Friendica 'Giant Rhubarb' 2023.05 - 1518
PHP 8.2.10

@Friendica Support

Hi there,
we are trying to setup this new server basically as a community forum server but ran into problems with our first forum.

The idea is that people from the #fediVerse and #mastodon as the main user population are able to follow our forums and post to our wall but some how this doesn't work right now.

What are we doing wrong?

Please see this post below where we describid the different settings we tested.

mʕ•ﻌ•ʔm bitPickup

2023-09-15 15:53:53

#friendica #fediHelp

@helpers
how do #groups, #community, #news and #forum pages integrate into #fediVers and #mastodon in particular?

* News Page
Account for a news reflector

Community forum:
* Public
Automatically approves contacts
* Private forum
[Experimental]Manual approval contacts

For now @rugby doesn't work as intended displaying posts and redistributing them.

Has this something to do with the config settings of that profile?

https://forum.friendi.ca/help/Forums
admin@tupambae.org
#journalism

Friendica Community Forum | Help: Forums

^{forum.friendi.ca}

Recruiters and Candidates, Let's Get Organized! 🧰​✨

People Hiring People ✉️​

In all your job opening posts:
1. Include (at least) the hashtag 👉 #Hiring
2. Include location 🌏
3. Include salary range ​
Follow the hashtag: #GetFediHired

People Looking For Work 👀

In all your job search posts:
1. Include (at least) the hashtag 👉 #GetFediHired
2. Include location 🌍
Follow the hashtag: #Hiring

Here's how to follow a hashtag on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/110493675813951054

We can do this! 🤝

#JobSearch #Recruiters #Fediverse #Mastodon #TinyMastodonTip

Em :official_verified:

2023-06-05 21:14:51

Tiny Mastodon Newbie Tip 🐘✨:

If you want to follow a specific topic in your Home timeline, know that on Mastodon you can follow hashtags! ​

HOW TO ❓

1. On desktop browser (this will vary for mobile apps), type the topic you are looking for in the upper left “Search” field without space (ex: StarTrek) 🔍

2. In the “Search results” select the tab “Hashtags” #️⃣​

3. Click on the hashtag closest to what you are looking for 🖖

4. At the top right of the hashtag feed, click on the “Follow hashtag” button that looks like a human figure with a plus sign 👤+

5. You will now see toots (posts) using this hashtag within your Home timeline (repeat this operation to unfollow a hashtag) 👀​

6. Magic! ✨

#TinyMastodonTip #Mastodon

Tiny Mastodon Newbie Tip 🐘✨:

If you want to follow a specific topic in your Home timeline, know that on Mastodon you can follow hashtags! ​

HOW TO ❓

1. On desktop browser (this will vary for mobile apps), type the topic you are looking for in the upper left “Search” field without space (ex: StarTrek) 🔍

2. In the “Search results” select the tab “Hashtags” #️⃣​

3. Click on the hashtag closest to what you are looking for 🖖

4. At the top right of the hashtag feed, click on the “Follow hashtag” button that looks like a human figure with a plus sign 👤+

5. You will now see toots (posts) using this hashtag within your Home timeline (repeat this operation to unfollow a hashtag) 👀​

6. Magic! ✨

#TinyMastodonTip #Mastodon

Last Week in the #Fediverse - ep 35

Main news of the week:
- Swiss government starts their own #Mastodon server
- The SWICG has talks about restructuring
- Doubts about the moderation tools and governance of Lemmy
- The #activitypub plugin for #wordpress is officially released

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

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.

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/

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)}

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

I find one of the most helpful ways you can encourage people to leave hellsites like #Twitter and #Facebook to try out #mastodon / the #fediverse / etc isn't to just tell them "join mastodon" and hope they end up picking a good instance. Actually go the extra step of finding an instance that, to you, an experienced user, seems well moderated, and at least somewhat aligns with that person's interests so they'll find other people's content to keep them interested, and suggest that one directly. @eldritch.cafe remains the first Mastodon instance I ever joined, after my friend and I specifically looked for a server that allows nonsexual female nipples without being focused on actual sex work, and all in all it's been a great experience (and has completely ruined me towards any server with less than a 5,000 character limit, haha).

Especially considering how tech-inclined so many (pre-Twitter-migration) fedi users are--keep in mind that most of us (me included) are not so knowledgeable about this stuff straight out the gate 😜 We need a little extra guidance, and if you truly think that the fedi is a better alternative, you need to make the extra effort in improving #accessibility to your chosen platform. (It also helps tremendously in making sure that someone's first interaction with mastodon isn't on a huge server with little to no moderation, opening them way more up to attacks from racists, etc than if they had started on a heavily moderated server that is already #defederated from instances that allow that abhorrent behavior)

A detailed #ImageDescription of a complex image does not go into the #AltText. The #W3C says so:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/complex/

If it can be useful for sighted people, or if everyone, sighted people included, needs it to understand the picture, the image description goes elsewhere. That way, everyone can access it, so it's a matter of #accessibility.

The W3C recommends to put it on a separate page. But the W3C implies that everything on the Web is static webpages accessed via standard desktop Web browsers. That's what the W3C is all about.

Obviously, this doesn't work in the #Fediverse. Unless you're on #Hubzilla, you can't put #ImageDescriptions on separate pages because you can't make such pages in the first place. So the image description has to go into the post.

Again, no problem on Hubzilla which has virtually no post length limit. Same for #Friendica and #Streams. Depending on how long your description is, most other projects may not be problematic either.

But then there's #Mastodon. Only one project, but it's 80% of the Fediverse, and many Mastodon users think it is the Fediverse, full stop.

Mastodon limits posts to only 500 characters. If you came over from #𝕏 where you only had 280 characters, that sounds like a whole lot. But in practice, it's way too little, especially for image descriptions. This, by the way, is why "image description" and "alt-text" are synonymous and mutually exchangeable on Mastodon: Everyone puts their image descriptions into the alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. People can't even imagine that it could be any other way.

But it has to, also because any information available only in the alt-text is lost to those who can't access alt-text, for example due to a physical disability.

So on Mastodon with its 500-character limit, detailed image descriptions should go into a thread that follows the post with the image.

In either case, there should still be an alt-text that says that the image is described in follow-up posts (Mastodon) or the post itself (everywhere else).

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?