I've been using Friendica for a few years, and after playing around with other software such as #Pleroma, #Misskey and #Lemmy, I've ended up returning to the old reliable in my personal server. I'm honestly surprised to see Friendica offering a more solid offering of capabilities than many other newer #Fediverse platforms, such as #Mastodon itself. However, it still seems to be missing a few important capabilities (some of them already implemented in other AP software, some of them being improvements to the already existing capabilities of Friendica) that I would like to see implemented eventually, to finally being able to move full-time to a single Fediverse software instead of spreading my server cycles between several web-apps. Feel free to add to this list, or to recommend workarounds for any of the issues I've listed below. Also, I plan to see how to learn enough PHP in order to send PRs for a few of these, but I want to check if there's any work in progress regarding any of these issues to avoid duplicate efforts.

Issues that already exist in the tracker, roughly sorted by priority:

• Import posts from Mastodon / Misskey exported backups: see issue 6004 in GitHub.
• Ability to vote in polls, not just have them read-only: see issue 11093 in GitHub.
• Ability to import #RSS feeds and not only ActivityPub accounts: see issue 13854 in GitHub.
• Post translation, using a backend such as #LibreTranslate: see issue 12948 in GitHub.
• Merge related notifications to prevent duplicates: see issue 9729 in GitHub.
• React with emoji, as in #Misskey and derivatives: see issue 6271 in GitHub.

Issues that are already managed with an add-on, but have issues:

• Proper support for Mastodon custom emojis: the "Mastodon Custom Emojis" add-on can handle them in post content, partially, and can't handle them in user names yet.
• Handling the "NSFW" tag in federated posts: the "NSFW" add-on can detect specific words on a post, but if the post does not include them (and yet uses the "mark as NSFW" option in Mastodon), the post will be shown regardless.

Implementing new views in order to work better as a replacement for other platforms:

• Feed reader view a la #FreshRSS / #Lemmy: collapse comments and content, optionally add buttons to go to the previous/next unread item, filter by read.
• Video player /gallery view a la #PeerTube / #Pixelfed: pin media to top and comments / voting buttons to bottom.
• Dashboard view a la Tweetdeck: allow multiple columns with different filters. This might require a rewrite of the logic for each page, as each filter is currently implemented on the interface as a PHP request bound to each page load. This might fall out of scope for the default Friendica interface, and might be better served with an external web-app.

Issues that don't seem to be tracked currently, but are mostly a "nice-to-have" and have a lower priority:

• Ability to mix "what's hot" sorting with circle filtering: useful for news for example.
• Export posts in Firefish-compatible format: not mandatory, but would be handy for data migration purposes. Alternatively, one could make Firefish itself compatible with Friendica-formatted backups.

!Friendica Support

Hallo Fediverse! Bitte um Rückmeldung + Ergänzungen: Übersichts-Tabelle mit Fediverse-Diensten, Vergleichsdiensten und Funktionen

Ich schreibe einen Artikel über den #FediverseFachtag und in dem Rahmen natürlich auch über das #Fediverse . Zielgruppe sind Leute, die wahrscheinlich zum Großteil noch gar nix vom Fediverse gehört haben.
Dazu bin ich dabei, eine Tabelle zu erstellen, in der einige Fedi-Dienste sowie deren Haupt-/ besondere Funktionen aufgeführt werden sollen.

Das ist der derzeitige Entwurf:

"ähnlich wie..."
Ein Vergleich mit kommerziellen Plattformen ist natürlich immer nur zum Teil passend. Ich kenne auch keinen der kommerziellen Dienste aus eigener Erfahrung, aber für die avisierte Zielgruppe kann so ein Vergleich vielleicht trotzdem eine hilfreiche Orientierung sein. Vielleicht gibt es da aber auch Vergleiche, die passender sind. Einige Dienste (bspw. Medium, Podigee) kannte ich auch noch nicht mal vom Namen her, sondern habe das nur aus ähnlichen Vergleichstabellen übernommen.

Zu den "besonderen Funktionen":
Insbesondere Friendica, Firefish und v.a. Hubzilla haben so viele Funktionen, dass diese im Rahmen der Tabelle nur exemplarisch aufgeführt werden können und die Auswahl ist subjektiv. Hier wäre die Frage, ob das eine passende Auswahl ist, ob besonders wichtige fehlen oder ob andere Funktionen wichtiger oder besonderer sind.

Wenn Ihr also Anregungen oder Ergänzungen habt, gerne her damit! Danke!

