The #ContentNation situation is a dumpster fire for the #Fediverse. What would you do if you were building something, people misunderstood what it was, and things escalated to a point that someone loaded CSAM onto your server for the sake of reporting it?

https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/

We Distribute

2024-03-03 00:19:00

Yesterday, Mastodon was abuzz regarding a strange new scraper that seemed to be pulling people’s profiles and content streams into a platform designed around monetization. Dubbed Content Nation, the site’s combination of strange design, stock images, and focus on getting paid for posts raised more than a few eyebrows. Indeed, the site visually resembles something akin to a domain parking page, with an eye-watering visual layout and strange mix of posts that don’t seem to fit anywhere.

• 
• Holy stock art, Batman!
• I can’t make heads or tails of this.

Some long-standing admins poked and prodded at it, before declaring that Content Nation was, indeed, an effort to scrape Fediverse content for profit. It shared Unlisted posts in search results, seemingly rejected blocks, and deleted materials seemed to reappear on the website nearly instantly. All a person needed to do to verify it was put in their own user handle, and see their posts and profile get scraped out of nowhere.

A lot of people were angry, and readily pulled out the torches and pitchforks. The sad truth, though, was that this wasn’t a malicious scraper trying to crawl the network and make money off of people’s posts. It was some guy’s hobby project to build a service similar to micro.blog.

What is Content Nation?

Content Nation is, essentially, a feed reader for a small publishing community that just happened to be experimenting with ActivityPub. It’s a project developed by Sascha Nitsch, a backend developer and management consultant from Germany. Sascha is a relative outsider to the Fediverse that heard about the network, loved the idea behind it, and tried to integrate his site into the network.

The site is, understandably, somewhat jarring in its appearance, because Sascha is primarily a backend developer, not a frontend designer. He was more interested in building out a robust list of features prior to doing any visual design work, because the platform was still taking shape. As a one-man operation, this kind of approach made the most sense to him.

“The site was and is free,” Sascha wrote, “no ads, no cookies nor tracking. I did not make any money with the federation; it’s a service for users on the platform. And it was never intended to be to make money with those content.”

How did the Fediverse React?

Several people came forward to point out to Sascha that his platform interoperates very, very poorly with Mastodon, and that Sascha did not do sufficient research prior to launching his service. Until recently, Content Nation didn’t properly make use of a User Agent in its request, so it was easy to mistake for a scraper.

Compounding things further, people didn’t realize that the site implemented Webfinger in its search function, allowing people to load remote content by putting in an address into a search field. People would go to Content Nation, search for themselves, and inadvertently kick off a fetch request, leading them to believe they had just been scraped. In reality, this is how 99% of Fediverse servers operate by default.

When users sent GDPR takedowns, Sascha would comply, but the system had nothing in place to block anything. Those same users were distraught to once again search for themselves, only to find their own data all over again.

The High Barrier of Entry for Fediverse Development

The shortcomings described above paint a picture: Sascha was building a free ActivityPub library for his project While he managed to get the basic concepts down, there were still a lot of missing pieces that are essential for participating in the modern Fediverse. Unfortunately, a lot of those resources are not readily available to anyone.

Here’s the thing: if you were to take the ActivityPub specification from the W3C, and implement it as specified, you’d end up with something that wouldn’t correctly talk to any service in use today. Mastodon, and platforms designed to talk to it, have a dozen or so behaviors that are not actually in the spec at all: Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search are just a few of them.

Many of these things are almost completely undocumented, and can only be developed by lengthy conversations with people who already built those things. Even Mastodon’s own specs say very little. The majority of people dismissed Content Nation as simply being a malicious attempt to slurp up their public and private content for profit. Even when Sascha tried to defend himself, he was ridiculed and mocked.

From Bad to Worse

Aside from simply blocking the domain and moving on, community members decided to have a little bit of extra fun, attempting to “make the crawler crash“, send angry emails to the service operator, and more. After some study of how the site worked, one person had the malicious idea to send a remote post containing child pornography to the site, before getting someone else to report Content Nation for Child Sexual Abuse Material.

