Last Week in Fediverse – ep 50

Welcome to the second year of Fediverse Report! This edition has: everyone is excited about RSS, a new link-aggregator platform, PieFed, launches in beta, major issues with blocking security in the fediverse, and more!

Everyone loves RSS

RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.

The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.

An uncertain future for Firefish

The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.

Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.

A new link aggregator platform with PieFed

The link-aggregator part of the fediverse has grown, with the launch of PieFed’s beta test. PieFed joins platforms like Lemmy and Kbin who all have the ability to share links, and comment and vote on them.

PieFed focuses on making the platform easy to manage, maintain and develop for, and uses Python. Developer Rimu is also emphasising Trust and Safety, and healthy community interactions. One way PieFed does this is by adding the ability for authors to add a ‘I’ve changed my mind’ setting. It draws inspiration from Nick Punt’s work on de-escalation on social media. Another feature is adding a warning on posts made by accounts with low reputation, meaning that their posts get downvoted a lot.

PieFed has launched as a beta test, and comes with the warning that there will be ‘probably many bugs’. You can try PieFed for yourself at piefed.social.

Authorized Fetch circumvented

Alex Gleason announced that Authorized Fetch has been circumvented. Authorized Fetch (in-depth explanation here) makes sure that a blocked server is fully blocked, and cannot access posts. Alex Gleason, behind fediverse platform Soapbox and currently working on the bridge Mostr (which connects the fediverse with Nostr), found out that Threads already blocked a few servers, such as Spinster, Poast, and the Mostr bridge, some of which he is involved with.

The Nostr community actively promotes the idea of adverse interoperability. In that spirit Alex Gleason reimplemented a method first used in Pleroma that circumvents Authorized Fetch. The blocked servers can now connect to Threads again. This is accomplished by spoofing the domain name from which the request came from.

There is a lot more to be said about this, and warrants an extensive follow up. I fully agree with WeDistribute’s concluding remarks: “Look, Mastodon has been providing a half-measure to its users for years. Now it’s the time to make things right: going into 2024, I think it’s going to absolutely be a requirement to develop more robust forms of privacy options and access controls to empower users”.

The links

• This week’s award for most esoteric fediverse implementation goes to DiveDB, the online scuba diving blog site, which has recently added ActivityPub support. This allows you to follow scuba divers and their dives directly from fediverse feeds.
• Micro.blog creator Manton Reece is publishing a book Indie Microblogging. The entire book is available as a text site as well, on book.micro.blog.
• The blog Nexus of Privacy has a five-part series about ‘Strategies for the free fediverses’.
• YouTuber MKBHD talks about Threads and the fediverse on his podcast Waveform.
• More RSS: Goblin is a fediverse platform currently in development that is strongly inspired by Tumblr. They showed the ability to follow Tumblr blogs in Goblin via RSS this week.
• Bookwyrm has been updated with full account migration.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe below to receive the update via email, or follow @LaurensHof in your favourite fediverse app.

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-50/

gábor ugray

2024-01-02 22:44:22

Under-the-radar late night launch: RSS Parrot is live! It talks like Mastodon, but it doesn't walk like Mastodon. BUT! It will relay any RSS feed straight into your timeline.

Turn Mastodon into your very own feed reader. Follow anything that has an RSS feed and get a toot about new posts.

How? Mention @birb with the address you want to follow.

More details at https://rss-parrot.net. Boost for visibility 😀

#RSS #Atom #FeedReader #Fediverse

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

In my quest to get rid of GAFAM and decrease as much the tracking I’m subject to, I’m only at the start.

Social Media Alternatives

By the end of 2021, fed up with infinite news feeds, I’ve removed my Facebook, Twitter and SensCritique accounts with almost no alternatives. I needed to declutter and focus on my family, so I also reduced the influx of information by stopping RSS feeds, Newsletter subscriptions, by pausing notifications of most apps like WhatsApp, and of course I’ve stopped watching TV Shows & Movies, news… Those initiatives were also motivated by family augmentation as I became father in 2021 🙂

Anyway I had to pursue efforts !

