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Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist


It's me. I had no idea. Wow. I have some reading to do.
(Thanks!)
If my account is on a Mastodon server, using a Masto app (Fedilab), can I see "quote tweets" from Misskey et al users? Or do those messages just get dropped?
It seems to simply appear as an appended link.
@serious business :donor: This may depend on how exactly quotes are formatted.

I think it's usually only a case of the formatting being stripped so that Mastodon users can't see what and how much of a post is a quote. For example, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) use good old BBcode, and Mastodon strips off all formatting that comes from BBcode except [url][/url] (ActivityPub actually uses Rich Text to transmit formatting).

Other projects may use the even older leading >. Stripping it makes little sense, but Mastodon doesn't recognise it as a quote yet.

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

pixelfed is not there yet. You can't change who has access to a post after you have posted, you can't upload in-bulk/collections, there's no exif image info, no space to publish model and photographer releases...
It can become something great, but don't expect people to adopt en masse until it reaches a more mature state.
Same for other projects in similar state.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
what provides cross-app/cross-instance interaction?
@Genders: ♾️, πŸŸͺβ¬›πŸŸ©; Soni L. #ActivityPub. The language which (most of) the #Fediverse speaks.

It is how Mastodon instances talk to other Mastodon instances. And it is how, for example, Pleroma instances talk to Mastodon instances. Or to each other.

okay well, how many steps (and which) do you need to take to fav or boost this linked post? https://chaos.social/@SoniEx2/110023142899250535

and what if it were posted on something like IRC or email instead, how many/which steps would it take then?


#MastoAdmin we want to work with y'all on getting mastodon ready for #blanketcon, a #minecraft modding event where modders and players get together to discuss mods and the communities around them. we're trying to make an advanced #fedi integration mod for blanketcon, but we need instance support for it. would anyone be open to the idea?

we really want to improve cross-instance and cross-app interactions. this could be the start of something huge!

:BoostOK:


yes, which steps you, personally, as a hubzilla user, would be forced to take by the various cross-interacting software (between the OS, the browser/desktop app, the window manager, the instance, and whatever else might be of relevance), to be able to interact with said post from your fedi account?
@Genders: ♾️, πŸŸͺβ¬›πŸŸ©; Soni L. Since I don't have that post in my stream:

Step 1: Copy the URL.

Step 2: Click on the magnifying glass for search.

Step 3: Paste the URL into the search field.

Step 4: Hit Enter. The post should appear now.

Step 5: Do with it as I please. Share, like, reply, save in a folder, whatever.

Basically, interaction with any post is only one search away.
okay, so from something like IRC or email you have:

1. copy the URL
2. manually switch to the browser, then to the instance
3. click search
4. paste URL
5. finally, hit enter

whereas something like twitter it's just

1. click URL

do you see the problem? do you see why fedi is bleeding users?
@Genders: ♾️, πŸŸͺβ¬›πŸŸ©; Soni L. Well, if we were to put ease-of-use above everything else for everyone, we should shut down all projects that aren't Mastodon and then turn Mastodon into a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone with the only exceptions being the name and the fact that Mastodon isn't owned by Elon Musk. Make mastodon.com both the project website and the only instance, make Mastodon one huge centralised monolithic silo owned by a Mastodon, Inc. in Palo Alto, CA (NASDAQ: MSDN).

Hubzilla wasn't launched in 2022 in a reaction to the launch of Mastodon which in turn was a reaction upon Musk's Twitter takeover. Mastodon was launched in 2016 with no mobile app. And Hubzilla had its 1.0 release in 2015, development began in 2012, and the target audience wasn't the tech-illiterate iPhone user, it was the Linux geek.

Mastodon wasn't built to be mainstream. Hubzilla was even less built to be mainstream.
so the linux geek should be forced to put up with that crap because demanding better of your tools is too much to ask for?

is it really made for the linux geek, or for the C89 evangelist? because even the modern linux geek uses rust nowadays, complete with borrow checker. but the C89 evangelist will claim turning on -Wall is against the spirit of C. why *not* demand better of mastodon and hubzilla, too?
1100 words of mythology, misrepresentation and bullshit. congratulations, my dude, congratulations.
@Genders: ♾️, πŸŸͺβ¬›πŸŸ©; Soni L. It's basically the same as "If #Linux wants to take over the desktop, it'll have to become identical to #Windows, just free-of-charge and without malware. No more distros, one Linux for everyone, one desktop environment, one graphical toolkit, only one of each, whatever it is."

