calls them “notes” is because that’s what they are actually called in #ActivityPub - there are also other types, that other platforms use as well, including “article”, although, instances like #qoto have set the character count for notes at 65535 🙂

It’s been covered in this thread already that Quote Posts are simply beyond the control of mastodon devs, Eugen’s edicts, or local mastodon users or admins, because most other platforms support it and there isn’t anything #mastopub can do about it. In Misskey, users can disallow it, but that only affects other local users, so it’s s moot point (except for silo instances).

There are very few Fediverse platforms that aren’t taking advantage of most things that are possible, for example, #Soapbox now has federated events, and introduced custom emoji reactions like Misskey has, and live chat - Misskey’s traditionally led the way with these federating features with #Calckey going even further.

Some platforms however, intentionally incorporate a leaner set of features; #Smithereen is one example, it doesn’t even sccomodate boosts, which harkens back to #Myspace, #VKontakte (aka, “VK” - not sure I spelled that right), and very early #Faceplant days. #Epicyon has anti-silo capabilities baked in.

#Mitra has #Substack style subscriptions at it’s core. Anyone can subscribe remotely from any Fediverse server instance where the user can receive DMs - and in congruence with privacy concerns that are typically expected for Fediverse implementations, it’s based on #Monero (XMR).

Most platforms also support #Markdown, with Cakckey being perhaps supporting the greatest superset IIRC, including #LaTEX, and #Friendica, being much older than msstodon, has continued to evolve over the past decade and still has support for #BBCode too, and direct links for uploading images for those who prefer to.

I didn’t see any mention of Markdown support when I bothered to look at the mastopub roadmap, yet even on that platform, Quote Posts are all throughout the stream and people boost and reply to them as the time - and, as mentioned earlier, anyone can create a post, simply pasting the link from someone else’s post, and then boost that… Voila! Local #Quote_Post.

mastodon was successful in its arrogance of leveraging some pretty graphics and welcoming verbiage into a brand that Eugen weaponized against virtually all other Fediverse platforms, and now, with all of the fine forks like #Hometown and several newcomers, we’ll soon be seeing hardforking as a result of that hostility.

But not just forks, funding and ambitious development as evidenced by existing and emerging platforms like #Cloudflare’s #Wildebeest, Tumbler, and the very unique, #Django based Takahē Fediverse server that I wrote about here:

https://tallship.writeas.com/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

Average people are already migrating in larger numbers everyday away from the archaic mastodonian resource hog to other, more capable and promising (and friendlier) platforms elsewhere in the Fediverse that have integrated and fully support #masto_migration, and even ones that don’t (yet) haver that feature.

Unlike other dinosaurs and the eponymous mammal for which Eugen chose the namesake of his #TootSuite product, we shouldn’t expect extinction for his platform, but the apathy and indifference levels are rising, as is the enmity in many sectors of the community for what others perceive as a betrayal (or sellout), and that kind of self-inflicted damage is often difficult to mitigate, with waves of disenchantment reverberating get into the future… Just look at what happened to #SourceForge - it still technically exists, but never recovered after the community betrayal it committed years ago.

And finally, there’s a irony so obvious that’s it’s not even plausible to deny… Eugen subverted the very rudimentary principal that the Fediverse network is ideologically predicated upon - #DeSoc… There’s no question that his goals shifted to that if building a silo for himself, at least to some great degree. Very sad.

An interesting thing about condescending others, you find yourself alone and isolated in an otherwise vibrant, busy world.

#tallship #Takahe #ActivityPub #privacy #community_values #FOSS

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tallship

2023-01-20 02:02:49

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

takahē – A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPub – this is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at:@[url=/@/tallship@public.mitra.social]tallship@public.mitra.social[/url]

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

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Welcome | Takahē

Takahē is an ActivityPub server designed for efficient use on small- to medium-size installations, and which allows you to host multiple domains on the same infrastructure.

^{jointakahe.org}

Good post, there's also a few things I've wanted to add too.

