Hi Scuttleverse,

I am releasing a pre-proto-barely-working-alpha-quality git repos for us to start playing with scuttlebutt from #Firefox.

This is a combination of a native app which is built with #NodeJS and provides the sbot client and a #WebExtension that allows on to share content to Scuttlebutt. This message is being written and shared with this add-on for Firefox.

Native App

Since Firefox WebExtension API does not provides us with UDP or TCP APIs, we need to reply on a companion app running in NodeJS and communicating with WebExtensions over standard input/output. The API used is described in Native Messaging.

The setup is a bit convoluted, so please pay attention to the README file. Also, be aware that my daily driver is a Windows machine and I have tested this briefly on macOS but not on Linux (it should work though).

You can fetch the native app at my github repo for sbot_native_app.

Share on Scuttlebutt WebExtension

This is the first WebExtension related to Scuttlebutt that I am releasing (aka allowing it to escape my poor judgement in software quality). In the future, I will improve this add-on and create other add-ons as well. They will all talk to the native app mentioned above.

This add-on adds a sidebar that allows you to share content on our beloved platform. The sidebar is persistent, so switching tabs in Firefox does not affect it, which means, it makes quite pleasant to use, specially when you're using multiple tabs and fetching content from them like I am doing now.

Be aware that you need to setup the native app first before you can use this add-on.

Fetch it from github on the webextension-share-on-scuttlebutt repo.

Disclaimer

This is really alpha software! Please follow the instructions carefully and don't hesitate to reach out to me if you want.

This is how it looks:

Currently there is no way to add blobs from it, so I couldn't add the screenshot but that is a feature that I will add as soon as I can.

cc @Dominic @andrestaltz @tim @Matt McKegg

Fantastic. I'll give this a try over the weekend :)

@keks as far as I know websockets work fine. The standard input will be used to tell sbot to launch the websockets server in the future and then connect to it. At least that is my plan. I just implemented whoami and publish without websockets now because I wanted to get something out there fast. Also, thanks for the kind words

@SoapDog it works! Test post is displaying fine.

Excellent set up instructions too. Even though there were a few steps to carry out it was very easy to get it running on MacOS.

@tim I was afraid that the instructions were a bit confusing. Glad that it worked out.

@tom thanks for the kind words

I'm really pumped to try this but short on time. Know that I'm cheering from the sidelines and will join the party when I can. Keep making awesome things and sharing them xxx