Linux never wanted to take over the desktop.
@jupiter_rowland
  • click url
  • unable to favorite tweet due to being permanently banned by the single twitter instance in existence.
You gave us so many options that I dont know where to go to now! 😁
same here, I just bookmarked the post so I can come back to it when I'm more used to all this. New universes take time to understand lol. I feel like a refugee that has also time traveled, it's so cool.
Mastodon is like a gateway drug and the fediverse is like... All the other drugs? Idk where I was going with this...

Content warning: re: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

I’m not sure most people want a lot of that extra stuff though, and it’s super confusing for new people otherwise.

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

@Kermode The different projects use different markup languages for formatting.

Some microblogging projects use Markdown, some HTML in addition. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) use an extended variant of BBcode.

ActivityPub turns everything into Rich Text afterwards.
I didn't know that! Thanks.
I use joplin for notes, so I know md to some extent. Joplin also has 'extended' the md, so... I don't really know how much I know is actually transferable. Like tables for example. No idea, but they're handy.

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

@basisbit There may be a few who were given the choice between multiple projects (e.g. Mastodon vs Akkoma vs Friendica etc.) right away, also being told that they'd have the exact same people to connect to, regardless of what they choose, and who chose what appeared as the closest to Twitter.

But for each of them, you have thousands upon thousands who were only told about Mastodon, who were told that Mastodon is the Fediverse, either on Twitter or by mass-media. Including thousands to whom mastodon.social was sold as "Twitter without Musk" because nothing more fit into 280 characters.

It's them I'm talking about.
See me second comment which I wrote a few hours ago as answer to my first comment πŸ˜’
@basisbit I've already seen it before replying. And I think my previous answer already covers it.

Yes, a few people were shown the whole Fediverse before joining. Out of all projects, they picked Mastodon because it seemed the most simple and the closest to Twitter to them.

Others were shown the whole Fediverse before joining, and they picked something that isn't Mastodon because they found Mastodon to be too lacking.

Most were only shown Mastodon, usually only one instance. They didn't get to choose because they didn't know they had a choice, much less what their choices would have been.

Some of the latter actually don't want there to be anything else than Mastodon. They want the Fediverse to be as simple as possible. Multiple Mastodon instances are already too complicated. Multiple different projects in the Fediverse, each with multiple instances, now, that really goes too far. Everything that isn't Mastodon has to go, also because everything that isn't Mastodon is too complicated all in itself.

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

@Rocky Carr Good to know it takes only one afternoon to read my stuff.

Also explains my number of followers...

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: re: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Content warning: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

But that is BAD, VERY BAD! So the Fediverse is split into a myriad platforms -- and hence communities -- with incompatible features.

That may be great for the computer nerds who will join a dozen platforms just to revel in the features. It is terrible for those who only want a platform to communicate with other people...

#Fediverse #FediverseFragmentation
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Nope, you got it wrong. Hint: count the number of characters in the toot you just replied toβ€”it's well over 500, because it didn't originate on a Mastodon server! It's a federated system, so every client can read stuff posted on any other server that supports ActivityPub. (Imagine you could read Twitter tweets on your Facebook page. Only more so.) If all you want to do is to toot, that's fineβ€”everyone else can see you just fine.
But what happens when a message with fancy formatting/threading/etc is read by someone from a server that does not support such features?
The message gets transmitted to the client, whose reader is then responsible for displaying/formatting that message (or not, if it lacks the capability). This isn't new. It's how the internet worked 20 years ago, before all these gigantic corporate silos took over. (I shouldn't need to explain this to you, should I …? Graceful degradation of capabilities isn't an new requirement …)
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
But that is my point. Email and Usenet had a standard message format (ascii text, unfortunately, because that was before Unicode). Every valid server was supposed to issue only compliant messages and properly display any compliant message. This does not seem to be the case in the Fediverse, is it?
@Jorge Stolfi @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross

out of curiosity, what do you see if I use italic or bold text on my platform?

or even a block quote (which I'm sure is not supported by mastodon)
Does your message above have any such markups? I don't see any -- just plain text, with no italics or bold.
I get the italics, bold, and block quotes, too. If somebody isn't getting that, and it's important enough to them, they can easily migrate to an instance that will provide the markup. I actually did that myself a couple of weeks ago, but for reasons unrelated to the capabilities of the social media server. My old account was on a Mastodon instance called musician.social, and my new account is running Akkoma, a hard fork of Pleroma.