To be clear: someone searched a list of known illegal material, loaded that remote content onto Content Nation locally, and then put up a red flag for someone to file a report. Given the server’s jurisdiction being in Germany, this could have been catastrophic: Germany’s laws regarding CSAM stipulate a one-year prison term minimum for possession of this kind of material. Just look at the recent case of a teacher who found out that a pornographic video was circulating about one of her students. When she tried to turn in evidence to the police, she was arrested.

It’s a case that causes people to shake their heads: A teacher wanted to help a student whose intimate video was circulating at school and now has to answer in court for, among other things, distributing child pornography.

Following a complaint from the public prosecutor’s office, the Koblenz regional court overturned the decision of the Montabaur district court not to open main proceedings in this case. “The regional court, like the public prosecutor, considers the behavior of the accused to be criminal in principle,” said senior public prosecutor Thomas Büttinghaus. The educator is currently facing at least a year in prison – and with it the loss of her civil servant status.

Sascha’s life could have been turned upside down for absolutely nothing. Say what you will about how his website looked, or how his platform functioned: none of these things warranted such a disgusting level of abuse. Somebody basically tried to send a fledgling platform developer to prison, because they didn’t like what he was doing. A series of assumptions and misunderstandings escalated to this point.

Why is this Important?

Over the years, Mastodon’s user culture has become incredibly insular and hostile towards outsiders. Despite repeated claims of “People are just nicer here!” and “Everyone is just so welcoming!”, often those preaching about privacy and consent are the first to harass anyone doing something they don’t like. Reactions have extended to doxxing, death threats, DDoS attacks, and apparently, distribution of CSAM. Just the other week, Mastodon users were harassing a guy who built a protocol bridge that hadn’t even been enabled yet.

Neither of these things are first occurrences, either. People in the past have tried to build tooling for the Fediverse, from search engines to disposable account services for testing to indexes of verified accounts. People like Wil Wheaton were harassed off the network for their ignorance of nuances about who was on a given blocklist that they shared. Some Lemmy instsances have been flooded with CSAM as part of a community retaliation effort from other instances.

Mastodon’s user community have also long looked down their noses at other platforms such as Pleroma, due to a combination of platform rivalry, cultural clashes, personal squabbles, and an “us vs them” mentality. It wasn’t so long ago that simply using Pleroma was considered a valid reason for blocking someone on sight, because good people only used Mastodon.

Source: FediDB.org

Mastodon still makes up the majority of the Fediverse at this point, and acts as a defacto standard for ActivityPub. Many parts of the Mastodon community still threaten to block, doxx, or harass people simply because they expressed a thought or opinion that stands in contrast to what the hive mind demands.

Even Damon, at one point, has received death threats from total strangers for his perspective on FediPact and Threads that other people didn’t agree with. He’s told me on several occasions that the Fediverse doesn’t feel like it was made for people like him, and a good portion of it is due to Mastodon’s user culture.

Whatever this thing is, it’s not sustainable. A big aspect of Mastodon’s norms center around a type of Puritanical culture that half the time, isn’t even consistent with itself. We can’t advocate for a space and say that it’s so much better than everywhere else, when so many people are subjected to this.

The Aftermath

A report was filed with Content Nation’s host, Hetzner, due to the presence of CSAM being detected. However, Sascha’s platform was only set up to cache remote content for an hour prior to purging it. The best conclusion we can draw from this, at the moment, is that someone willingly set Content Nation up.

“I’m not sure it even was CSAM,” Sascha writes in a private chat, “I never saw the pictures, as they had already been deleted. The data was already removed from the cache, and the original server was down, so it wasn’t refreshed [on Content Nation].”

“My flat could have been raided, and I would not have an electronic device left to write this,” he added.

As of this writing, Content Nation has turned off all Fediverse integrations, and Sascha has been turned off of having anything to do with the network after having this experience. He has been effectively bullied off the network.

How can we avoid this happening again?

