VAAK Updates and Stuff and Things

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So, I’ve been continually working on VAAK. I think … it’s been around two months now? I don’t know, it’s hard to tell time anymore. Just yesterday I was waking up for school with a running nose and watching the Price is Right on a TV next to my bed. A TV that was about 10 inches horizontally and vertically, with bunny ears antennae and everything. Man, I sure do miss those days. Those days of thinking real hard about what I wanted to do: Go outside and run around, uh, practice drawing things on my notebook. Surf the internet in its infancy, where e-mailing someone felt like a great accomplishment, and having new e-mails to read was something good and not horrible and annoying.

Anyway, VAAK now has Bluesky feeds at the top of the “Home” feed, the same way it looks and feels on the Bluesky appview, and, along with that, there’s also a new page under the Library menu where you can organize and pin your feeds. Additionally, you can use the upgraded Search function to find more!

Going alongside Bluesky updates: Bluesky DMs now also come along for the ride and will show up in your VAAK DMs.

Congratulations. There’s finally almost no reason to look at the default appview. But … of course, VAAK is still alpha, and I’m still hammering away at the bugs, and other stuff that I don’t find out is working incorrectly until a week later when the edge-case comes through on my timeline or my notifications.

I’ve also worked in the ability to connect a Nostr account’s npub to your VAAK account. If you want to. Yes, you can zap people. Yes, you can follow people. Yes, you can utilize the Nostr network’s “follow packs”, and yes, you can mute, block, and even report people you see coming from Nostr via VAAK’s reporting system. VAAK also has a private Nostr relay that’s only for VAAK users, where your data and account information is stored. That’s right. If all of the other relays die, you won’t lose anything. But, I expect this might not be utilized all that often, since Nostr has a reputation for being a place where all the hard-right extremists go due to lack of moderation on the network (which I fixed on VAAK). This is only partially true, though. There are plenty of regular normal people using Nostr just because it’s actually a really easy piece of social software to use, and, it is, after-all, the original version of Bluesky (the ATmosphere is basically just Nostr, except your data belongs to you, and not every single relay).

Aside from all of that, I’ve been pushing (with Claude’s help) a lot of bug fixes, and feature improvements. But, of course, there is still so much left to do, including the Rust refactor, as I slowly and gradually move VAAK from PHP to Rust. And it’s slow, on-purpose, because all the knobs and buttons that go into the fediverse have to be rigorously tested before I just … turn it on.

That’s it! Now go play Mafia Hustle.