Prismo is a decentralized link-sharing app powered by ActivityPub

Sean Tilley
We Distribute
Published in
2 min readJul 6, 2018

Prismo is a new link-sharing platform intended to work similarly to Reddit, Lobst.ers, or Hacker News. Michał Bajur, creator of Mastodon Tags Explorer, is building the platform for the fediverse, meaning that it speaks the ActivityPub protocol and is intended to work with other federated parts of the ecosystem.

A WIP version of the UI, demonstrating the discussion view for a link.

Although there aren’t many details about the platform yet, we were able to learn a bit more from a few Mastodon posts made by the project:

Posting to “subreddit” will work like gnusocial groups…instances will have an option to be single-Group or multiple-group and no matter which one is enabled, you’ll be Able to follow any instance using single account

Effectively, Prismo aims to adopt the ActivityPub group Actor type to implement their own version of subreddits, and it will follow the conventions for how GNU Social handles groups (with the !bang mention syntax). Individual instances might be able to choose between representing themselves as one big subreddit, or as a collection of multiple subreddits.

Nested comments with upvotes.

The platform is still very early in development, but the basic features so far (registering an account creating new links, tagging, commenting) all work. It will be interesting to see how Prismo takes shape over the coming months, but it’s exciting to see another fediverse application!

Thanks for taking the time to read about Prismo! If you’re interested in learning more, check out these handy links below!

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Sean Tilley
We Distribute

Editor of WeDistribute. Obsessed with Free Software and Decentralization. Also makes things, sometimes with Elixir.