0x1C3B00DA

0x1C3B00DA , 2 months ago

which makes it that Mastodon’s implementation will not be compatible with other fediverse implementations

What a surprise! I never would have expected Mastodon to ignore compatibility with the rest of the fediverse /s

0x1C3B00DA , 2 months ago

Not only are they federating with each other, but they implemented Group to Group following to help prevent duplicate posts. Its a feature that's been requested for lemmy/kbin/mbin, so it'll be interesting to see how well it works for them.

0x1C3B00DA , 2 months ago

consequence of the terminally-online brain rot

Disagree. Its a consequence of corporations loudly proclaiming their support for groups when it cost nothing (think Black History Month here in the US). Corporations like to use a lot of empty marketing talk about societal issues when they can get away with it and ppl have decided to fight that by pushing companies to actually takes stands. Also, corporations here in the US have much larger voices than individual (and again this is because of the corporations' own actions), so some ppl see it as a way they can actually have an influence on their govt.

0x1C3B00DA , 2 months ago

But wait, there's more, we're standardizing our Groups implementation so other projects can take advantage of our App and Client API.

So its compatible with lemmy but uses a different API and they want their API to be the standard for the threadiverse? This is why we should be using the C2S, but since we're not you should just stick with the lemmy api since that's where the client ecosystem is already at.

0x1C3B00DA , 3 months ago

Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer

This is probably true, but how can executives be so stupid? Every review I read praised Larian specifically and how the made a huge game with no microtransactions and tons of little loving touches. You have to be willfully ignorant to think it was the IP and not the developer and their work that people were responding to.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

I think there's a huge difference in scraping your content to churn out a for-profit "AI" and federating your public posts on a federated network.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

in terms of giving one’s consent, exactly how the two are different?

Because in the second case, the user is choosing to post on a network where any other server can request their posts. A bridge is just an instance that understands more than one protocol. There's no difference in it and any other server requesting your posts. That's how the network works.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

I said the two things are different, you said how does that make asking for consent for the two things different, and my response was that for one of them it already works that way without your consent. That is a clear difference. Yes, I'm talking about the technology to explain the difference, because it's a concrete fact. Your argument that a bridge should be opt-in requires an abstract boundary that some instances are are allowed to federate on an opt-out basis and others are not.

You don’t build trust in users by using practices like opt-out, which is again, the only argument I am trying to make.

The instance you're on uses opt-out practices. You didn't consent to your post federating to kbin.social and yet here we are. If you don't trust the bridge, fine, block it. Every tool on the fediverse that you already use to deal with its inherently opt-out nature is available for you to use with this bridge.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

Thank you for the detailed explanation. It matches what I've heard from others while having this same debate. Now allow me to explain my side.

I have consented to functionality in which my posts are distributed to other instances within the Fediverse. It’s widely advertised and clearly explained that is how things function. I can readily find which implementations are part of the fediverse

This is the part I think is wrong and the cause of all of this. You can not find which implementations are part of the fediverse. No tracker that you can use has an up-to-date and accurate listing of implementations. New ones come online every day as some random developer builds something new. The fediverse doesn't have clear boundaries and I think the advertising that you mentioned does a disservice by implying it does. The fediverse is similar to the web; they're both based on open protocols and can be guided but not controlled, because anybody can build something on those protocols.

One response to this fuzziness has been to demand most features be opt-in. The reason I don't think this is tenable is because you have to have a hard boundary to determine what should be opt-in and what is ok to be opt-out. Your heuristic was native ActivityPub implementation. I don't think this scales (I feel like you're going to say this is a technological argument and therefore invalid, but it's also a social argument. Ppl don't want to use something that they have to constantly maintain. Constantly adding new servers/users to an allowlist is a chore that would drive ppl away. See google+ circles). It doesn't scale because like I said above new implementations pop up every day and these implementations are starting to branch away from the static archetypes we're used to (Twitter-like, Facebook-like, Reddit-like, etc). And some of them are existing projects that add AP support.

For instance, Hubzilla/Friendica has been bridging AP content for years. Do all of those instances require opt-in because they use a different protocol in addition to AP? There have also been bridges that translate RSS feeds to AP actor for years. Did the owners of those RSS feeds opt-in and should they have been required to?

What I'm trying to say is I think you're right that you can never keep up with the boundaries of the fediverse and where your posts end up. And I don't think there's an easy delineation for what should be opt-out vs opt-in. So instead we should be demanding that implementations add controls to our posts. Thinks like ACLs and OCAPs would allow you to control who can see your posts and interact with them and not care about new bridges/instances/whatever. Which is why I think the argument over opt-out vs opt-in is a distraction that will only keep the fediverse in this quasi-privacy space where you're dependent on yelling down any actor who is doing something with yours posts you don't like.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

I wish you luck and would love to see better Interoperability, but mastodon has been against better Article support from the beginning. I'm not sure much has changed there

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

It doesn't scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That's how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

a lot of people want nothing to do with it.

And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can't demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

the nature and direction of the fediverse

The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn't have a cohesive nature/direction. It's made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You'll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn't have hard boundaries so you can't possible measure it all.

Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.

None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse. The fediverse existed long before ActivityPub was even proposed. Free software, ad free, non commercial, not run by big corporations are all just coincidence because its a grassroots effort. Even now, there's multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.

Even if you take those as given, none of those dictate any shared values. Bridgy-fed itself meets all of those requirements but clearly holds differing values. Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.