Recently I’ve also removed Pinterest and I’ve set up Pixelfed (self hosted) to replace IG (Instagram). I’ve also joined a Mastodon instance as a replacement for Twitter. The good thing with Mastodon and federated networks is you can be on any instance and follow users from other instances. From my Pixelfed (IG-like) I’m subscribed to my Mastodon page (Twitter Like) and I’m also followed by my WordPress page thanks to the ActivityPub plugin I’ve setup on this blog. I’ve migrated my secrets from Bitwarden to Vaultwarden (self-hosted), my code from Github to Gitea (self-hosted), my WordPress and Shaarli from OVH to Cloudron running on Contabo VPS. I’ve also started using Nextcloud and Collabora as replacements for my “Office” suite (Google Docs, Google Sheets, …) but I’m not yet sold to the UI.

Self-Hosting Tools

The goal is to try to use as much self-hosted tools as I can. It’s not easy to find good alternatives especially if you care about usability, data portability, privacy, and connect with other users …

I’m struggling to get rid of YT (Youtube) and YT Kids. There are plenty of alternatives to YT, but not so much with both a kid-friendly UX and possibilities to filter content.

Challenges in Replacing YouTube

The problem is not to find a privacy respecting alternative tool to YT : It’s easy to find and host content on Peertube but not so much to find a good instance with interesting content.

The problem is most of the popular and interesting content is on YT. There are alternatives frontends like Invidious, SkyTube (Android), Clipious (an Android client for Invidious instances). But Invidious does not yet support filtering of videos, which make it an unsafe place for kids. At least SkyTube allows for filtering channels and that’s what I’m gonna try with my kid, but the UX is lacking behind YT and that makes it quite difficult for my little one to navigate alone in the app and pick a video.

Future Goals and Challenges

Important next steps for me are to get rid fully of any Google software, that includes Gmail (this will be a though one), Youtube, Contacts, Calendar, Google Drive, Google Keep, Google Maps, etc. and to stop using software that depends on tech giants or trackers. Not easy. Just try surfing the web using Big Tech Detective extension. Even search engines or browsers that claim to respect your privacy are tracking you or rely on GAFAM infrastructure or trackers.

For instance, when trying to use DuckDuck Go search engine with the Big Tech Detective extension on :

Exodus on Android shows that most of the “privacy” friendly browsers on Android are full of trackers : DuckDuck Go, Ghostery, Firefox, Opera, Tor Browser… Only Brave on mobile didn’t contain tracker, according to Exodus. The spyware watchdog catalog will provide additional data about some of the mentioned browsers while also claiming Brave is to be considered as spyware.

Fortunately there exist search engines alternatives, such as Mojeek (which uses its own index) and SearX.

While looking at my expenses and optimizing my budget, I’ve removed my Medium subscription, Pluralsight, and OpenAI subscription, and started to cancel hosting plans as I’ll host most of what I need on my VPS. Next challenges would be to get rid of Netflix, Meta/WhatsApp, Amazon (Prime, Kindle…), Apple, Spotify, Dropbox (to Nextcloud?), ChatGPT (I’ve yet to find a comparable alternative)by looking for alternatives or privacy friendly frontends for what cannot be easily replaced. But they do not make it easy. By trying to get rid of Netflix, I’ve noticed that as the “main” profile of our family shared account, it’s impossible to delete my data. I can only create a new Netflix account and transfer the family profiles to that one. At the end, I’d like also to replace my OnePlus One with a dumb phone or a fair phone. I had a look at privacy friendly OSes we can setup on Android but the compatibility with OnePlus 10 Pro is still work in progress. Anyway if you are interested, take some inspiration here. I also want to fix this blog by taking inspiration from Small Web and Slow Web philosophies. , works for future browsers or at least relies on libre JavaScript (see also LibreJS) or no JavaScript at all.

And also to convince my loved one to try free and open source software on her devices (Apple 🙂 ). Lot of friends and family are using Whatsapp while I’m sold to Signal or alternatives. This one will be difficult to bypass. I aim at least to automatically backup all WhatsApp files to my Nextcloud.

Every small improvement towards more privacy, data portability, open-source, data ownership, freedom, will be worth it and I’ll share my findings with you 🙂

Web (browser) extensions I recommend

• LibRedirect a web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and other websites to their alternative privacy friendly frontends. You can find my settings here.
• Privacy Redirect a simple web extension that redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram & Google Maps requests to privacy friendly alternatives.
• DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials includes tracker blocking, cookie protection, DuckDuckGo private search, email protection, HTTPS upgrading, and much more. I use it to generate temporary email addresses when my email is requested.
• Ultrablock blocks ads, trackers and third party cookies.
• Privacy Badger blocks invisible trackers.

