@hans @tallship Okay @hans , the short answer is yes. It's only communicates via ActivityPub at this time. The developer has put other protocols in his roadmap however ?

For a bit more in depth explanation though, I'm afraid that I can't do three discussion without (regrettably) introducing a bit of politics into the equation.

First, SoapBox is just an FE (Front End -in Fediverse parlance), and used to be called SoapBox-FE. This implies that you can use it with any backend such as Pleroma, Mitra, and Mastodon. Perhaps s couple of others to some degree it another. I know that Truth Social uses the frontend with (defederated) Mastodon as their backend, for example.

The "recommended", or native backend, or "-BE", is something called "Rebased". And that was originally called SoapBox-BE.

So it's technically just Rebased that is talking ActivityPub.

Here's s blog article explaining it's genesis in clear terms:

soapbox.pub/2022/08/19/soapbox…

Moving along now...

Okay now for the political part. It seems that certain factions of folks don't like Alex Gleason. Not my problem and I don't care. I find him to be a competent, affable, and approachable developer. Beyond those concerns, what and how he thinks doesn't matter to me.

But there have been people that have cyber out of the woodwork with some rather vitriolic diatribe when I've expressed his impressed with his fork of the Pleroma backend.

I don't much care for cowardly sorts, and often feel compelled to respond to nimrods berating me for advocating the usage of "evil" FOSS. I mean, it's not like I'm promoting Faceplant or Twatter or InstaSPAM, or worse, Microsoft, lolz.

Anyway, my typical response is just to expose their hypocrisy by asking them to confirm that they also don't allow themselves to use JavaScript - because, as everyone knows, Brendan Eich is such a dangerous and evil man, right?

That usually shuts them up faster than a flyswatter smacking a mosquito. They know that unless they're willing to endure an excruciatingly painful existence on the Internet that swearing if the use of such a ubiquitously integrated component of modern computing is nothing more than an exercise in folly (although I do respect those who swear off javascript for privacy and/or security reasons, but those folks are just fine running Lynx and Gemini or Gopher clients, and usually live on the CLI in a Korn shell running Emacs, lolz.

No disrespect to Emacs folks, but I'm more of a Vim guy myself and i still often set tksh as my shell of choice.

Anyway, Pleroma is widely considered a mess but many in the actual development community itself, with respect to the state of their team itself. It's also a good product, but due to politics, it has left their dev team in what some are calling disarray for the meantime. This is unfortunate, and has resulted in more than one fork that seems to have some potential. I'll post a link to one that, if this types of politics are important to someone, is another quality product, even though that developer is ambiguous about continuing support unlike Alex's project Eric is very much a solidly grounded business product.

Personally, I think it's stupid to create a fork of a good product and try to run with that if you're reasons stem from ideological nonsense - we've all seen three fate if what happens when morons who didn't longer the name "GNU Image Manipulation Program" created a miserably failed fork of it called, "GLIMPSE", out of some deranged mission to change the face of linguistics and vocabulary for all.

Children are mine that though, until they grow up.