Eugen's "Mastodon Network" branding combined with his tendency to silo users towards instances with a specific political viewpoint has somewhat neutered media attempts to promote or run hit pieces on the platform. Blueticks were signing up for instances, getting banned for no reason with no way to move to another instance easily (because getting banned blocks that usually), and going back to Twitter. It's also neutered hit pieces as journalists with no idea of the network will run a hit piece on "The Mastodon Network" instead. Case in point, a hit piece alleging it was full of CP and making the bold accusation that Eugen is trying to hide a CP problem didn't even name other instance software and while it named the fediverse, it only named GNU Social.

The other thing is that the branding thing Mastodon went for can be done better. Soapbox/Rebased is a great example of this. Soapbox has a UI designed to be easy for someone who grew up with phones and Twitter to use with no experience, as opposed to Mastodon being a total pain at times. Instead of running PR online, Alex prefers to make something that anyone can use.

The major problem with Soapbox/Rebased is that the developer has a hate army following him over his views on the transgender community (which basically call out the community), who will harass instance operators and threaten to block them (if they aren't posting wrongthink) and focus on the developer's political views over any aspect of the code, while whining that their Mastodon instance with 10 people crashed again. If this sounds crazy, a fedi admin who tried to contribute to GoToSocial got yelled at by the dev of it for even talking to Alex.

https://shitposter.club/notice/ASaCuox2fO9CZ11Jlg

Or how about someone getting a pull request to a website's modified code complaining about Alex:
https://gitlab.com/awoo.fyi/howler/-/issues/1

Or a while back some viral post sharing a nginx command to block all connections to Pleroma servers and whatnot, and making a blocklist of all servers:
https://ligma.pro/@r000t/109396033621130514

This mindset is also shared among Twitter refugees up to date with the latest drama, because the truth is, people who aren't extremely online and addicted to fedi meta drama don't even know anything about either side and could care less. I saw a left wing anarchist account on .social sharing fe.soapbox.pub the other day, which lets you log into your Mastodon instance and post there with Soapbox as the frontend.

At the same time, mainline Mastodon is lagging behind literally every single popular fediverse instance/server software in terms of features, okay maybe not behind GS, GoToSocial, and a few other dead ones. But the situation with it reminds me a lot of what's happened to Pleroma as of late.

Pleroma has had two forks that have gone in their own direction and added in features Pleroma wouldn't add. Rebased has added some from Akkoma and Pleroma, and Akkoma is basically "custom reactions the fork" and while the updates for Akkoma are literally "breaking shit for the sake of it" at times, the selling point is custom reactions. Reactions won't even make sense if you don't even use a Mastodon fork however because mainline Mastodon does not support these while Misskey, Pleroma (and it's forks), and whatnot do already. This happened for a different reason of course, both drama with Alex Gleason acting as a product leader (he's mellowed out some after only working on his own fork), and Lain taking a long break from the project to the point of seemingly being MIA online.

I'm seeing the same thing with fedibird, hometown, glitch-soc, and more Mastodon forks and while they might not fix Mastodon's resource hogging issue, they have features Eugen won't add. It's even worse because Mastodon isn't stalling development wise, Eugen is just not listening to the reality that the fedi is moving on without him. Nobody has been able to totally subvert the fedi since no single instance has gained critical mass (see e-mail) and the userbase there is absolutely anti-corporate, the media would rather let it rot in silence than try to shut it down because it's very hard to shut it down.

Sexy Moon

2023-02-11 21:55:56

gotosocial just closed my pull request and blocked me from contributing to their project.

I have not violated their code of conduct in any way.

I don't think I took any position on Soapbox support in gotosocial despite knowing about the controversy (too lazy to look up my old posts sorry) and the change that I was attempting to give to gotosocial has nothing, zero, to do with supporting soapbox or anything Alex Gleason has made. The change was to make gotosocial's webfinger act the same as Mastodon's, Pleroma's, and Misskey's.

Anyway they repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding of why I was proposing this change, and rejected code out of spite that they are probably going to eventually have to reimplement anyway. When I was working on their code I noticed I was finding a lot of bugs, and their community is run by guys like this. So I guess I don't recommend using gotosocial!

Their disapproval means nothing to me, but thought you all might like to know.