Web (browser) extensions I’m Trying

• JShelter An anti-malware Web browser extension to mitigate potential threats from JavaScript, including fingerprinting, tracking, and data collection! But it causes some crappy websites to malfunction 😉
• Big Tech Detective helps you track tech giants. If fully activated, you won’t be able to browse certain websites and even some supposed privacy friendly tools, such as Duck Duck Go Search engine which behind the scene rely on Microsoft infrastructure and hard partnerships with Microsoft.

Android apps I recommend

• Exodus an app that audits Android apps for trackers.
• F-Droid a installable catalog of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform.
• Aegis Authenticator : a free, secure and open source app to manage your 2-step verification tokens for your online services.

WordPress plugins I recommend

• ActivityPub With this installed your WordPress blog itself functions as a federated profile, allowing to reach a wider audience.

Tools I recommend

• Kill the Newsletter Convert email newsletters to RSS feeds.
• Bitwarden which is a password manager. I’m hosting Vaultwarden which implements the same API. Bitwarden client is available on any popular platform.
• Invidious to be used as frontend alternative to YouTube. Same content as YouTube. No ads, no trackers.

Some reading I recommend

• https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ watchdog of popular apps with trackers.

Self hosting providers

• I recommend Contabo (no sponsor here), that I’ve hand picked among many alternatives, while choosing a good VPS offering at good prices. Only downside is their administration panel UX, but other than that, it was cheap. And they buy green energy to run their servers. The alternatives I had compared Contabo with were OVH (way too expensive) and Hetzner (cheap but unfortunately their VPS hardware lacks AVX support thus is not compatible with Cloudron requirements). Contabo in the end beats VPS offerings of Hetzner and OVH at that price, with more storage and CPU for me !

Self hosted apps

• If you own a dedicated server / VPS, try Cloudron, it’s such an easy way to self host your apps and take control of your data ! I’m currently using it with Nextcloud, WordPress, and all apps mentioned below below :
• Wallabag as read-it later app.
• Miniflux minimalist and opinionated feed reader.
• Vaultwarden unofficial Bitwarden compatible server.
• Changedetection.io free open source website change detection, website watcher.
• PrivateBin minimalist, open source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data.
• Invoice Ninja Invoices, Expenses and Tasks built with Laravel, Flutter and React
• Gitea a self-hosted Git hosting service that offers code hosting, code review, team collaboration, package management and CI/CD features. It is compatible with GitHub Actions, Docker, various databases and tools, and supports multiple languages and architectures.
• Pixelfed a replacement for Instagram as it used to be (without all the ads, and crap).
• Shaarli personal, minimalist, super-fast, database free, bookmarking service. Useful for sharing links or keep them safe and private.

Concluding Thoughts

I hope these insights and recommendations help you in your journey towards a more private and self-reliant digital life. As always, I’m eager to hear your experiences and suggestions. Let’s make our digital space a bit more ours!

https://morgan.zoemp.be/charting-my-journey-away-from-big-tech-embracing-privacy-and-self-hosting-solutions/

#alternatives #android #cloudron #decentralization #degooglify #fediverse #libre #openSource #privacy #security #selfHosting

Morgan

2023-12-20 16:19:46

A couple of weeks back, I was getting my ass kicked at chess. It was a blast, even as I blundered into defeat.

Here’s the thing: in some games, like life, the right focus at the right time can flip the board. It’s about spotting chances and seizing them. Remark : If interested in the “perfect timing” topic, do read about the power of when.

Being focused on specific goals can help make the difference in the long term. Also being aware of the opportunities and reality.

Last year? A financial nightmare. But I hustled, optimizing my budget. Running my own company, I could shuffle some expenses around – a neat trick.

I axed unnecessary subscriptions – online courses, publishing platforms, various IT tools. Sometimes, the best alternative isn’t a new provider; it’s you. Betting on my skills, I cut costs and upped my privacy game. That’s a win in my book.

Now, this blog and my digital life sit on a fresh, cost-effective infrastructure. More privacy, less cash bleed.

My new obsession? Privacy and open source. Ditching GAFAM and seeing where that road takes me. It’s about discipline and the right tools.

Next year’s mission: maintain this focus and help others grab back control of their budgets and privacy.

