diaspora*'s 10 years in community hands

This weekend marked the 10th anniversary since the diaspora* project was handed over by its founders to the community. Ten years – time really does fly!

During that time we’ve made many fundamental improvements to the software that this network runs on, from standardizing the process of making improvements to the code to completely rewriting the federation protocol on which communication between pods is based. We’ve also stabilized performance in many ways, and we've added many improvements to the user interface and new features.

Over the past couple of years things have been a bit quieter as our team of volunteer developers has been hard at work on some really huge and complex tasks. The most fundamental of these have been creating a feature to allow members to move their account from one pod to another, and creating an API to allow apps to interact with diaspora* more easily and in more interesting ways.

With these major improvements included, our next release will be a quantum leap forward for the project, and so we’re going to release it as diaspora* 1.0!

We hoped we might be able to release version 1.0 on the date of our 10th anniversary, but limits on our resources have meant that these big new features are not yet ready. If you think that you could help with some coding or reviewing tasks to get us over the line, please let us know! We'd love some help from our wider community, and we can’t wait to be able to offer these new features to you all.

Thanks to you all for being part of diaspora*'s amazing community!

#diaspora #anniversary #release #development #help

Hi there @islieb? !
This is a post actually directed in part to the @Friendica Support forum page of our free open source software community. I guess you heard the term #friendica already, as you are quite a while in the fedi, beginning with your #diaspora presence a long time ago. Our main coder @Michael Vogel is a fan of yours (if I got that right). I asked him the other day in a FOSDEM element chat, if he considers it possible that you make some drawings for friendica, maybe even for every new version, we have like two o three releases every year.

The idea came up because on this server we decided to use the following comic on the login/welcome page:

Than we came up with this variation for the text as you can see:

It seemed to me that Michael liked the idea to have some drawing by you, so I don't want to let the idea slip away and ask you, as well as the community, what everyone thinks about such an option. There are also the 403, 404, 500 and so on error pages. Well maybe those are more a task for @isfies!, who knows ..

Sumasumarum, any ideas, comments or questions about this proposal @all ?

// v.01

Silversalty wrote:

Not sure what the concern presented here is.

I took the picture. It's of a real street scene. The individual in the image cannot be identified so privacy doesn't seem to apply.
I have refused permission for image use (when kindly asked) if a person in stressful circumstances can possibly be identified.

/ tiptoeing around, trying to formulate correctly the answer

Well this could become kinda salty and salted conversation @Silversalty, as the nature of the original text addressing the @Satire group community page, and the nature of this profile have the capacity, or somehow and to a certain extent it is their nature and/or purpose, to be misunderstood easily.
🤔

So:

• first off all, cudos because it's an incredible pic!
• "The individual in the image cannot be identified so privacy doesn't seem to apply"
  totally agreed from the get go
• "I have refused permission for image use (when kindly asked)"
  Do you mind that your as public published toot was used by reshare, actually leaving the activityPub sphere by crossPost to #diaspora*:
  https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/0ac89072-1567-a50b-94b9-1f9793325551
  Do you prefer the deletion of the reshare?
• Did you feel accused by any means of the text of the reshare?
• Was your picture taken in the first world?
• Is it ok, or even would you like it, if in the original post your profile becomes credited for the image?

@Cory Doctorow

utopiArte

2025-02-06 19:20:52

@Satire
// v.01(?)

Please be aware that #realSatire #copyLefted #undocumented images, taken by #whoKnows, of a real satirical #gentrificationVictim of society in the neighborhood, found on one of @[url=https://mastodon.nz/users/cory]Cory[/url] Doctorow's #realLife status updates, can #bitterSweet'en your #morningMate, if you were actually only about to to match the #showOff of the initial publication.

Silversalty in an answer to this post wrote:

I took the picture.

♲ @Silversalty@mastodon.social:

A little like a kid wanting to stay overnight in a backyard tent, till it gets unpleasant.
'Unhoused' imagining.

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angry.

In the last 60 days, the diaspora* web assets received 11.3 million requests. That equals to 2.19 req/s - which honestly isn't that much. I mean, it's more than your average personal blog, but nothing that my infrastructure shouldn't be able to handle.

However, here's what's grinding my fucking gears. Looking at the top user agent statistics, there are the leaders:

• 2.78 million requests - or 24.6% of all traffic - is coming from Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot).
• 1.69 million reuqests - 14.9% - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot)
• 0.49m req - 4.3% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
• 0.25m req - 2.2% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36
• 0.22m req - 2.2% - meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

and the list goes on like this. Summing up the top UA groups, it looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don't to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.

Oh, and of course, they don't just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don't give a single flying fuck about robots.txt, because why should they. And the best thing of all: they crawl the stupidest pages possible. Recently, both ChatGPT and Amazon were - at the same time - crawling the entire edit history of the wiki. And I mean that - they indexed every single diff on every page for every change ever made. Frequently with spikes of more than 10req/s. Of course, this made MediaWiki and my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.

If you try to rate-limit them, they'll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they'll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.

Just for context, here's how sane bots behave - or, in this case, classic search engine bots:

• 16.6k requests - 0.14% - Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
• 15,9k req - 0.14% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36

Because those bots realize that there's no point in crawling the same stupid shit over and over again.

I am so tired.

So sieht es bei mir aus:
Momentan kennt dieser Knoten 4.273 Knoten mit insgesamt 2.120.886 registrierten Nutzern, die die folgenden Plattformen verwenden:

• #Friendica (379/4.024) - 10 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #diaspora (304/628.472) - 2.067 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #red (7/64) - 9 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #hubzilla (264/7.687) - 3 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #GNU Social (136/6.425) - 47 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #StatusNet (9/174) - 19 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #Mastodon (2.722/1.451.747) - 901 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #pleroma (446/21.092) - 47 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #socialhome (4/973) - 243 Nutzer pro Instanz
• #ganggo (2/228) - 114 Nutzer pro Instanz

Bei Diaspora scheint es also am kompliziertesten zu sein, eine eigene Instanz zu betreiben (oder die Nutzer vertrauen den Betreibern am meisten 😉 ) und bei Hubzilla ist es am einfachsten (oder die Nutzer sind am mistrauischsten 😉 ).

Da ich mal wissen wollte, wie sich das über die Zeit entwickelt, habe ich mir das von Zeit zu Zeit mal notiert und so sieht es dan aus:

• 8. Januar : 4.253 / 2.349.200 -> Maximale Anzahl an Nutzern
• 9. Januar : 4.241 / 2.345.669
• 10. Januar : 4.231 / 2.330.945
• 11. Januar : 4.226 / 2.334.113
• 13. Januar : 4.229 / 2.039.934
• 14. Januar : 4.259 / 2.054.374
• 15. Januar : 4.252 / 2.059.012
• 16. Januar : 4.246 / 2.007.713
• 27. Januar : 4.215 / 2.025.384
• 7. Februar: 4.208 / 2.124.247
• 10. Februar: 4.245 / 2.131.417
• 23. Februar: 4.267 / 1.769.948
• 27. Februar: 4.243 / 2.181.948
• 3. März: 4.273 / 2.120.880 -> Maximale Anzahl an Instanzen

Die Anzahl der Instanz korreliert also nicht unbedingt mit der Anzahl der Nutzer, auch interessant.

#föderation #Fediverse

Mudança de instância - Instance move