Throughout researching this article and situation, I think there are several things that really, really need to change for the better. The modern Fediverse operates involves a long list of internal knowledge that’s not really written down anywhere. No part of the ActivityPub spec or Mastodon talks about how to implement their special pieces, so that people writing new servers can be good actors.

As it stands today, no singular piece of Fediverse software includes instructions to load a “worst of the worst” blocklist when setting up an instance, or to put a Webfinger search form behind a login page. What seems like common sense to some people is literally a new concept to others.

Culturally, we need to accept that most people coming into the community for the first time are operating with a lack of prior knowledge. We can’t simply cross our arms and say “You should have known better”, and socially punish people, when in fact there was no way for them to learn about it.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/

#CSAM #Harassment #TrustSafety

Twitter rival Mastodon isn’t safe from online mobs either

The mass reporting and suspension of actor Wil Wheaton prompts the open-source platform to examine its moderation tools.

^{Megan Farokhmanesh (The Verge)}

@Urząd Ochrony Danych Osobowych Witam na #fediverse.
I od razu pytanie (😁) - jak należy rozumieć na podanej wyżej stronie #uodo fragment

"Z kolei na LinkedIn planowane jest publikowanie dłuższych i bardziej pogłębionych materiałów skierowanych przede wszystkich dla biznesu"?

Czy to znaczy, że będą przez uodo publikowane jakieś treści, do których dostęp będzie wymagać posiadania konta linkedin (bo będą wyłącznie na tym portalu) ?
Warto zwrócić uwagę, że serwery sieci fediverse oprócz braku reklam i algorytmów szeregujących treści zapewniają dostęp do publicznych postów bez algorytmów szpiegujących/profilujących/identyfikujących odbiorców co wydaje się szczególnie ważne w kontekście publikacji właśnie na temat ochrony danych osobowych.
Nie ma również żadnych przeszkód technicznych, żeby na fediverse (w tym na mastodonie) publikować teksty dowolnej długości - ew. limit znaków wpisu jest pod kontrolą administratora każdej instancji.

Decentralizacja w #Fediverse.

Zakładacie profile na nowych instancjach?
Zdziwienie, że na starych (innych) instancjach nie widzicie nowych wpisów?

Nieważne, czy to Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube czy inny serwis, warto zadbać o obserwację tych nowych profili na jak największej liczbie popularnych instancji.

Bo ActivityPub działa podobnie do e-mail. Wysyła wpisy jedynie tam, gdzie są adresy i profile, które go obserwują.
Nie ma centralnego repozytorium wszystkich wpisów jak w serwisach centralizowanych (np. Twitter/FB/YouTube).

Więc zanim zaczniecie publikować treści z nowych profili, poproście znajome osoby z różnych instancji, by wasze nowe konto zaobserwowały. A już na pewno zaobserwujcie sami siebie z własnych innych profili. Wtedy te treści mają szansę się federować na inne serwery. Inaczej pozostaną dostępne jedynie na instancji oryginalnej.

Tak to działa od samych początków #fediwersum opartego o protokół #ActivityPub 😀

#FediTipsPL #FediPomoc

Drogie, drodzy, Fedisie i osoby PolSocialove ❤️

Macie od dzisiaj możliwość przekazać 1,5% ze swoich podatków na fundację FTdL @ftdl , która prowadzi kawałek polskiego #Fediverse.

Wiem, że macie swoje ulubione organizacje, pomyślcie o Fundacji, która nie ma innego finansowania niż Wasze Wsparcie 💶

Jeśli dacie się przekonać, a IMO warto, to w PiT należy wpisać nie tylko numer KRS (Fundacji FaniMani), ale i cel szczegółowy, który oznacza wsparcie FTdL.

– KRS: 0000507234
– cel szczegółowy: 85488

Wielkie dzięki za rozważenie i wsparcie 😀

Można też podbić tego tootka 🚀

Niech Polskie Fedi się rozwija, serwerów przybywa, a ludzie walą tutaj drzwiami i oknami 😀

#WspieramPolSocial #WspieramFTdL

Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spending the day at the park".

