What does HackerNews think of Smithereen?

Unfortunately I don't think it fits any of the projects I work on (and I don't use VSCode to begin with, never had it installed, bit I do see an IntelliJ plugin as well).

I have one project that's a server application (https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen), but since it uses lots of custom stuff on top of the Spark micro-framework, your plugin would probably not work on it. I imagine it does expect projects to be structured idiomatically for the framework they use, at least to some degree. Spark also doesn't know anything about databases, so that is all custom as well. Oh and I also hacked it a bit with reflection to allow streaming responses.

I'm building a fediverse project that aims to fill this exact niche. It's basically a recreation of an early-ish version of VKontakte (Russian Facebook) but federated and in green instead of blue. It's not really ready yet, and there are lots of important features missing, but I do use it daily for my primary fediverse account.

I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.

https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

I'm building an ActivityPub thing of my own: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

It's not quite ready for mainstream use just yet, but I'm getting there. The next update will improve moderation tools by a lot. One after that will, at last, add private messages.

He's also the creator of Smithereen. "Federated, ActivityPub-compatible social network server with friends, walls, and groups". It is modeled after VK and federates with Mastodon.

https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

My project[1] will have discussion boards in groups at some point. But not exactly "broadcast", it's more like Facebook groups that you join and do things in.

[1] https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

Oh, no, it's now kinda useless for that too unless you somewhat go out of your way. They've signed contracts with recording companies and "legalized" most of the music several years ago, killing off the public API (audio.* methods), adding ads (which I've never heard thanks to my ad blocker, but still) and imposing ever more nonsensical client-side restrictions in mobile apps (which I use an old version of) that are removed by buying a subscription.

But — despite Mail.Ru Group doing its best to ruin it, it's still way better than Facebook. There's a chronological feed even! And they aren't brave enough to ruin that.

Full disclosure: I worked at VK on the official Android app for 5 years, most of that as the only Android developer in the entire company. I quit in 2016 because of growing disagreement with the management about our goals. VK still has a lot of sentimental value for me because it literally changed my life, multiple times over.

Anyway, if you do want the experience of the OG VK but without FSB and all the other perils that come with centralization, you can follow the development of my ActivityPub project: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen