Fediverse

For Communick, I will be using reddit as part of the approval of new registration requests. What do you think of this policy?

Last Week in the Fediverse - ep 24

The main subject of the week is the conversation around Meta joining the #fediverse. To make sense of it all, I created a timeline of the major events, as well as sort out the different types of discourse people are having into different subjects.

In other news:
- over 15 threadiverse apps in development
- a research symposium on Mastodon
- fediverse magazine WeDistribute is back

@fediverse @fediversenews

Read it at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-24/

I recently came across a torrent that seems to be an archive of Reddit. It got me thinking if it would be possible to make it locally browsable. However, I also considered the possibility that someone might have already addressed this by creating a public Lemmy instance, enabling the content to be accessible from any federated instance.

Can we all stop the in-fighting for a minute and realise how awesome the platform we are on is?

We are forming communities on the realized image of the internet that we were told we would have back in the 80s and 90s.

You can make your own home on the web and have your own niche community, not owned by any corporation, while still being connected to the wider internet.

This feels like something out of a sci-fi movie.

I feel like Bookwyrm has proven the idea of a federated review platform. Could this be extended to local business reviews?

I vowed long ago to stop contributing to closed platforms such as on Google Maps or Yelp. Could a federated alternative be a good solution?

It would be extremely funny

(just a few thoughts I wanted to write out)

Don't get me wrong, I love the local and federated timelines, but after thinking about it I realized that it's also the cause for a lot of drama.

Email and Xmpp never had such a big problem with cross instance blocks. If you think about it, all federated content is blocked by default and only becomes available if a user searches for it and subscribes to it. Before that, the server has no idea what is out there unless a relay is used. But there's two exceptions... the local timeline and the federated timeline.

These are great to get stuff started and kickstart the following process, but are forcing people to receive content that they might not want to see.

Where previously a block would only be necessary whenever a malicious user messaged me directly, now we have to deal with the need to curate content of public timelines in order to avoid problems with local or remote users.

The instance admins have full right to decide what is hosted on their instance and what not. This is not about free speech because you are not entitled to using someone's server in a way they don't want, but about creating complicated dilemmas and tough moderation choices by forcing together content and users that could be drastically different in beliefs or preferences by using timelines which are understandably very appealing to use.

Maybe all posts should be unlisted by default and both timelines, whether on Lemmy or Mastodon only contain whitelisted user accounts to give your instance's users and remote users a few recommendations.

Don't get me wrong, I love those two timelines and I have a thick enough skin that I can simply ignore or block content I don't like, but as an instance admin both on Mastodon and Lemmy I've noticed that this is not the case. Users are often eager to report anything they don't like to see or disagree with even though they don't follow that community in question or would never have interacted with it. This could cause a lot of moderation overhead as well as drama as it puts users and remote instance admins on alert about X, Y or Z divisive or distasteful content (especially when it comes to NSFW) potentially being sent out to them.

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

I know there is revolt as a FOSS alternative to discord but it's not federated.

#Threadiverse mobile apps looking like a surprisingly healthy space already!

https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/71764
https://lemmy.ml/post/1505771
https://lemmy.ml/post/1499996

@fediverse
@fediversenews

Fediverse game jams have been a thing for a while, but this one seems to have a decent amount of people interested in joining in. It could be a really fun way for a lot of creatives and programmers in the fediverse to work together and build fun experiences that reflect on themes of our shared space.

cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/3451

Takahē is a Python ActivityPub server whose original goal was supporting multiple domains from one install:

When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.

I love the new direction, focusing on identity:

So, my new design goal is now to really take advantage of the multi-domain support and provide an experience that lets a diverse set of people, projects or companies, with a set of different domain names, logos and design ideas, all exist on the same server but still have their own profiles and identities that they can shape more in line with what they want.

Will support microblogging, but be focused on a sort of homepage functionality.

Is there a federated alternative to Stack Exchange?

Is there some application like a wiki in the fediverse? A place to gather and edit information together about a specific topic.

Is there a Fediverse option for hosting fanfiction, or maybe web novels/serials/etc? Like an AO3 alternative, basically. I looked around but couldn't find one, the closest thing that kinda works are the blogging platforms like writefreely. If there isn't, do you think fanfiction would be a good candidate for federation?

Why isn't it so popular compared to mastodon? I just found out about it and it looks pretty mature imo, it's only popular with japanese people.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/715934

The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!

Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!

https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/

Contents:

- Two views of the fediverse
- The case for "Trust but verify"
- Wait a second. Why should anybody trust Facebook, Instagram, or Meta?
- Why the Anti-Meta FediPact is good strategy
- We're here, we're queer, fuck Facebook
- A few words about digital colonialism
- Now's a good time for instance admins to discuss with their communities
- In chaos there is opportunity!

@fediverse@lemmy.ml @fediverse@kbin.social #fediverse #Meta #FediPact

cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/2263

I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself, so I wrote down a bunch of things and took screenshots.

Here's what I learned:

(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)

Paste Lemmy URLs

Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.

Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post

Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for Doctor_Pi@lemmy.ca, with one post displayed. Including a follow button

Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).

Limited support on other clients

Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.

Please leave a comment of what does / doesn't work in your particular client.

Follow Lemmy users on Mastodon

Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @boris@news.cosocial.ca. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.

Reply to a Lemmy post from Mastodon

If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.

I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.

This is my boris@cosocial.ca Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.

The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.

Create new OP post from Mastodon

You can create new OP posts directly from Mastodon. @-mention the group name, e.g. @vaneats@news.cosocial.ca.

Here's my test post which ended up creating this post in /c/cosocial.

It works! Exactly how the post ends up looking in Lemmy is a bit variable, so more experimenting to be done

Follow Lemmy Communities on Mastodon

Screenshot of vaneats through CoSocial Masto web interface. You can see a little "group" label next to the name

I can't actually browse posts from here, don't know if that's a sync issue or what.

Here's a screenshot of @vancouver@lemmy.ca which shows all the OP and comments.

All of the posts appear as boosts of the Lemmy accounts that are posting the content

Original

I reworked this post from a comment to LemmyCA Support on how the ActivityPub protocol works between Lemmy and Mastodon.

This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

A response to Daring Fireball's recent thinkpieces about Fediverse admins wanting to block Meta's new ActivityPub platform.

Rebuilding this site has been a labor of love. So many things are happening in this space, and it's growing in every direction like crazy.

I know everybody with a project should have their own website and then federate to social networks. But people have become lazy in this sense and they hold their projects inside instagram. Ok, they could use pixelfed instead, but IG/PF are not the best fit for holding a project (for example your artistic/therapeutic/whatever entrepreneurship), facebook pages is kinda better. A blogspot could probably be a better fit (I'm thinking of people that would feel very complicated on building/hosting a proper website), or silex or neocities but, is there something that would work like this somewhere on the fediverse? Thanks!