Catch you in 2024.

https://morgan.zoemp.be/personal-insights-on-finance-and-digital-privacy/

#budget #goals #openSource #opportunities #privacy #strategy #wellbeing

WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing | Daniel H. Pink

Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home.

^{Outthink (Daniel H. Pink)}

Yesterday I tried to setup my own version of OCRbot@fedi.lynnesbian.space, which does #OCR on pictures attached to posts on the #Fediverse, which I find an intriguing idea. During the process to set this up I was lazy and asked #ChatGPT to guide me through the whole process, which is fairly easy to be honest, but I an playing around with this #AI for fun.

I wanted to run the OCR #bot on my own #Friendica server, because I like to run on my own tech too.

So I asked Chatty to guide me and it worked well, I logged in with the Python bot and wanted to start it and got an API error, it was only then when I told ChatGPT that I am actually trying this with Frienidca and that the API might have its limits.
I then looked up the API documentation of the Mastodon API that Friendica implemented and asked ChatGPT if there is any essential parts missing that are needed to run the bot.

ChatGPT 'read' the documentation of both, the bot and the Mastodon API of Friendica and explained:
"Since Friendica doesn't support the Mastodon streaming API, the OCRbot, which relies on these endpoints, may not be compatible with Friendica without significant modifications to either the bot or the Friendica server."

Just wanted to write a bit about this experience with Friendica, the bot and ChatGPT.

Maybe I will setup a #Pleroma instance for this, a single user instance for me and the bot, maybe better a Mastodon instance?

cc !Friendica Support

I'm super excited about the #Fediverse. I've been online since the 90s, been through most evolution stages of the internet, and it feels like we're changing it once again - and this time in a good way.

Quoting this post anonymously because I don’t want to be the one to burst their newly reformed bubble. However I believe the honeymoon’s almost over with Threads entering the space, regardless of their intentions. They’re just too massive of a player not to shift the power dynamics in their favor.

People have long been angry at Gargron for sucking most of the Fediverse attention towards Mastodon through no particular fault of their own, and I believe it’s about to change, and not necessarily for the better.

For fringe projects like #Friendica, it won’t change much though, we never were prominent in the space and Threads’ arrival will not change that. @Michael Vogel ’s willing, we’ll start supporting the new API quirks Threads will inevitably put forth and leave the decision to interact with Threads or not to Friendica administrators and individual users.

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

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

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is looking to launch their own fediverse platform. Some people are already advocating to block it en masse.

FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta’s ActivityPub Platform

The fediverse has been aware of Meta’s intention to build an ActivityPub app for some time now. Purportedly called Threads, this “Project92” looks like it will be a Twitter competitor, and will be compatible with Mastodon instances. Rumors have spread that Project92 is courting the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey, to overtake Elon Musk’s dumpster fire.

The infamous linked screenshot of “Threads” / “Barcelona” / “Project 92” being presented.

To begin with, Project92’s existence was always going to bring some unease to the network. A growing number of instance admins have signed FediPact, an agreement to block Meta from connecting with them. The effort, organized by one Vanta Black, opened up a passionate discussion about the network’s future. Admins and users alike have given passionate statements about the possibilities.

I will do everything I can to stop them from burning down the beautiful community we’ve spent over seven years cultivating here.

Vanta Black, creator of FediPact

For many, the reaction makes sense. The walled gardens that so many users have migrated from were vectors for abuse, poor moderation, and data harvesting. That’s a big part of why so many people want nothing to do with it.

Reasons for the Ban

Throughout the discourse, people have cited some of the ills that Facebook has inflicted on the world. The company is responsible for poor working conditions for third-party moderators, presenting itself as the entire internet to some populations, embrace and abandonment of open protocols, and algorithms contributing to genocide in Myanmar. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

They will absolutely not moderate their shit properly, and it will make the areas of the fediverse that choose to federate with them actively unsafe.

Vanta Black

Whether FediPact is an effective way to stop value extraction out of an independently-run network is up for debate. Rumors are swirling, with accusations that some admins have signed NDAs to have private discussions with Meta.

#Barcelona #fediverse #Meta #P92 #Threads

https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/

Sean Tilley

2023-06-21 08:57:46

Note: This entry is part of our new Opinion section, which exists to offer different perspectives from various voices on the network. Members of the community are absolutely encouraged to submit their own pieces for publication.

John Gruber, legendary Mac enthusiast and operator of the widely known blog Daring Fireball, certainly has some strong opinions about the negative reactions within the Fediverse regarding Meta’s entry into the space. He’s so passionate about the subject that he’s already written a second piece.

