Our project is staffed entirely by volunteers, producing the best coverage we can for the development of the #Fediverse. We don't paywall our articles, sell advertising space, or collect personal data.

Here are some ways you can help us keep the lights on!

https://wedistribute.org/support-us/

Sean Tilley

2023-06-14 04:41:43

Our fledgling news publication is 100% volunteer-run, and 100% free. We don’t serve ads, we don’t sell your data, and we don’t put articles behind paywalls. We are dedicated to producing high quality pieces to help keep the network informed about everything happening within it.

As a side effect to this approach, we need support from the Community to keep things running. There are a few different areas that you can help us with!

Donations

Hosting isn’t exactly cheap, and we’re working to assemble essential infrastructure necessary to make collaboration with community members smooth and easy.

For now, there are a few different ways to donate:

• Patreon
• LiberaPay

Write With Us!

We Distribute is a small publication with a few passionate people behind it, all doing it in their spare time. We’re trying our best to cover as much ground as possible, but the network is massive, and we want to write about more than just the technology behind it.

We intend to have these types of pieces:

• News – general updates about platforms, apps, clients, and more.
• Reviews – in-depth evaluations of apps and platforms, rife with screenshots and insights on how things work.
• Guides – Technical explainers and discovery tools to keep fedizens informed on how to do stuff.
• Culture – People are one of the biggest, most interesting aspects of the network. This section includes pieces of history, awesome and wacky events, and insights on what’s going on in different communities.
• Interviews – we sit down and talk to the people who are building the network. Interviews can be traditional Q&A, or more fleshed-out biographical pieces.
• Opinion – Our newest edition, this is an opportunity for fedizens from a variety of different backgrounds to express their opinions on what’s important to them, or what needs to change.

Hang Out With Us!

We’re trying to bring our Matrix channels back from the dead, so join our space, and dive in!

Join the Matrix Space here: https://matrix.to/#/#wedistribute:matrix.org

https://wedistribute.org/support-us/

WeDistribute's profile - Liberapay

We Distribute is a media publication dedicated to the development of the Fediverse!

^Liberapay

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}

Volltextsuche mit Friendica

bekanntlich ist #Friendica eine der ältesten Projekte (seit 2010) im #Fediverse. Daher ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass es neben eine Unmenge von kleinen und großen Features, die andere Projekte nicht besitzen, auch eine #Volltextsuche unterstützt, die alle bekannten Beiträge durchsucht, die dem Server bekannt sind.

Dabei werden die üblichen Suchtechniken (boolesche operatoren) zur Literatursuche unterstützt.

Dabei können beliebig viele Suchbegriffe mit Suchanweisungen verknüpft und so die Suchergebnisse beeinflusst werden.

Das ist praktisch, weil längst nicht alle Nutzenden im Fediverse Hashtags nutzen oder die für den suchenden relevanten Begriffe mit einen Hashtag versehen hat. Darüber hinaus spricht Friendica auch mit nicht Activitypub Projekten, in denen u.U. Hashtags nicht bekannt sind und die Volltextsuche die einzige Möglichkeit darstellt, relevante Inhalte zu finden.

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

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

And guess what!? micro.blog has climbed up to become the 10th largest server on the Fediverse. It's pretty interesting to see that now we have three of the top 10 Fediverse servers that aren't Mastodon.

But hey, let's take a moment to give micro.blog the attention it deserves. It's a Tumblr-like platform, part of the #Fediverse community, and it's been around since 2017. One of the great things about it is that it allows for syndication to various other platforms like Facebook, Medium, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Flickr.

Now, here's an interesting tidbit - unlike other Fediverse services, micro.blog doesn't fall under the "free as in freedom" or "free as in beer" category. It's actually a proprietary platform that operates through subscription services. However, they do offer a 30-day free trial to give it a whirl, and after that, the base rate for a micro.blog account is $5/month.

I'm genuinely curious about what has contributed to the recent surge in user registrations on micro.blog.

SOURCE: https://fedidb.org/network?cursor=eyJ1c2VyX2NvdW50Ijo5OTkyNSwiX3BvaW50c1RvTmV4dEl0ZW1zIjpmYWxzZX0
@fediversenews@venera.social

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)