So, is there a way to recreate that early Web 2.0 experience with open data and ActivityPub? Let's find out!

This quest is divided into two parts.

1. Get nearby "Points of Interest" (POI) from OpenStreetMap.
2. Share a location on the Fediverse.

OpenStreetMap API

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps. It is a freely available resource which anyone can edit (if they're skilled enough).

It also comes with a pretty decent API for querying things. For example, nw["amenity"]({{bbox}}); finds all "amenities" near a specific location.

As you can see, it has highlighted some useful areas - a pharmacy and a pub. But it has ignored other useful locations - the train station and the park. It has also included some things that we may not want - bike parking and a taxi rank.

What API call is needed to get useful locations of of OverPass?

It's possible to specify the type of thing to find using nw["amenity"="restaurant"]; - but adding every single type of thing would quickly end up with a very large query containing hundreds of types.

It is also possible to exclude specific types of places. This retrieves all amenities except for fast food joints:

nw["amenity"]({{bbox}});-nw["amenity"="fast_food"]({{bbox}});

Perhaps one solution is just to return everything and let the user decide if they want to check in to a telephone kiosk or a fire hydrant? That's a bit user-hostile.

Instead, this query returns everything which has a name nw["name"]({{bbox}});

That cuts out any unnamed things - like park benches and car-sharing spots. But it does add named roads and train lines.

It is possible to use filters to exclude results from OverPass. The best that I can come up with is: nw["name"][!"highway"][!"railway"][!"waterway"][!"power"]({{bbox}});

That gets everything which has a name, but isn't a highway or railway or waterway or powerline. It isn't perfect - but it will do!

This is the query which will retrieve the 25 nearest things within 100 metres of a specific latitude and longitude. It includes the name and any other tags, the location, and the OSM ID.

overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[out:json];nw["name"][!"highway"][!"railway"][!"waterway"][!"power"](around:100,51.5202,-0.1040);out center qt 25;

ActivityPub

There's good news and bad news here. Firstly, ActivityStreams (which are subscribed to in ActivityPub) supports the concept of "Place" and "Location".

Once the user has a latitude and longitude, the can share it - along with a message, photo, or anything else.

Something like:

{    "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",    "type": "Note",    "content": "Here in NYC! <a href=\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/958999496\">John Lennon&#039;s Imagine Mosaic</a>.",    "attachment": [        {            "type": "Image",            "mediaType": "image\/jpeg",            "url": "https:\/\/fastly.4sqi.net\/img\/general\/590x786\/56367_9pxuZJD7d1hgPdaMFcFq1pipvTTMynBJsYcpHH-b8mU.jpg",            "name": "A photo of a mosaic which says &#039;Imagine&#039;."        }    ],    "location": {        "name": "John Lennon&#039;s Imagine",        "type": "Place",        "longitude": 40.77563,        "latitude": -73.97474    }}

It is worth noting that Mastodon doesn't (natively) support location - if you view my repost of that PixelFed post you'll see there's no location metadata attached. That's OK! It just means that the status needs to include human-readable data.

Similarly, Mastodon doesn't support the arrive vocabulary. So this will be limited to a message with a location attached.

Other ActivityPub services do support location.

Putting it all together

Well… that's a job for next week. Probably!

• Building a web site which gets the user's location is easy.
• Getting the data from OverPass should be straightforward.
• Creating an ActivityPub server which can post geotagged notes into the Fediverse might be a little beyond my skillset! Some testing with Darius Kazemi's AP Glitch suggests this should work.

If you'd like to help, please leave a comment.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/

#ActivityPub #fediverse #FOURSQUARE #geolocation #OpenStreetMap

Terence Eden’s Blog

2024-01-27 12:34:55

Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spending the day at the park".

So, is there a way to recreate that early Web 2.0 experience with open data and ActivityPub? Let's find out!

This quest is divided into two parts.

1. Get nearby "Points of Interest" (POI) from OpenStreetMap.
2. Share a location on the Fediverse.

OpenStreetMap API

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps. It is a freely available resource which anyone can edit (if they're skilled enough).

