blog, if not everywhere, then at the very least on their home instance.

But all this must wait for the massive changes in the pipe. Async code and all manner of changes. Soon it will be very different and this is not a change we feel we can contribute to.

We can't wait to help later on though.