Despite running a completely different implementation, Akkoma was capable of migrating my Mastodon followers, followed, and other settings over. My old posts couldn't be migrated, but I find this limitation acceptable. I can understand why some may be wary of migrating.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Perusing the description in this link, https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ it seems to me that ActivityPub is a standard protocol for the exchange of FILES, leaving their interpretation entirely to users; rather than a protocol for exchange of MESSAGES (including blogposts, articles, etc) -- that is, textual/visual/auditory artifacts, possibly with embedded or attached files. Is this correct.? >>
In this regard (apart from interaction model), ActivityPub is more like old FTP, rather than SMTP+MIME, NNTP, the WWW, and the "social networks".

That is, AP does not try to ensure that a message sent by a user from a compliant server can be read faithfully (apart from non-semantic layout and looks) by recipients in every other server. Because the sender may use a message format that the receiver can't properly handle.

Is this correct?
I'm not an implementer, but it's my understanding that the recipient can tell the sender what it can handle, while the sender may include a source attribute containing the original content, as well as the transformed content that complies with the recipient's stated requirements.

I think somebody above referred to the notion of degrading gracefully, and that's certainly possible using such mechanisms.
Yes, but that is still not good. Within ActivityPub, one cannot write a *message* that, a priori, is known to be correctly readable by any of the intended recipients -- unless it is a short (< 500 bytes) text in plain ascii, with no italics, boldface, or other markup, and no embedded images... >>

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #FediverseFragmentation
>> For the ActivityPub network to be a better alternative to social networks, or even to WWW, the ActivityPub standard should specify a *message* format -- such as HTML 3.0 -- that is rich enough for modern expectations (embedded images and hyperlinks, tables, etc.), but that every compliant implementation is required to handle and display properly, on any minimally powerful platform.

#Fediverse #ActivityPub
#FediverseFragmentation
Sorry. I have been using ">>" to indicate continuation in threads. A habit I carried over from the bird⌫⌫⌫⌫dogecoin site. My mastodon instance limits posts to 500 bytes.

Would "πŸ§΅β€>" be the proper way here?
@Jorge Stolfi
Use an instance with much more than 500 Chars...
They are existing.

There are forked Mastodons outside, which can and have configures max character-size up to 5000 or more chars.
There are pleroma-Instances outside, which hast default 3000 or 5000 Chars i think. And many admins have set up the limit much higher.
There are forks of pleroma, with more allowed characters.
There is Friendica out in the Fediverse, which has NO limit.
There is hubzilla, zot, misskey... they all have more or no limit for characters in postings...

You can try them all. You are as connected to the fediverse, as with your actual mastodon-instance... don't be afraid to test other instances or even other software than mastodon...

And if you find an instance or software, wich fits your needs better... just move your followers and followings to this new instance. There are Howtos and Scripts for exactly this: moving your account to another instance.
@Elena ``of Valhalla'' @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross @bitnik
@eshep

I wish someone had warned me of that 4 months ago, when I joined through mas.to. Oh well.

But the problem is not what kind of text **I** can read and write. It is **lack of interoperability**. It is the fact that, no matter in which server I am hosted, I cannot be sure that everyone who gets my posts will be able to read them correctly -- unless I write only 500 chars of plain ascii.
@Jorge Stolfi, did you not look into any other instances before choosing mast.to? What made you decide that it was the right place for you? Maybe using the most limiting implementation is the correct choice for that goal. Public audience webpages should probably only be written in plaintext without images as well ensuring everyone is able to read them.
Indeed I had never heard of the Fediverse or Mastodon when I decided to leave Twitter. Some contacts who did that suggested I move to mastodon. How could I choose between instances before joining them? πŸ§΅β€>
πŸ§΅β€> Wepages HAVE a basic standard (HTML 3.0, or the equivalent subset of HTML 5.0) that includes bold, italic, images, section headers, tables, lists, etc. By writing my web posts using that subset, I am sure that they can be read in practically every graphics browser, on mostly any platform. The looks may be different, but the semantic contents will get through. πŸ§΅β€>
πŸ§΅β€> It seems that for the Fediverse, maybe even for Mastodon, the only message format that can be read by everybody is 500 chars plain Unicode without any markup. Plus maybe one poll and a few images -- but only at the end of the post and with fixed size.

I will probably move to some other instance soon. However, the above constraint applies *no matter where I have my account.* That is the problem...
Say you do move to an instance where you're able to read/write >5000 char/post yet you choose to restrict your posts to a size compatible with instances that have made a choice to not be able to read more than say 500 char/post. Are you not then encouraging that restriction to remain as it is? Why not create your posts in full and educate your readers who have that issue as to why they're not able to read it? That would at least be an active effort in promoting a correction to the problem. Simply complaining that others have what you want does nothing to help anyone.
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