It also comes with a pretty decent API for querying things. For example, nw["amenity"]({{bbox}}); finds all "amenities" near a specific location.

As you can see, it has highlighted some useful areas - a pharmacy and a pub. But it has ignored other useful locations - the train station and the park. It has also included some things that we may not want - bike parking and a taxi rank.

What API call is needed to get useful locations of of OverPass?

It's possible to specify the type of thing to find using nw["amenity"="restaurant"]; - but adding every single type of thing would quickly end up with a very large query containing hundreds of types.

It is also possible to exclude specific types of places. This retrieves all amenities except for fast food joints:

nw["amenity"]({{bbox}});-nw["amenity"="fast_food"]({{bbox}});

Again, that would be complex.

Perhaps one solution is just to return everything and let the user decide if they want to check in to a telephone kiosk or a fire hydrant? That's a bit user-hostile.

Instead, this query returns everything which has a name nw["name"]({{bbox}});

That cuts out any unnamed things - like park benches and car-sharing spots. But it does add named roads and train lines.

It is possible to use filters to exclude results from OverPass. The best that I can come up with is: nw["name"][!"highway"][!"railway"][!"waterway"][!"power"]({{bbox}});

That gets everything which has a name, but isn't a highway or railway or waterway or powerline. It isn't perfect - but it will do!

This is the query which will retrieve the 25 nearest things within 100 metres of a specific latitude and longitude. It includes the name and any other tags, the location, and the OSM ID.

overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[out:json];nw["name"][!"highway"][!"railway"][!"waterway"][!"power"](around:100,51.5202,-0.1040);out center qt 25;

ActivityPub

There's good news and bad news here. Firstly, ActivityStreams (which are subscribed to in ActivityPub) supports the concept of "Place" and "Location".

Once the user has a latitude and longitude, the can share it - along with a message, photo, or anything else.

Something like:

{    "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",    "type": "Note",    "content": "Here in NYC! <a href=\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/958999496\">John Lennon&#039;s Imagine Mosaic</a>.",    "attachment": [        {            "type": "Image",            "mediaType": "image\/jpeg",            "url": "https:\/\/fastly.4sqi.net\/img\/general\/590x786\/56367_9pxuZJD7d1hgPdaMFcFq1pipvTTMynBJsYcpHH-b8mU.jpg",            "name": "A photo of a mosaic which says &#039;Imagine&#039;."        }    ],    "location": {        "name": "John Lennon&#039;s Imagine",        "type": "Place",        "longitude": 40.77563,        "latitude": -73.97474    }}

For example, here's a PixelFed post with an attached location - and this is the JSON representation. That status can be reposted into other social networks.

It is worth noting that Mastodon doesn't (natively) support location - if you view my repost of that PixelFed post you'll see there's no location metadata attached. That's OK! It just means that the status needs to include human-readable data.

Similarly, Mastodon doesn't support the arrive vocabulary. So this will be limited to a message with a location attached.

Other ActivityPub services do support location.

Putting it all together

Well… that's a job for next week. Probably!

• Building a web site which gets the user's location is easy.
• Getting the data from OverPass should be straightforward.
• Creating an ActivityPub server which can post geotagged notes into the Fediverse might be a little beyond my skillset! Some testing with Darius Kazemi's AP Glitch suggests this should work.

If you'd like to help, please leave a comment.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/

#ActivityPub #fediverse #FOURSQUARE #geolocation #OpenStreetMap

05 - Find nodes by applying multiple filters

A basic tutorial covering the key features of the Overpass language

^{osm-queries.ldodds.com}

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

Did you know you can easily search through your own Mastodon posts?

Just include from:me in the search field.

Instead of this, you can include in:library to show posts you have interacted with or written yourself.

If you want to search through posts of a specific user, include from:username (the full username, including the instance)

If it doesn't work, have a look at this:
https://graphics.social/@metin/111821440228692015

#mastodon #MastoTips #FediTips #tip #tips #information #knowledge #fediverse

Metin Seven 🎨

2024-01-26 09:02:49

A follow-up post regarding the Mastodon search tips:

If the search options don't work, the reason might be that your Mastodon instance maintainer hasn't implemented Elasticsearch.

