Event Federation

2023-12-20 12:14:07

When writing the initial version of our project plan as signed and agreed with by NlNet we didn’t know yet about the dynamics of the community, specifically about how the cooperation between the maintainers of the #WordPress #ActivityPub plugin and #Mobilizon would be like. The level of collaboration with other #Fediverse developers would determine whether our project goals could only be achieved through a series of workarounds, or whether we could work together to strengthen interoperability and compatibility in the Fediverse.

Mobilizon was, until our project, the only Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio limits its ActivityPub capabilities to sending notes, but is working on a true federation of events, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: 304, 33, 321, 1509, 1507, 1392, 1385, 1388, 1387, 1378, 1376.

The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress AktivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @pfefferle again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.

Tasks done (almost)

• We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
• We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
• Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
• Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.

Upcoming tasks

• Implement FEP-2677: Identifying the Application Actor
• Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
• Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
• Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
• Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.

If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress in case your are running a WordPress site with events yourself, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.

https://event-federation.eu/2023/12/20/it-is-all-about-the-community/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #Gancio #Mobilizon #PeerTube #WordPress

les · GitLab

Framagit

^GitLab

Matthias Pfefferle

2023-12-04 15:52:09

# sidebar

Vor einigen Wochen habe ich Ian Steward auf einem Automattic Meetup kennengelernt. Er kam auf mich zu, um mir zu erzählen, dass er kürzlich auf einen ziemlich alten Artikel von mir gestoßen ist. In diesem Artikel geht es darum, wie man die Reihenfolge der Sidebars im K2-WordPress-Theme ändert.

Ich habe K2 sehr lange auf notiz.Blog eingesetzt und mich viel und lange mit dessen technischem Aufbau und der semantischen HTML-Struktur beschäftigt!

Aber außer dem kurzen Schwelgen in alten Erinnerungen hab ich mir nicht weiter Gedanken zu dem Thema gemacht. Immerhin gibt es das Theme schon seit einer halben Ewigkeit nicht mehr und Sidebars sind auch aus der Mode!(?)!

Dann schreibt @ricmac letzte Woche aber folgendes auf Mastodon:

Sidebar Culture: remember things in your blog sidebar like blogrolls, “Influential articles”, Flickr photos, MyBlogLog (a proto-social network for bloggers). All this stuff and more helped make early 2000s blogging fun and more communal. Would love to find a way to bring that back in 2024…

https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/111477809540922177

…das hat mich dann doch noch einmal neugierig gemacht und ich habe eine alte notiz.Blog Version von 2008 (auf Basis von K2) raus gekramt.

Fast die Hälfte der Seite war Sidebar 😍

Vieles von damals hat mich schwer an den Artikel „The lost infrastructure of social media.“ von @anildash (und der IndieWeb Version davon) erinnert.

Ich bin gespannt was @ricmac sich einfallen lässt…

Thinking about a personal website re-design (or a new site), so I can play around with fediverse integration, sidebar culture, and other fun things. Thinking of using @[url=https://fosstodon.org/users/eleventy]Eleventy 🎈 v2.0.1[/url] (have used Hugo before and this seems better). Maybe a new site is better, as I don’t want to have to migrate ricmac.org from WordPress…for now, anyway. Is it normal for people to have two personal websites these days? I should just start a test site with 11ty and see how it goes… #thinkingoutloud

https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/111489177217562043

… und ich werde die Position meiner Sidebar vielleicht nochmal überdenken!

Alles kommt wieder ☺️

https://notiz.blog/b/6mS

#sidebars #theme #thinkingoutloud #Web20 #WordPress

The lost infrastructure of social media. - Anil Dash - Medium

As social networks grew in popularity and influence, the old decentralized blogosphere fell apart and those early services consolidated, leaving all the power in the hands of a few private companies…

^{Anil Dash (Medium)}

…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ jesuisatire bitPickup

2023-10-17 13:04:10

friendica VPS setup on ubuntu 22.04 LTS

@Friendica Support

Hi,
I'm working on my first #friendica #VPS installation, here you'll find my initial post about general thoughts like what distro to use, size and costs.
I'm using the tutorial "creating a friendica server - ubuntu" by @Hank G ☑️.

As of now I'm doing well in the process and want to start this post to document differences and questions while installing the server.

This server is going to host an already existing friendica node I have to move from another hosting provider. That means that for example the DB doesn't have to be created from scratch but moved and other smaller details.

I will try to address the different steps of installation in answers to this post and appreciate help, ideas and observations.

I'm doing this from a #linux desktop environment from the console but there shouldn't be differences if you want to do this from a #windows machine.

#fediVerse #tutorial #fediHelp #activityPub

…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ jesuisatire bitPickup

2023-10-12 18:28:38

what VPS offer fits best for a small friendica instance?

@Friendica Support
@Friendica Admins
@Friendica Developers

Hi there,
in the end I want to try to setup my first own hosted friendica VPS on a small setup:
1gig RAM/1 Core/25gig

The idea is kinda single user instance with a few forum pages.

The hosting provider has the following options:

• debian bullsey - vpn server
• debian bookworm - wireguard server
• debian bookworm - bookworm 2023-07-03
• debian bookworm - bookworm 2023-07-03 LEMP (nginx+php8.2+mariaDB10.5)
• debian bookworm - nextcloud
• ubuntu 22.04.01LTS
• CENTOS8.1 - 2020-05-03
• cleanVPS to upload own ISO

I'm used to debian/devuan on PC, so am obviously inclined to go for debian but have no idea what version would be the best choice.

In the first place the debian LEMP option looks like the way to go.
Latest experience with a new friendica installation seemed to be in need of PHP8.1 instead of PHP8.2.
Is it difficult to downgrade that?

Also, I'm kinda worried about security in general, even tho the data exposed will only be my own, so there is no responsibility with others.
Are there more security risks than on a shared hosting with let's say a standard phpBB forum page?

The idea would be to point the IP from my existing hosting provider to the VPS.

• Do we have some general "how to setup" for a VPS setting from scratch?
• Anyone interested in creating such a "how to" in a conversation with me here to have a refence or base to sum that up for the frindica wiki?
• Could it even be of interest to create a "friendica VPS-ISO installation" with the help of git.friendi.ca for example?

@TupambAdmin
@bitPickup mʕ•ﻌ•ʔm

Laurens Hof

2023-09-17 18:57:31

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.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

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

Meer overheidsorganisaties testen Mastodon - Digitale Overheid

De pilot voor de Mastodon-server van de overheid krijgt steeds meer deelnemers. Het doel is om alle overheidsorganisaties te betrekken.

^{Eva Kloor (Digitale Overheid)}

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