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Fediverse

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ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Time for an ICQ for the Fediverse?

Looks like ICQ is finally shutting down, just as interest in retro internet tools is growing.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/25/24164579/icq-shut-down-june

@fediverse

singpolyma ,
@singpolyma@lemmy.ml avatar

Cheogram Android has the send half of URL preview. I will be adding display on the receive side this year when I get the time.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Thanks for suggestion I will try that one

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

UI differences are a big factor in the success/failure of decentralised federation of diverse platforms and content

And this seems a good example: bridged posts onto which has a lower character limit than Mastodon.

So, just like posts on mastodon, you don't get the full content of the post (which ends with an abrupt ellipsis here) and have to take a link to the original platform.

However powerful the underlying protocols, this isn't far from screenshots.

@fediverse

modulus ,

IMO bridging or translation isn't federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it's hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.

modulus ,

Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.

maegul , (edited )
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

The fediverse won’t succeed at putting up a substitute and that’s a problem?

Just an impression: All the pieces seem to be there. But what’s required is a team, with devs, PMs and coordinators, dedicated to making a particular place in the .

That’s resources and decently sized financial and organisational demands, especially to get a critical mass of users.

Is the fediverse up to that challenge? If not, is it an issue worth addressing?

@fediverse

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

Amen. Same problem here. But feel free to hit me up if you find someone who wants to do it. I wouldnt mind helping with design stuff since that meeds different skills than coding.

lambalicious ,

Forget federated stackoverflow, give me federated Gardening.StackExchange!

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic

See the conversions here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4628
and
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/federating-the-content-of-posts-note-articles-and-character-limits/4087

AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.

It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.


@fediverse

nutomic ,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

None of that matters if Mastodon doesnt implement these suggestions or standards. And from past experience its extremely unlikely that they will. Thats why I think its best to ignore what Mastodon does, its not our concern how they decide to render things.

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

That's kind of what I meant too, if there's a standardised and correct way to implement things, that's how projects should implement it instead of trying to do it the "Mastodon" way

JustinH ,
@JustinH@twit.social avatar

"We Need To Rewild The Internet"
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I've read all year.

I often struggle to think of a term for "appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually." Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@fediverse

Valmond ,

Interesting!

I poked around in the (slightly verbose) documentation and stumbled onto this:

Servers should not re-use URIs, regardless of the mechanism by which resources are created. Certain specific cases exist where URIs may be reinstated when it identifies the same resource,

So I wonder if it has the same inbuilt limitation that IPFS has, which means you cannot just update the data you are sharing, without also having to create a whole new link (I know IPFS are trying to work around that, but have seen no decentralised solution yet).

I'll poke around some more!

Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before.

Cheers

Valmond ,

Now this is interesting, I know about Tor ofc, with all problems surrounding it (exit nodes etc) but I guess an onion website could be made well protected and shared & updated. You have to host it yourself though I guess.

Freenet, gotta dig down and see how it works under the surface, it looks very promising but it's kind of complex and I haven't yet figured out if it is all benevolent sharing for example and what happend if some random node sharing your stuff goes offline.

Very interesting!

I think (I'll dig more to see if it stands) my advantage would be the redundancy (so the data always stays up and is hard to take down), the no need of benevolent nodes, and potentially the ease if use.

Thanks!

maegul , (edited )
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment"

which was about a year ago now, I can't help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of in the

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that's smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

1/

Subversivo ,

Sorry anout the delay. The siteis iceshrimp.net

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Huh. Thanks!!

andrew ,
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Mastodon establishes non-profit in the US, while Germany revokes their nonprofit status

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/

@fediverse

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

while Germany revokes their nonprofit status

For unknown reasons, and those tax authorities are pretty well know for revoking it wrongly.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

People are actually on BlueSky

There's now a decent measurement of user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html) ...

They've got about 1.6M MAUs ...
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.

That's not nothing!

Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).

Bluesky is quite "international" with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there's real attrition happening IMO.

Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?

@fediverse

mima ,

@halm Diaspora only federates with Friendica (because the latter has diaspora protocol support). Friendica doesn't have its "own protocol", it uses ActivityPub with its own proprietary extensions IIRC.

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

I meant links to instances not owned by the main company. Are there any?

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Plugins for fediverse platforms.

Where is this up to? Is anyone thinking along these lines?