Also important: do not use capitals anywhere in the search conditions. E.g.: "From:me" doesn't work.

Further reading:

https://mstdn.social/@DeltaWye/111280982761530295

and

https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-search-for-stuff-on-mastodon/

#mastodon #MastoTips #FediTips #tip #tips #information #knowledge #fediverse

How do I search for stuff on Mastodon? How do I use hashtags? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

^fedi.tips

#Facebook inherently isn’t bad

yes it is.

#hashtags

Hashtags are supposed to be from all the contacts that has a server in the #fediVerse, if the posts were published publicly. Their for mastodon.social with it's overwhelming user base should be connected to a very large percentage of the fediverse accounts (that's an interesting percentage investigation to do). It even has introduced full text search and I guess it's using it so that's another tool in one place to get a lot of the total info out there.

#friendica has relays, I never checked that option out but if you dig into it you'll find some answers. In the latest release it added "channels" to create streams of selected gathered information, another thing I haven't digged into yet. Actualy friendica and #hubzilla might be the ones that can tap into most info on the fediverse. Those communities, both inicialized by Mike, have kinda basic goal to create workarounds in the fediVerse to connect to everyone and everything. Thinking about it, friendica might be the oldest thriving #activityPub speaking platform out there.

My recommendation to check out friendica in your case would be squeet.me as it is run by one of the german main devolpers of that platform so it's always on the latest dev branch.

following activitypub, which is an unsorted mess of information overflow

That's an impression I get first of all in the #mastodon stream as every answer pops up like a single unrelated contextles bubble in once universe that most likely might create some declaration of war in some other distant universe that ultimately might just lead to a dog swolling some toy ball.

many () problems can be traced back to Homo Sapiens Sapiens

all of 'em, that's why spanisch is the choosen language in this case as it spells mono sapiens -> #VIATA
At the same time, blaming the user while the boss considers them "dumb fucks" and gives out the instruction "be fast and break things" sounds like kinda victim blaming.

No it never does, it makes your world view distorted

That's what I mean by: their own disconnected reality.
What wasn't to clear in my answer is that apparently they gathered into bubbles on places like fb and went of from there to GAB or apparently now a days #telegram groups.
btw
Every world view is distorted, by default, there is no way around that fact.

It is necessary sometimes to touch foreign subjects, meet new people, read unusual threads, outside your comfort zone. At least that’s my experience.

More than agreed:
#TEDtalk:

That was another bubble.

Or they managed to organize.

Bubbles are fine, not only for marginalized groups and can be helpful and uplifting.
Point is when they lead to radicalization, "Tunnelblick", "Scheuklappen" (blinders).
Actually they create an own norm, an own culture, an own tribe. That can lead to diversification that can be good and useful, why not. Kinda like always it's the concentration that makes it medicine or abused drug, that's why I wrote semipermeable as an important part of the setup.

#GAFAM created a asocial environment, some reasons you mentioned, the first reason because they could and it was good buisenes (for them). So "we" decided to go for the free network (redes libres/freie Neztzwerke) to disentangle and start all over again. My peers are my algorithm that create my feed of input. And as my vibes and emotional situation changes, I'll have to adapt my feed constantly if I want to stay in charge. If I refer that task to my smart watch I'm doomed to become aligned to a (main)stream others decide over. AI is going to make that most likely worse because it's becoming more and more complex and we rely on some coders that say "bad dog! baaad dog!" to the AI. Meanwhile in Myanmar some genocide is fostered, fb traces the data for their AI and the billionairs say:
"Well, some workers died when the golden gate bridge was build, bad luck, that's colateral damage worth it."

how to friendica install for ubuntu VPS
(lot's of spoilers!)

For your acronym dictionary:
#slatfatf
https://pod.geraspora.de/tags/slatfatf

https://pod.geraspora.de/tags/acronymlist

.. and yes, I have long blond hair too ..