@Fediverse

#Mastodon #GlitchSoc #Ecko #Firefish #Misskey #Akkoma #Pleroma #Friendica #Hubzilla #Pixelfed #Peertube #Lemmy #kbin #Funkwhale #Castopod #WriteFreely #Plume #WordPress #Bookwyrm #Mobilizon #Gancio #Owncast #AskFedi

A packed week; Switzerland joins the fediverse, discussions on how to organise the group responsible for the ActivityPub specification, thoughts and developments regarding Lemmy and governance and more! This week also saw major conversations on the feeds regarding blocklist, and especially The Bad Space, with discussions and allegations getting quite heated. I’ve decided to move my writeup of the situation towards next week; getting a bit of distance in time helps me with doing the situation justice.

Switzerland joins the fediverse

The Swiss government has officially launched their Mastodon server at social.admin.ch! In the press release (not available in English), they state that this is a pilot test that will run for one year. The server is intended for the Federal Council and the government departments.

Some departments that have already registered an account include the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department for Economy, education and research. Swiss’ multilingual culture poses an interesting challenge; in which language will the accounts posts? The Department for Foreign Affairs maintain a separate account for English communication, with the other account posting in German, French and Italian. The spokesperson of the Swiss Government, André Simonazzi, also has an account, and posts in all four languages.

In the blog post announcing the new server, a few characters are listed as to why Mastodon is ‘fundamentally attractive for government communications’. They point out that decentralisation avoids the control of both an individual company and state censorship authorities. The privacy friendliness, and the transparency towards data is also mentioned as a positive.

For people who have been active on the fediverse for a while, this idea of freedom and independency is not new. What is striking however, is that we are seeing a shift towards governments also realising this. The value of digital autonomy for government entities is cannot be overstated enough.

Meanwhile, the Dutch government is actively working on their Mastodon pilot as well. In a post they echoed this sentiment of digital autonomy, adding that dependency on other platforms can harm public values. They also state that the goal of their Mastodon pilot is to get all (!) governmental organisations to be a part of it, reiterating that they are trying to find out if Mastodon can help the entire government (“de hele overheid”) reach their citizens.

The SWICG had a meeting about restructuring

The Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG) had a meeting this week, and one of the items that was being discussed is the potential restructuring of the group. This is a fairly relevant and important discussion, but the meaning of this might need some context: the W3C is the main organisation that is responsible for internet standards, such as ActivityPub, but many others as well. They can start Working Groups, who can produce official recommendations for internet standards. Between 2014 and 2018, the Social Web Working Group worked on the standards that power the fediverse, and in 2018 the W3C officially published the ActivityPub standard as a recommendation. The Working Group, having completed their recommendation, spun down, and started the Social Web Incubator Community Group, which maintains and coordinates work on the Social Web standards.

The main relevant difference between a Working Group and a Community Group, is that a members of a Working Group need to be either part of a organisation that is a (paid) member of the W3C, or be invited in as an Independent Expert. A Community Group is open to everyone. A Working Group can publish updates to the official documents, while a Community Group can only publish errata and clarifications.

The basic tradeoff can be summarised as follows: people feel that the standards as they are currently published need updates and work. This is hard to do with the mandate of a CG. Rechartering a WG enables more updates to the standards and protocols. This comes at the cost of openness however, as anyone can join a CG, and the ability to join a WG is significantly limited. As typically the criteria for being a member of a WG is to either be an employee of a W3C member organisation, or to be invited in as an Independent Expert, this might give participating organisations and companies more influence than independent fediverse developers.

The discussion on this will continue on Friday 22th (1300 UTC) with the next meeting of the SWICG.

Lemmy Governance and Beehaw doubts

Lemmy is working on making the process for changes more democratic, by adding RFCs. RFC stands for Request For Comments, and are meant to describe how major new features can be implemented in the software. By first explaining the potential changes, and allowing everyone to comment on them, more people can get involved in the process. Announcement here, directory here.

Meanwhile, the Lemmy server Beehaw.org is having doubts about continuing to use Lemmy. The Beehaw.org server is a Lemmy server with strong moderation standards that has been around. Ever since the new influx of users, they find that the moderation tools of Lemmy are too limited to properly deal with all the moderation work that needs to be done on posts and users that enter Beehaw via other, less well moderated, servers. They also list the lack of acknowledgement of the Lemmy developers on the seriousness of these issues as contributing to their hesitation to keep using Lemmy. A few weeks ago I reported on the issue of CSAM on Lemmy. The admin of Beehaw posted about the impact this had on their mental health, and by extension, on the urgency to look for a platform with better moderation tools. The Beehaw team expect that it will be in the order of months before a jump to a different platform is made.

