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fediverse

This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Time for an ICQ for the Fediverse?

Looks like ICQ is finally shutting down, just as interest in retro internet tools is growing.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/25/24164579/icq-shut-down-june

@fediverse

singpolyma ,
@singpolyma@lemmy.ml avatar

Cheogram Android has the send half of URL preview. I will be adding display on the receive side this year when I get the time.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Thanks for suggestion I will try that one

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

UI differences are a big factor in the success/failure of decentralised federation of diverse platforms and content

And this seems a good example: bridged posts onto which has a lower character limit than Mastodon.

So, just like posts on mastodon, you don't get the full content of the post (which ends with an abrupt ellipsis here) and have to take a link to the original platform.

However powerful the underlying protocols, this isn't far from screenshots.

@fediverse

modulus ,

Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea a complete protocol to protocol bridge seems far off for sure. But a platform to platform bridge seems to be working fine for the moment (masto-bsky), and that seems a reasonable expectation.

maegul , (edited )
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

The fediverse won’t succeed at putting up a substitute and that’s a problem?

Just an impression: All the pieces seem to be there. But what’s required is a team, with devs, PMs and coordinators, dedicated to making a particular place in the .

That’s resources and decently sized financial and organisational demands, especially to get a critical mass of users.

Is the fediverse up to that challenge? If not, is it an issue worth addressing?

@fediverse

haui_lemmy ,

Amen. Same problem here. But feel free to hit me up if you find someone who wants to do it. I wouldnt mind helping with design stuff since that meeds different skills than coding.

lambalicious ,

Forget federated stackoverflow, give me federated Gardening.StackExchange!

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic

See the conversions here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4628
and
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/federating-the-content-of-posts-note-articles-and-character-limits/4087

AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.

It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.


@fediverse

nutomic ,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

None of that matters if Mastodon doesnt implement these suggestions or standards. And from past experience its extremely unlikely that they will. Thats why I think its best to ignore what Mastodon does, its not our concern how they decide to render things.

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

That’s kind of what I meant too, if there’s a standardised and correct way to implement things, that’s how projects should implement it instead of trying to do it the “Mastodon” way

JustinH ,
@JustinH@twit.social avatar

"We Need To Rewild The Internet"
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I've read all year.

I often struggle to think of a term for "appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually." Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@fediverse

Valmond ,

Interesting!

I poked around in the (slightly verbose) documentation and stumbled onto this:

Servers should not re-use URIs, regardless of the mechanism by which resources are created. Certain specific cases exist where URIs may be reinstated when it identifies the same resource,

So I wonder if it has the same inbuilt limitation that IPFS has, which means you cannot just update the data you are sharing, without also having to create a whole new link (I know IPFS are trying to work around that, but have seen no decentralised solution yet).

I’ll poke around some more!

Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of them before.

Cheers

Valmond ,

Now this is interesting, I know about Tor ofc, with all problems surrounding it (exit nodes etc) but I guess an onion website could be made well protected and shared & updated. You have to host it yourself though I guess.

Freenet, gotta dig down and see how it works under the surface, it looks very promising but it’s kind of complex and I haven’t yet figured out if it is all benevolent sharing for example and what happend if some random node sharing your stuff goes offline.

Very interesting!

I think (I’ll dig more to see if it stands) my advantage would be the redundancy (so the data always stays up and is hard to take down), the no need of benevolent nodes, and potentially the ease if use.

Thanks!

maegul , (edited )
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment"

which was about a year ago now, I can't help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of in the

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that's smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

1/

Subversivo ,

Sorry anout the delay. The siteis iceshrimp.net

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Huh. Thanks!!

andrew ,
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Mastodon establishes non-profit in the US, while Germany revokes their nonprofit status

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/

@fediverse

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

while Germany revokes their nonprofit status

For unknown reasons, and those tax authorities are pretty well know for revoking it wrongly.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

People are actually on BlueSky

There's now a decent measurement of user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html) ...

They've got about 1.6M MAUs ...
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.

That's not nothing!

Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).

Bluesky is quite "international" with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there's real attrition happening IMO.

Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?

@fediverse

mima ,

@halm Diaspora only federates with Friendica (because the latter has diaspora protocol support). Friendica doesn't have its "own protocol", it uses ActivityPub with its own proprietary extensions IIRC.

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

I meant links to instances not owned by the main company. Are there any?

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Plugins for fediverse platforms.

Where is this up to? Is anyone thinking along these lines?

I've seen @db0 espouse such (eg https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/8581651) (sorry for the tag if annoying).

I've certainly thought of it myself ... because it's a pretty obvious idea for an ecosystem aiming for richness and sustainability.

Seems a perfect fit for reusable moderation tooling too, rather than each new platforms having that trouble.

This is essentially 's idea it seems.

@fediverse

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Year, tone down the smug “prs accepted”, mate. You’re just toxic

Die4Ever ,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

When it comes to moderation tooling I’m honestly a little confused that there isn’t more work or noise around a developing a sideloaded tool.

Yeah we just need volunteers to dedicate their time to it. But it’s a lot easier to complain than it is to contribute.

andrew ,
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/
@fediverse

yo_scottie_oh ,

Repost.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Mastodon CVE Report

Didn't expect the mastodon CVE report/account would kinda end up being about platform diversity on the fediverse (TLDR: only mastodon really had the problem, which was huge)

https://arcanican.is/excerpts/cve-2024-23832/discovery.htm

@fediverse

maegul OP ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@skullgiver

The point though is that not all platforms had the problem, which means platform diversity would have lessened the significance.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.

@fediverse

By @robin

otl ,
@otl@hachyderm.io avatar

@poVoq Agreed. It got me thinking. But feels almost entirely ideological, conflating social media (e.g. Twitter, Reddit) with “the digital world”.

Saying git is a “failed attempt at decentralisation” just because GitHub is popular misses that GitHub is less critical infrastructure than it would be if we only had CVS or Subversion.

I’m encouraged by incremental, practical decentralisation efforts outside of social media. It’s slow, kinda boring but it’s real and happening today.

@fediverse

alcinnz , (edited )
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@maegul @fediverse Thanks @robin for the term "Google Search Fallacy"! I've been seeing variations upon it everywhere ...

Love this article!

(I've toyed with decentralized search before & quickly came to the conclusion that the way we commonly think about it is thoroughly misguided)

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?

Can't get this brain fart out of my head.

What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?

Quick thoughts:

  • FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to ...
  • Shared/Single Sign On
  • Easy cross posting
  • Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
  • Unlike email, supporting small servers

No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.


@fediverse

Aatube ,
@Aatube@kbin.social avatar

@Sean Not all devices support passkeys.

Unmemorizable passwords are not the kind I like to use. I'd rather be able to login on some random incognito guest computer.

@fediverse @maegul @1984 @mindlight @maegul

maegul OP ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@strife @joeldebruijn

Yea this is the essence of the idea. Strip down the interop requirements as much as possible, relying on existing tech as much as possible, and allow software and norms to solve all the other problems, where, TBF, it seems that software is doing all the heavy lifting in the fediverse anyway, but also has to handle federation and the protocol.

masimatutu , en-gb

Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation

Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.

For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.

@fediverse

dylanTheDeveloper , (edited )
@dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world avatar

It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.

And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.

What we actually need is better mod tools

Anticorp ,

I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.

masimatutu , en-gb

Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse

I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.

Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.

But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.

The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.

And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.

The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.

P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.

Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.

Die4Ever ,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin

Franzia ,

I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.

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