I want to have a service based on free software for cooperative storywriting and textual roleplaying that allows me to string individual roleplay sessions into longer timelines and allow for interactive roleplaying and separation of IC/OOC text.
Will I need to start building it myself?
@m3tti See the full thread - I think I explained things in it.
@phoe Something like a Play By Forum / Play By Chat mix?
@mdallastella @m3tii Yes. Something that has the upsides of both of these but, hopefully, downsides of neither.
Forums do not allow for actual interactivity and it's troublesome to move threads around to organize them in greater timelines.
Chats very rarely have persistence options, and even if some of them have it (Slack, Discord, Riot et al), they offer no means of tying these chats into logical blocks.
@phoe I know what you mean, I'm about to start an online campaign and I searched a bit about other solutions than the two mentioned, but it looks like there's nothing like that out there (at least, not open source).
@mdallastella Okay. Yesterday I've begun a project to gather ideas for how such a service could work: http://octo.sh/Gateway/Gateway
You are free to add your feature ideas in the issues section.
@phoe of course I'm talking about a very narrative style of roleplaying (no dices or stuff like that).
@mdallastella Cooperative storytelling. That's a fun name I figured out for the thing.
@mdallastella At least for parts of it, yes. It's the language I'm proficient in. I have already started implementing it in Lisp, too.
But I ain't gonna complain if anyone decides to implement another part of the final solution in a different language.
@phoe just a question, would you agree to build this as a business? I mean, open source the project but give also a payed hosted solution?
@mdallastella What do you mean exactly a paid hosted solution? I'd like to develop this software as AGPL3 which permits commercial usage as long as the complete client and server source is freed.
@phoe I mean, not everyone has the time nor the knowledge to self-host the project, maybe someone will be interested to pay some money to a hosted solution.
@mdallastella Yes. AGPL3 should work well in that scenario. Hopefully it should achieve two things: 1) make the software free as in insert-Stallman's-stuff-here, 2) make it possible to host and improve the code for money.
@phoe Give me some time to think, I could put some of my company time in a project like this. Otherwise I'll be happy to contribute in my (little) spare time . :)
@mdallastella Okay! Feel free to register at the GitLab instance at octo.sh and observe the project. I'll do my best to keep it alive.
My current Lisp codebase is at https://github.com/phoe/gateway and I try to keep it somewhat documented. It's still separate modules though, before any actual functional testing though - so not yet anyhow useful.
@phoe that sounds cool tell me more!