WordPress and ActivityPub

The WordPress plugin for connecting a website to the fediverse via ActivityPub has officially launched in a 1.0 version. It comes with a variety of new features that further accentuate the social nature of connecting a blog to the fediverse. It allows you to follow the entire website now, instead of a singular author. It also gives you the option for an easy ‘follow me’ button, so that people can easily tell that the WordPress website is a part of the fediverse. Or showcase it with a ‘followers’ block.

The biggest news however, is that this plugin will soon also come to WordPress.com. So far, it is only available for people who do self-hosted versions of WordPress. The support for WordPress.com is “coming soon”, and will greatly expand the number of people who can make use this to connect their website to the fediverse.

For more detailed info, check out WPtavern’s blog about this. WeDistribute has an detailed guide on how to use the plugin, and use it to enable comments from across the fediverse on a WordPress blog.

The links

• Kbin creator Ernest gives a status update about the work on Kbin, as well as the amount of pressure the work brings.
• iOS app SoraSNS is already one of the more interesting fediverse apps in development, that supports a variety of platforms and has interesting ideas with algorithmic timelines. It now supports Bluesky as well.
• Bonfire is an interesting upcoming microblogging platform for the fediverse. They’ve announced that they are working towards 1.0 in the coming months.
• WriteFreely has not seen major updates recently, with updates and pull requests , and a PostFreely is a new fork that has started to been worked on.

Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this update every Sunday in your mailbox, subscribe below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-35/

nutomic

2023-09-11 09:58:27

Lemmy RFCs

We created a new repository for host requests for comment. It is based on the Rust RFC repo and meant to describe how major new features can be implemented. In this way more people can get involved in the discussion, without having to know Rust or getting lost in implementation details. If there is a major new feature you would like to see implemented, please consider writing an RFC first. Also feel free to suggest changes to the RFC process so that it works better for Lemmy.

One RFC was already created a few weeks ago for supporting post tags. It should be added to the repo soon.

GitHub - LemmyNet/rfcs: Requests for comment for changes to Lemmy

Requests for comment for changes to Lemmy. Contribute to LemmyNet/rfcs development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Have to admit that #Friendica is the best #Fediverse project I ever tried.

One of the nicest things that I really like about it is that, including Markdown support, Friendica allows you to write posts with titles!

Plus, Friendica has support for each of Fediverse projects!

When it comes to #Lemmy / #kbin or #WriteFreely , Friendica do shows titles, descriptions and comments!

Plus, you can not only like comments but dislike them as well - there's a button for that!

Messages, the direct ones are supported in the best way possible!

I recommend Friendica 100% to check it out. it has ALL of the features people had asked for!

Migrating posts, built-in account switcher and creation, Groups (like Lists on #Mastodon ) , Forums creation - you can even sort them by "All", "Persons", "Organizations", "News" and "Forums" labels are available at the top of section "Account types" which means you decide what type of feed do you need to see!

You can also follow RSS feeds which is great too 😀

You have unlimited text posting here!

That's all GREAT!

Plus, I understand, that Friendica has its own, very nice and cool community here which is GREAT too!

It's better then ANY of else community I ever seen on other Fediverse projects!

Free edit button, quote posts supported - ALL of that is cool and great!

Maybe I'll selfhost Friendica one day, who knows....

Question: Why do people say Friendica is buggy?

And maybe, I didn't listed ALL of Friendica features, but they're great anyways!

Albums of photos - that feature is built-in!

You know, I think I can call Friendica "an everything app".

Seriously. Every feature that is requested (and not yet still released!!!) are already Friendica has!

Friendica is PERFECT! It even supports theme customization and backgrounds!

Folders, following hashtags - I can't list ALL.

Scheduling posts, two way to view Friendica, mobile support - everything is cool and GREAT!

You can do blog posts here too! With images!

You don't have to use ANY other projects! Friendica is what you need, since it has EVERYTHING!

Friendica also supports ALL protocols (like it used to support #Twitter but it supports as well other social media, so you can connect them and use all of them in one Friendica!), and it also supports adding images how many you want and place wherever you want them to be!

Plus, Friendica allows you to have UNLIMITED profile fields as well!

Man, I keep exploring Friendica and....have to say developers of that project had done a VERY good job!!!!

Thank you for reading!

Please, make sure to follow here for more posts, since I'm going to start posting blog posts!