I’d like to try to address some of his points, because I believe he’s gotten a lot of things wrong. John, I don’t think you’re a bad guy, and I don’t hate you. I just think you haven’t been in the space long enough to really know much about it.

From his first entry:

…the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular…

John Gruber

This is something of a false dilemma. If some random developer with no track record tried to build an app, and was viciously shunned because he wasn’t a part of the in-group, that would absolutely qualify as petty and deliberately insular.

Meta is not a person, it’s a corporation. No amount of chanting “corporations are people, my friend” is going to change that. Facebook alone has a noxious track record a mile long, has repeatedly abused open standards for its own benefit, and their negligence and poor decisions have spread misinformation, genocide, and hatred over and over again.

They can’t even moderate their own platforms properly, let alone treat their contracted moderators well.

The Fediverse was started, aided, and cultivated by many different people over a considerable amount of time. Many of those who are here did so to be free of the kind of things that Facebook/Twitter/Reddit were doing to their respective communities. For-profit corporate walled gardens are already problematic enough.

But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?

Confusing users with a service is disingenuous, at best. No one is stopping anyone that uses Facebook from joining the Fediverse. We just want to stop the company itself from bending the network to its own ends.

What’s actually kind of crazy is that people have created a number of services to assist with user migration from Twitter, like FediFinder. But, wouldn’t you know it, those platforms tend to shoot down the lifeboats when that affects their bottom line.

We’re fine with building new user communities and growing the network. It’s the corporate end that we have a problem with.

Large swaths of Mastodon seem to relish the fact that it’s confusing how to get started, and that this confusion is keeping Mastodon small.

First of all: the notion of relishing keeping the network small isn’t a thing. Most people on the network are thrilled to see it grow and evolve – which it has been doing organically, without any kind of commercial advertising, for over 15 years.

The pushback that people have is towards growth for its own sake, a numbers-chasing game where over-simplified sign-up tools trend towards centralization. Some Mastodon instances, for example, are possibly massive, with hundreds of thousands of users, and like a team of six moderators. It’s not a sustainable situation, and it creates a lot of social problems on the network.

The whole point of ActivityPub as an open protocol is to turn Twitter/Instagram-like social networking into something more akin to email: truly open.

This might blow your mind, but the scope is way more ambitious than just making federated clones of popular services: it’s a framework to connect separate spaces of the Internet together.

Federation might work in a manner similar to email, but the goal was always to bring social capabilities to the rest of the web, and providing interoperability. From my Mastodon, I can follow a band on Funkwhale, comment on a video from PeerTube, send a link with a paragraph of text to a group on Lemmy, and then comment on a WordPress blog. And that’s only the beginning.

The true power of ActivityPub has yet to be fully realized, but it brings an opportunity to do some things with servers and clients that have never been seen before. We can break out of walled gardens and use the interoperability across the web as platforms for all of our apps.

Maybe I’m wrong! I certainly don’t think the “let’s pledge to block Facebook before their Fediverse thing even starts” people are nuts. But to me this feels like convicting Facebook of a pre-crime.

This isn’t Minority Report. While people are judging what Meta might do in the future, those notions are informed on how Facebook has acted globally in the past. Giving them a chance in the first place here could actually be considered giving them a second chance for the long list of crap they’ve already done.

From his second article:

I don’t think most Instagram users will even try Threads…“just sign in using your existing Instagram identity” is a powerful enticement. If you already have an Instagram account, you’ll be able to jump right in.

The thing with Threads is that it’s likely not going to be open source, and people won’t be able to self-host it. It will be a singular node on the network, tied into infrastructure that Meta explicitly controls. So yeah, of course they have easy integration and a way for people to try it out in Meta’s sandbox.

How to get started with Mastodon (or any of the other ActivityPub “Fediverse” platforms) has been an enormous obstacle to adoption

I’d be lying if I said that we’ve managed to crack this nut. Discovery in peer-networked systems is notoriously hard. There are a lot of nuances to how different servers interact, and the complex politics behind who will talk to who can be absolutely irksome. But I don’t think users are stricken with absolute analysis paralysis like some suggest.

How do I join in fun discussions? Who is worth following? Where is all the good stuff at? These kind of questions take a lot ingenuity in design, in a system where you can’t just throw a few billion people’s data at it.