I've seen @db0 espouse such (eg https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/8581651) (sorry for the tag if annoying).

I've certainly thought of it myself ... because it's a pretty obvious idea for an ecosystem aiming for richness and sustainability.

Seems a perfect fit for reusable moderation tooling too, rather than each new platforms having that trouble.

This is essentially 's idea it seems.

@fediverse

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Year, tone down the smug "prs accepted", mate. You're just toxic

Die4Ever ,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

When it comes to moderation tooling I'm honestly a little confused that there isn't more work or noise around a developing a sideloaded tool.

Yeah we just need volunteers to dedicate their time to it. But it's a lot easier to complain than it is to contribute.

andrew ,
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/
@fediverse

yo_scottie_oh ,

Repost.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Mastodon CVE Report

Didn't expect the mastodon CVE report/account would kinda end up being about platform diversity on the fediverse (TLDR: only mastodon really had the problem, which was huge)

https://arcanican.is/excerpts/cve-2024-23832/discovery.htm

@fediverse

maegul OP ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@skullgiver

The point though is that not all platforms had the problem, which means platform diversity would have lessened the significance.

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

The Fedipact statistics are interesting

7% of active users committed to - https://fedidb.org/current-events/anti-meta-fedi-pact

  • How representative of the user base is this, or are admins gatekeeping here? A large survey would be good to clear that up.

  • EG, Mastodon, relative to its userbase, seems the most "Meta friendly" with only 57% of fedipact users (but ~80% all users)

  • Fractal of niche-dom? Fedi ~1% of social media, fedi-pact ~ 10% of fedi. So anti-meta-fediverse ~0.1%?

@fediverse
@fediversenews

h3ndrik , (edited )

In addition to what the other people said here...

I think the wording is a bit misleading, too. Those users didn't actively commit to . They just happen to use an instance where the admins decided to block Meta. Deliberate or not, it is indirect from the user's perspective.

And my opinion is: The whole is very unbalanced. While we do care, we also have to remind ourselves that Meta probably don't care at all about -for example- the 40.000 users on Lemmy.

flamingmongoose ,

They began experimentally federating several of their staff accounts. I could read them directly on mastodon. I don't THINK they could read any Mastodon data

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.

@fediverse

By @robin

otl ,
@otl@hachyderm.io avatar

@poVoq Agreed. It got me thinking. But feels almost entirely ideological, conflating social media (e.g. Twitter, Reddit) with “the digital world”.

Saying git is a “failed attempt at decentralisation” just because GitHub is popular misses that GitHub is less critical infrastructure than it would be if we only had CVS or Subversion.

I’m encouraged by incremental, practical decentralisation efforts outside of social media. It’s slow, kinda boring but it’s real and happening today.

@fediverse

alcinnz , (edited )
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@maegul @fediverse Thanks @robin for the term "Google Search Fallacy"! I've been seeing variations upon it everywhere ...

Love this article!

(I've toyed with decentralized search before & quickly came to the conclusion that the way we commonly think about it is thoroughly misguided)

maegul ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?

Can't get this brain fart out of my head.

What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?

Quick thoughts:

  • FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to ...
  • Shared/Single Sign On
  • Easy cross posting
  • Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
  • Unlike email, supporting small servers

No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.


@fediverse

Aatube ,
@Aatube@kbin.social avatar

@Sean Not all devices support passkeys.

Unmemorizable passwords are not the kind I like to use. I'd rather be able to login on some random incognito guest computer.

@fediverse @maegul @1984 @mindlight @maegul

maegul OP ,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@strife @joeldebruijn

Yea this is the essence of the idea. Strip down the interop requirements as much as possible, relying on existing tech as much as possible, and allow software and norms to solve all the other problems, where, TBF, it seems that software is doing all the heavy lifting in the fediverse anyway, but also has to handle federation and the protocol.

liaizon ,
@liaizon@wake.st avatar

What is a Fediverse Galaxy?

As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.

@fediverse Lemmy group]

liaizon OP ,
@liaizon@wake.st avatar

@christian @fediverse @stux I am not sure what exactly you are questioning? just that some admins have more then one mastodon instance?

christian ,
@christian@suma-ev.social avatar

@liaizon

I'm not questioning anything. I'm just wondering if "galaxy" is the same thing in the Fediverse as "relay family" is in the Tor world.

@fediverse @stux

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