No point in moving your identity if your content server shuts down unexpectedly. I'm actually working on nomadic content over ActivityPub right this moment. Centralising it destroys everything I've done with nomadic identity over the last dozen years. We have clonable identities (identity and content) right now with live synchronisation. If your server cert expires or goes offline right this second, go to your clone and nothing has changed. You have all your content, friends, and settings. Everything. I'm not giving this up and neither should you. Content-addressable mechanisms don't work because the url changes if you edit the object. Every project has completely different URL paths and object-type mappings.
I'm currently convinced the only way to solve this is with a mapping table, so that /item/something on my system can be found at /object/something on your system (or whatever). We also have 30-40 different object types that most other projects haven't even considered. This is the only way to make them portable. Just store the object in the mapping table instead of the local path mapping for that object. Done. The portable url could just be $apgateway/$did/$resource-id. If my software supports that kind of object I'll redirect to where we store that kind of object. If it doesn't, I'll just return the portable object.
@smallsees@erlend@dmitri (also the spec indirectly explains how to build a microservice that could run for $1/mo on a little heroku-style platform you could point myname.com at-- we can hopefully provide a prototype soon and, if people demand it, add more explicit detail about how to build one's own or adapt the idea to other form factors?)
Please boost if your immediate circle contains fediverse developers outside of Mastodon.
I'm trying to determine the scope of support for the Mastodon's platform "Move Account" activity across the fediverse. We intend to use this in the relatively near future to convert all of the streams repository's ActivityPub facing accounts to nomadic digital identities - without losing all of our ActivityPub friends in the process.
I'm certain we'll find a number of fediverse projects that don't support this activity and will require manual re-friending. If you have knowledge of any platforms which don't - please reply with the platform name so that this procedure is well documented and we don't have a lot of surprises and missing friends. Thanks.
Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.
I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.
I've tried to take on the question of what it would take to make the internet public interest technology. This took me on a trip through transnational infrastructure, standards, governance, industrial policy, and a whole cast of creative thinkers and next-generation projects.
Hi Fediverse, we are NLnet. We support people and organizations who contribute to a free and open internet. We offer small and medium grants to projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data.
We're the lead of @NGIZero a coalition which runs several funding programmes for people who build free and open source technologies for the Next Generation Internet. (Made possible with financial support from the European Commission).
We've been stealthily present in the Fediverse behind the NGIZero handle but have now finally set up our NLnet instance. With special thanks to @nlnetlabs for their patience :).
Another way we've been involved is we've funded many fantastic ActivityPub related projects. See the image for a visual overview.
Happy to be here and looking forward to meet you in this pleasant space.
Web UI localization (partial). The language can be changed in Settings, under the "Experiments" section (currently only English and Dutch are available). You can contribute translations via translate.codeberg.org
Various improvements to FEP-ae97 C2S API
Portable actors located on other servers can be imported and merged with local ones.
The #Forgejo monthly update was published ✨ It is a high level overview of the project activities.
The User Research effort that gained momentum two months ago continues with a new round of user testing sessions. It is key to build a roadmap.
Building blocks for both ActivityPub federation and data portability improvements were merged into the codebase. They are not yet used for any user visible feature but they are a stepping stone.
I really by and large have mostly lost faith that anything short of a miracle will get #ActivityPub to where I would like it to be, and the forces working against success here are just hard to even look at
I support the groups that are trying to define a way forward, and I suspect in many, many ways the battle is lost until and unless one of those efforts succeeds well enough to define a better way forward, and there's no way to know what that would look like or if it is even possible.
@hrefna There's a lot to be said for worrying about the compatibility layer later. It's such a bizarre situation ... the 2022/2023 adoption had so many people with deep distributed systems experience, and while there are some very encouraging projects (Letterbook for example, and the data portability stuff Lisa Dussault has been working on) the overall ActivityPub ecosystem has really failed to capitalize.
But I feel burnt out. Refraining from making these arguments again. 😬)
Wrt. FeatherPub I'd recommend organizing such that you keep decent level of control on evolving the spec. In a similar way to e.g. ATProto take a greenfield approach, learn from the past, be open to feedback, but otherwise make decisions in smaller dedicated group or alone.
I'll never get how people can get used to living in America, let alone like it.
I asked my wife's aunt how to get to the nearest supermarket, and got an "oh, it's just 3 miles away, you'll be there in a blink of an eye".
Only 3 miles to get to the nearest grocery shop?? You know that I could be on the other side of Amsterdam if I drove 3 miles from my home - and on the way I'd bump into at least 30 different grocery stores?
And I've heard folks say "my office is actually quite near, just a 30 miles drive". If I drove 30 miles I'd be nearly in Belgium or Germany! I guess I'll make sure not to get lazy anymore about my 5 minutes cycling commute to my office...
And the state of public transport is something indecent even for a developing country. I've seriously seen better train and bus connectivity in Bangalore and Kyiv than between San Jose and San Francisco.
And let's not even get started with the cycling infrastructure. Sometimes you see these barely 1 meter wide bike lanes pop out of nowhere, and disappear a few meters later, and on the way they may be dangerously crossed by turning lanes for vehicles. No wonder that I haven't seen a single cyclist so far.
And how can you ever get used to having your neighbourhood's mall as the only place to go and meet people, with no parks, bars or public spaces within a walking distance? I've asked some friends where they usually like to hangout with their mates, and got answers like "we like to go to this place 15 miles from here". That's approximately the distance between Amsterdam and The Hague! I can't even imagine having to pick up a car and drive so long just to have a beer with friends.
And let's not forget kids. Most of the cities in Europe have a playground or park within 500 meters, anywhere you are. It's quite common for kids to walk or cycle there on their own. But those are apparently rarities on the other side of the pond. Kids apparently need to be driven around for all of their childhood, they are forbidden in most of the cases even from walking alone in their own neighbourhood without either being hit by a car or some zealous neighbour calling the cops for minor abandonment. And then people wonder why European kids are generally more independent?
Sure, there are exceptions too. Namely, downtown Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington and Boston. But those are all cities built before 1900 and the car tyranny. Everything else is just so badly designed, so badly isolated, so dull and so alike, and every place requires to replace your legs with wheels and tires, that I really struggle to see in suburbia anything that even remotely resembles an American dream.
I've never paid much attention to these things before, but my 3-year-old kid on his second trip to America has been quite an eye-opener. When asked by my mother what he saw in America, he candidly said "lots of cars and roads".