I'm in favor of groups maintaining shared values and enforcing policies based on them. But those policies can never apply to an entire network made up of distinct projects, servers, and people all with different ideas about how it should work.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community

I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you're right. This is our disagreement. You're using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that's co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn't make sense to talk about it as a single organization.

I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we're having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can't shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don't listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you're using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.

I'm happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

Web 1.0 means no interactivity outside of forms (client to server request<-> response cycle). Web 2.0 was the label used when sites started gaining interactivity, using Javascript.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox

Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization

This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say "Firefox Organization" and not "Firefox", but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.

But, I've reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn't claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.

0x1C3B00DA OP , 4 months ago

OpenWebAuth has been in use on the fediverse since before WebFinger became so widely used.

Like I said in a previous comment, this FEP was written by reverse engineering the existing implementation. It's still a proposal so it still has to go through a discussion period where issues like this can be worked out and it can be updated

0x1C3B00DA OP , 4 months ago

The author wrote this FEP by reverse engineering the Hubzilla implementation. The point of proposing it is to find and answer questions like these.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

In the southern United States, we have biscuits made with bacon grease and sausage rolls, which are just rolls with ground sausage baked into them.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.

Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.

If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

If you know the person's twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don't realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn't just find you by searching for p03locke, I'd have to search for @p03locke.

Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won't show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don't know why implementations won't fix it.)

Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn't know that.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

If your instance is already aware of that user, you don't need the domain. Mastodon.social is the oldest mastodon instance and probably the biggest, so it is aware of a large majority of the fediverse.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

Again, both of those are older, more established instances so its more likely they are already aware of any given user.

And a lemmy user probably isn't the best test for this, because of how lemmy works. If anybody on the instances follows a lemmy community, all posts and comments in that community will make it to the instance. Which means lemmy users are probably spread around the fediverse more than users of other software.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

It shouldn’t be this hard to implement a standard structure for social media (groups/channels/sub-reddits) with an allegedly standardised protocol.

Wait til you see mastodon's proposed Group implementation, which they're intentionally making incompatible with existing Group implementations

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

That's not applicable. Sublinks is using the same standard as Lemmy/kbin/mbin, i.e. ActivityPub. In a decentralized system based on an open standard, plurality of implementations is a good thing. We shouldn't want lemmy to be the only one.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Exactly. It's also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Lemmy doesn't have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.

This problem is part of why there's not enough activity. Any activity that happens in the threadiverse is spread across multiple, duplicate communities. That makes it harder for communities to build up active userbases and makes users themselves less likely to post or comment.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don't see an issue with duplicate communities.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Reddit has a large enough userbase that duplicate communities can each reach a sustainable size without interfering. The fediverse userbase isn't large enough to sustain even a single community for some topics, let alone duplicates. I'm in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn't a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.

Also, reddit is a centralized system. A decentralized system is going to have problems that a centralized one doesn't

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Go for the most active one

There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.

The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.

I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

If the system does not depend on a central authority

In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.

it’s easy to coordinate a move away.

It's not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven't seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.

That doesn’t bother me, and I truly don’t understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.

Cool. It doesn't bother you. Then just keep doing what you're doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won't care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don't care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?

This isn't about maximizing reach of our posts. It's about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Cool. I'm glad you're getting a fairly smooth experience, but that hasn't been my experience or others'. I've seen posts with only a few comments but on their home server they have whole comment trees that I didn't see. Vote counts can be around 10-20 on one server and greater than 100 on another.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

I saw one recently in a linux community where a user complained about multiple "I ditched Windows" posts. I've seen requests for stickies in some gardening communities.

I assume nothing actively prevents the communities from merging other than the mods being comfortable running their communities. But they shouldn't have to merge. We can have solutions that enable multiple communities to exist while also preventing rampant crossposting and post duplication.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Because all the evidence shows...

What evidence shows that? This post is in [email protected] and crossposted to [email protected]. There's also [email protected] and I know I've seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there's still no consolidation.

You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I'm subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn't happen.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

There is no point

Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

I don't think we've consolidated around [email protected]. You're using a single post as an example. I've posted links that got 40+ comments in [email protected] but way less in other communities. I've posted or seen threads in [email protected] that got more discussion.

The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn't sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I'd bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to [email protected] anyway.

What I'm talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren't necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They'll see communities they're interested in and sub, but then won't see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.

Even if consolidation is happening, there's a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find [email protected] or [email protected] but if they're grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

I know. I'm the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn't it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

there is also the “political” aspect

Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

Your arguments against it seem to be:

1. Its not needed. - I've pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn't happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don't have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don't know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you've centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
2. People might not want it - The proposal doesn't force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities' members.

I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don't understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn't disrupt that. Either the communities you're in don't join up with others or they do and you wouldn't notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

That's exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

The third solution wouldn't cause extra communication. If you're subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That's the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.

If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It's the same amount of communication.

I'm assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn't explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn't mean you can't maintain similar communities without merging them.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

requires no extensions in the spec

That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.

no changes in the server side

But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.

easily prototyped/tested

Every fediverse platform already supports following Actors. That's part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

I've seen ppl saying they don't want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There's also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they're still filed on various projects' trackers.

I think it's higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don't think we're gonna convince each other so I'm gonna bow out here.

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior

Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don't have to send a follow request and the other community doesn't have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It's all optional.

There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?

There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.

it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible... Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.

The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.