Good night 😀

P.S. BTW, I never posted articles before, Friendica is the first platform that made me to do this 😀

I'm very proud of that platform and myself 😀

Haven't tried Calendar and Personal notes yet, but going to try them out tomorrow and will share with you guys about my experience 😀

I think, I'm even going to post more in future 😀

P.S.2. This is my first article, so I'm sorry for any beginner mistakes 😀 Hope to learn Friendica with you guys 😀

P.S.3 Question is possible to edit usernames here, guys?

Why #FediPact is important (1/3)

The #fediverse should all agree to never federate with #Facebook

• Mastodon is a 1:1 #Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk, but otherwise absolutely identical to Twitter. I mean, how could a microblogging service possibly be any different from Twitter? That's just as strange an idea as a desktop operating system that isn't exactly like Windows. Unless you're a Mac user, that is.
  
• Mastodon.social is Mastodon. Because that's the website you've been pointed at on Twitter.
  
• Also, the Fediverse = Mastodon. Only Mastodon.

• You've got three timelines. Next to your personal timeline which lists whatever your contacts have tooted or boosted, there's the local timeline which lists what the other users on your instance have tooted or boosted (this is how and why special interest instances or local instances make sense), and there's the federated timeline which is the local timeline plus what local users' contacts on other instances have tooted or boosted.
  There is, however, no timeline for the entire Fediverse.
  
• There's no full-text search for the entire Fediverse. Deal with it.
  
• There's no secret algorithm telling you what to read or whom to follow. All timelines are strictly chronological.
  
• This also means that there's no secret algorithm shoving your toots into other people's faces. If you want people to discover your toots, use #hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a gimmick. In the Fediverse, they're vital.
  
• There's a #newhere hashtag. It matters. As someone who is new here, you're expected to write an introduction, use the #newhere hashtag in it and then pin your introduction so that it's always on top or near the top of your personal timeline for others to read.
  
• There's no quote retweet. And there will never be. Eugen Rochko has a very strong opinion on that, he doesn't want that popular trolling tool on Mastodon, so this won't happen.
  
• Privacy settings per toot. You can choose who can read your toot. If you write threads, it's common practice to only set the first toot to public and all other ones to unlisted so that they don't clutter the public timelines.
  
• Delayed toots. You can choose when your toot goes out.
  
• Content warnings (CW) that blank out your toot. And yes, they're taken very seriously. People are likely to demand you use them when you don't.
  
• Alt-text for images. Again, people are likely to demand you create them when you don't. Some people on the Fediverse are blind and use screen readers, and they, too, want to know what that picture in your toot is.
  
• Not to mention that toots can be almost twice as long as tweets, namely 500 characters. Unless the owner of an instance has changed that number.

• Not all of them are "not Twitter clones", i.e. microblogging services. Pleroma is another one which was created out of disagreements with how Mastodon works. Akkoma is a Pleroma fork which came to exist because someone didn't like where Pleroma went. There's also Misskey. Obviously, they aren't "Mastodon clones" either, they were designed to be different from each other. And there's GNU social, the oldest one on the list.
  
• Pixelfed is "not an #Instagram clone".
  
• Friendica is definitely "not a #Facebook clone" because, while created for a similar purpose, it's still vastly different. And it federates with just about everything that moves including e-mail or WordPress. It even used to federate with Facebook itself eons ago. By the way, #Friendica makes everything possible that I've done in this post which is also why it's usually filed under "macroblogging". But I'm not on Friendica; I'll get to that. Also, Friendica is the second-oldest one on the list.
  
• Mobilizon is "not a #GoogleCalendar or #Doodle clone".
  
• Funkwhale is "not a #SoundCloud or #BandCamp or #Spotify clone", also because you're unlikely to find mainstream commercial music on it. Castopod: ditto, but specialising on podcasts.
  
• PeerTube is "not a #YouTube clone".
  
• Owncast is "not a #Twitch clone".
  
• Lemmy is "not a #Reddit or #HackerNews clone", although the "not a Reddit clone" part can be debated.
  
• WriteFreely and Plume are "not #Medium clones".
  
• BookWyrm is "not a #GoodReads clone".
  
• Flockingbird is "not a #LinkedIn clone" at all, also because rather than being a service of its own, it piggybacks on the rest of the Fediverse by picking up hashtags.
  
• Hubzilla was a successor to Friendica, but it's much more than "not a Facebook clone". It's also not a clone of whichever CMS and/or cloud service you use. It can provide you with your own personal organiser including a #CalDAV calendar (next to the public event calendar) and a #CardDAV addressbook, your own #WebDAV cloud space, your own online photo album, your own website, your own blog and/or your own wiki on top of just about everything that Friendica does. It's the third-oldest on the list and still older than Mastodon.
  
• And there's much more.