The thing is, at the end of the day, you just have to pick a place and see if you like it. You can always try a different space, or be part of multiple spaces, until you’ve really found a place you’re comfortable in. Most of my friends on the network aren’t even on my server, and we manage to communicate anyway. The process is just organic for now, rather than automatic.

I cited email as an example yesterday of big companies running big instances and not extinguishing the openness that made the platform great.

Actually, email is probably not a great example to use. 30 years ago, your analogy might be apt, but the ecosystem of email has largely been dominated by a few major players that successfully gatekeep it these days.

I recommend trying to run your own email server in 2023, and see how many of your emails ultimately go through to your peers, to people operating services, or to support desks. Better yet, try running an independent newsletter with it. You’ll likely end up in people’s Spam folders, if your message gets delivered at all.

I don’t take podcasting’s future for granted, but 20 years in, it’s still thriving as an open medium, despite the presence of titanic players like Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and Spotify.

If podcasts have continued to thrive, it is only in spite of those companies efforts to build walled gardens around it. Despite companies like Spotify trying to make certain podcasts exclusive to their platforms, or Google killing off feed readers, no one has actually succeeded at killing off a simple feed anybody can subscribe to.

And there are some roles that we need big centralized players to play even on an open platform. Apple’s iTunes podcast directory, for example. Facebook’s Threads app could be something akin to Apple Podcasts for Mastodon.

I dunno, John, this is a weird metaphor. I get that you’re trying to say “a simplified, popular thing that everyone knows could be a powerful way for everyone to interface with the network”, but this is also kind of a maximalist stance towards everyone federating with one very big corporate node.

Does the network really need this? Is crawling our entire network for the purposes of discovery and entertainment on Meta’s corporate node, and maybe even monetizing our public data along the way, a price worth paying for their presence here?

Kbin and Lemmy are to Reddit what Mastodon is to Twitter. Unsurprisingly, they’ve both seeing an infusion of new users this month, but are both still tiny compared to Reddit.

And many of those people might go back, or they might stick around. Still, the network will grow. This doesn’t have to be a “line go up” dick measuring contest, where the network with the biggest number is the winner. We just have to be around longer than they are.

The idea that NDAs are inherently nefarious is just conspirational tinfoil-hat nonsense.

I think this is an oversimplification. NDAs can be incredibly binding – let’s say that Meta did this with a fediverse developer, and then showed that developer several features they plan to implement. The developer working on their own version for compatability may well be in violation of the NDA, and can cause some real legal headaches for some guy that’s just building his own thing.

I’ll close this post with the same question I did yesterday: Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness? I think openness is the answer.

The idea of forming this question as a binary “this or that” is ridiculous, and predicated on a nebulous idea that open source communities should just roll over and be grateful that some insanely profitable entity wants to do real estate development right outside of our digital homes.

The Fediverse is developed by many people, building many different projects, over the course of many years. It has a long history of being cultivated by geeks and queers and marginalized folks who had no other space to go to. It is open to those who are willing to follow a social contract, to not tear down a beautiful forest to replace it with a shopping mall, dump toxic waste in our streams, or exert influence over the ecosystem we have been building.

If I had to ascribe a goal to the Fediverse, it’s to transform the Open Web into something so powerful, that it renders all of the corporate social silos of the world redundant and unnecessary.

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#fedipact #fediverse #meta

https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/

John Gruber Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

Note: This entry is part of our new Opinion section, which exists to offer different perspectives from various voices on the network. Members of the community are absolutely encouraged to submit their

^{Sean Tilley (We Distribute)}

Newsmast and news curation in the fediverse

Newsmast, a social network committed to thoughtful knowledge sharing and curated communities, has emerged as a notable project within the fediverse. It is backed by the UK Newsmast Foundation Charity, which has set itself as a mission to change social media for the better. I spoke with Michael Foster, co-founder of Newsmast, and Freddie Johnson, Foundation Ambassador for Newsmast.

The main way that Newsmast is working towards their mission is with curated communities. The idea came to the co-founders after he realised how during the Russian invasion of Ukraine an online community of valuable news and commentators emerged online. As this happened mainly on Twitter, the events of the last year necessitated the use of a different place to facilitate these trusted news communities, which they found in Mastodon and the fediverse.