Si quieres leerlo en húngaro, pulsa aquí.

@utopiArte

I created a new #Instagram account just to access #Threads and for testing later. But guess what?

The first thing I saw after joining Instagram's Threads using a new account were:
* big boobs
* big butts
* women making their big butts dance
* girls (hopefully they are not underage) showcasing their boobs
* and on and on and on

Seriously? Where's the #CONTENT? Did I join a #Dating app or something?

Why is the majority of the content I'm seeing are women? I only saw 2 nature posts, 1 cooking post, 4 funny posts (not even a meme).

To be clear: This is a reaction to the type of content, a new account I created, Threads threw at me. This is NOT about women.

I don't know if they're using an algorithm. If they are, since it is a new account, there is no data for their algorithm to use, so it more likely chose the “most popular” and/or “most active” posts.

That's fine.

However, for people not searching for someone to date, they will immediately delete Threads if this is what you show to new accounts.

=== BGN: aside ===
* I had to create a new account because Instagram banned my official account for no particular reason.
* I even confirmed my identity 3 times (they forced me).
* They won't talk to me at all.
* Absolutely no violations, I rarely upload and leave comments.
* If I will take my best guess, they banned my official account because I'm #ActuallyAutistic. While my personal account, where I did not reveal I'm #Autistic, is still fine to this day.
* I have Two-Factor Authentication on, I have a verified phone number and email.
=== END: aside ===

I think #Meta / #Facebook doesn't have to worry about #Fediverse content violating their “community guidelines”. Based from this shocking experience, it is the fediverse that should be worried of the content Threads will be bringing over.

P.S. I am 100% for #BringingDownTheWalls. This is NOT an anti-Meta post; even though they unfairly and unjustly banned my official, and old, account last year.

Ugh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social.

So, yeah, if you haven't noticed, things aren't looking good for firefish. Its owner, Kainoa, has practically abandoned the project, which had its last stable release out on July. My last message to them was a week ago, and I haven't heard back since. Firefish.social, besides the other severe technical problems it's had due to mismanagement in the last few months, now also has serious federation issues. I hope Kainoa is well irl, but this is irresponsible and unacceptable.

I hear some of you saying "but you're in the core team too, don't try to put the blame elsewhere!". So I have to explain what being a core team member in firefish meant. Kainoa invited me, Namekuji and a few others to be part of the "core team", but kept all decisions and responsibilities. We didn't co-own this. We never shared donations. We were just volunteers, who were honestly trying to make it a great project. This didn't work well due to concentration of power to one person, who didn't keep their promises. I don't mean to be harsh to Kainoa, I mean we knew they were only 19 when they started the project. Still, it's a bummer to anyone who chose to trust and support Firefish. This includes myself.

I don't know if it's early to consider firefish a dead project, but it sure seems like that for a few months now. Maybe it can be resurrected, idk. It's all up to Kainoa.

In the meantime, Namekuji and I are starting #Catodon, which will have some differences with Firefish, and will include many changes I had discussed with Kainoa but were never implemented. If you decide to stick with us, we promise to be serious about this. I strongly believe in the fediverse and its potential, and I want to build a great platform for it. This was my goal when I chose to be involved in Calckey/Firefish. It's still my goal with Catodon, only this time I can stand behind it 100%, as the project will be co-managed by Namekuji and me. If Firefish left you with a bitter aftertaste, we hope we can build a better relationship and prove ourselves worthy of your trust. Catodon will go public in a matter of days, possibly even hours. We'll have more to say about its direction then.

In the meantime, I just wanted to share my apologies for any inconvenience regarding Firefish, as I'm still technically a core team member, whatever that means. But frankly, I tried so hard to make things go differently - but there's only so much you can do when it's someone else's project. I'm really sorry for how things went.

But this is not the end of the fedi journey for me. I'm super excited about the chance to do some things right this time with Catodon. Life goes on, I guess! Hope to see you soon on our #codeberg repo, so we can start a new creative adventure together =)

​​ xx