Over the last year, the team has been busy building their own place on the fediverse. Starting with a fork of Mastodon, they have developed their own apps for Android and iOS, as well as their own web interface. The design puts communities at the core, as a way for people to help with discovery on the fediverse, and find valuable content.

Curated Communities

Newsmast has put quite a bit of work in their curated communities, and it goes beyond just providing a list of accounts to follow. There are communities in a large variety of topics, varying from ‘Government and Policy’ to ‘Biodiversity and Rewilding’, to ‘Ukraine invasion’, to ‘History’. A Newsmast community has some parallels with Bluesky’s custom feed. For creating each community, Newsmast takes a group of hashtags, then apply some strong filters to the posts made with this hashtag. Then it adds some specific hand-picked accounts to the subject as well that are knowledgeable in the field.

Freddie Johnson explains that they have structured the communities around academic or newspaper subjects, and that the focus is groups like academics, news organisations, and non-profit workers. They are thinking about how to provide editorial oversight over communities. The organisation is working on establishing a community based editorial board, that takes inspiration from the academic model for oversight boards.

A unique home on the fediverse

Another aspect about Newsmast that stands out is that it is also a hosted fediverse server that anyone can join. While there are many fediverse servers that are available for signup registration, there are not many servers that provide a clear governance structure in the way that Newsmast can. When new people first join the fediverse, the question of which server to join can be a difficult one, for multiple reasons: for people new to decentralised social networks it is often unclear what the question means, what the impact of the choice is. But the differences between the servers can be hard to find as well. Signing up asks you to trust the administrators of the server, with limited info of who they are. Newsmast stands out in a positive way; it presents a clear and extensive vision for what they want their social network to be, and also shows that the server is run by a UK accredited charity. For new people joining the fediverse, Newsmast provides an attractive option to join.

Expanding communities

Newsmast is working on making their curated content more broadly accessible. In the latest update of Mastodon app Mammoth, there are now curated “Smart Lists”, with the Environment and Nature Smart Lists curated by Newsmast. The organisation is also working on an update so you can log into Newsmast with your current Mastodon account, which should make it easier for people to access the Newsmast communities.

Different organisations are thinking about, and working on, curating and helping people discover interesting content. Flipboard is expanding their native integration with the fediverse for their magazines, Mammoth is providing Smart List, and for Bluesky is curated feeds one of their key features. Newsmast takes this concept and moves it further by actively thinking about how to provide oversight to the editorial power that the curators have. It is one of the more interesting projects in the fediverse that I have seen in quite a while, and certainly worth keeping an eye on. You can try Newsmast at newsmast.org.

#fediverse #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/newsmast-and-news-curation-in-the-fediverse/

Nowa wersja 1.3.0 wtyczki #ActivityPub dla #WordPress

Nowość: komentarze z #Fediverse powątkowane!

Przykład:
https://notiz.blog/2023/12/04/sidebar/#comments

Strona wtyczki:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

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)}

@Friendica Support
Hi there,
not sure if this is a bug or just that I'm missing some idea/rule functionality.

#bugResearch

I didn't have a look at gitHub

See image gif in screenshots spoiler

#newHere #neuHier #hola

[img=https://fika.grin.hu/photo/media/411601]Gif scene of the movie "The Martian".

The lonely main actor is sitting on a stone on the inhabited planet he was left on alone.
A text reads:
"First day in the diaspora of the fediVerse .."

The astronaut is depicted how he opens the solar panels of his equipment, presses a big button on it and the hashtags #hola, #neuHier and #newHere appear.

In the last scene he sits again on his stone and the text: ".. wait .." is displayed.

In the first scene that reads the text about the first day in the fediVerse the probably oldest logo of the fediVerse is displayed at the bottom left of the scene. At the horizon on the right the actual logo of the the fediVerse rises behind the landscape.

In the last scene, while our hero is awaiting the outcome of his intent to make contact with the outside world, the old Federated Social Web logo appears in front of the sun.[/img]

#[url=https://tupambae.org/search?tag=fediVerse]fediVerse[/url] #[url=https://tupambae.org/search?tag=fediHelp]fediHelp[/url] #[url=https://tupambae.org/search?tag=fediTips]fediTips[/url] #[url=https://tupambae.org/search?tag=gimp]gimp[/url] #[url=https://tupambae.org/search?tag=gimped]gimped[/url] 
@ gimped@tupambae.org @[url=https://tupambae.org/profile/tutorial]Tutorial[/url]

Screenshots: