John Mastodon was a computer programmer and avid social media user. He was frustrated with the centralized nature of most social media platforms, which meant that a single company had control over the content and data of its users. This often led to censorship, privacy violations, and manipulation by the companies for their own financial gain.

John wanted to create a social media platform that was decentralized, meaning that it would not be controlled by a single entity. He believed that this would give users more control over their own data and allow for a more open and free exchange of ideas.

He spent several years researching and developing the Mastodon platform, which used a decentralized network of servers to host content and user data. This meant that no single server or company had control over the network, but rather it was maintained by a community of volunteers and users.

As word of Mastodon spread, more and more people became interested in the platform. It attracted a diverse group of users from around the world, including activists, artists, and technology enthusiasts.

Despite facing some challenges and setbacks, John was able to successfully launch Mastodon and it quickly gained a large and active user base. It became known for its commitment to free speech and privacy, and users appreciated the ability to connect with others in a more authentic and open way.

Today, Mastodon is a thriving social media network with millions of users, and John Mastodon is hailed as a pioneer in the world of decentralized technology.

This is a good idea. It'd be neat to get fediverse services, including lemmy, supporting this. We could make cross site interactions so much easier.

You need to generate an openssl secret with:

openssl rand -hex 32

and include the following lines into your /var/www/peertube/config/production.yaml file after the webserver section:

# Secrets you need to generate the first time you run PeerTube
secrets:
  # Generate one using `openssl rand -hex 32`
  peertube: '[put output of openssl rand -hex 3 here]'

A bit like join-lemmy.org, now with a much improved instance browser.

The thing about Twitter is that it really lacks a lot of the features you'd expect from a true Mastodon replacement.

For example, there's no way to edit your toots (which they, confusingly call "tweets"—let's face it, it's a bit of a silly name that's difficult to take seriously).

"Tweets" can't be covered by a content warning. There's no way to let the poster know you like their tweet without also sharing it, and no bookmark feature.

There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content.

It also doesn't Integrate with other fediverse platforms, and I couldn't find the option to turn the ads off.

Really, Twitter has made a good start, but it will need to add a lot of additional features before it gets to the point where it becomes a true Mastodon replacement for most users.

#twitter #mastodon #twittermigration @fediverse

Communities are sort of reachable from Lemmy, but it doesn't really work yet.

I like the concepts of both platforms, Deviantart and Wattpad, but both have been going down the tubes, and the argument can be made that they have always had a pretty big cringe problem.

Is there a platform or platforms more geared toward artists and/or writers like either of those two centralized sites? Pixelfed maybe? But I get the impression that it's more Instagram as opposed to Deviantart. Writefreely for Wattpad? Are either very similar to those centralized sites at all?

I think Tumblr has a pretty unique style in terms of how it works. Even though it's completely centralised, it already almost feels like it's federated. So is there an actual fediverse platform that's similar to it?

I am looking to just dip my toes on a couple of other platforms. What I am finding while trying to choose an instance for Funkwhale (or Friendica, Pixelfed, etc) is that there is very little in the way of descriptions for finding something to match me and I would just be choosing at random.

I am using the official sites' server recommendations/lists to look through and am really getting no info that is helpful to me. Does anyone know of other resources?

My best option at this point is to use a throw away account to get on any server then spend just enough time interacting to find a good one and try to join it. Does that seem reasonable?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/364580

The EU via their Horizons Europe program, the Next Generation Internet (where e.g. NLnet are associated) (NGI Initiative) are the biggest funders of the free software projects that comprise the fedi. Without their support fedi wouldn't be what it is now.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently launched a pilot to have both a Peertube and Mastodon instance on the Fediverse, hashtagged #EUVideo and #EUVoice respectively. On these servers official European Commission related institutions as well as individuals working at the EC can have their accounts.

This recognition of the Fediverse and the interest that exists in entering our decentralized social networking environment is an important development. With success of the pilot there will undoubtedly be a follow-up and more initiatives to come. First results until now is that the parties that 'test the waters' are very happy on the kinds of interactions and quality of discussions they encounter on the Fediverse.

That is no wonder, of course. Fediverse offers social networking that is more personal and friendly, than corporate social media which is about 'broadcasting' and influencing.

Current pilot can be a ramp up to something much bigger:

Fediverse: United in Diversity

A social networking technology where everyone can find their place and participate, that is not controlled by Big Tech and commercial corporate interests. For the European Commission there is the opportunity to passionately put their support behind fostering "The European Take On Social Networking". Fediverse aligns to the NGI Initiative who envision an Internet for Humans.

How you can help

To progress towards this vision it is important for the EU/EC pilot to be a success. As fedizen you can help with this. Here are a couple of ways to offer your support:

→ Follow, boost, favourite the EUVoice accounts on Mastodon and EUVideo Peertube videos.

• These early adopter accounts are still learning how the Fediverse works, what the culture is and e.g. how we value accessibility and image captions. You can help them discover.
• Many accounts are still Twitter bridges and broadcast only. Some others respond and interact with fedizens, notably @EC_OSPO, @EDPS and @EC_NGI. The operators of the Twitter bridges don't know what the value of Fediverse is to them, and if they should spend time with us. All reactions by us are monitored, so we can help them here.
• There are people giving highly toxic reactions to almost any EC-related toot. There are many things to be critical about. Politics is about the discussion of these issues, and good arguments help more than toxicity. Here we have opportunity to show we are different than the cesspit that Twitter is.
• Do not expect too much, too soon. There is a complex organization structure at the EC, and given the politically sensitive nature all communications are weighed carefully and undergo multiple levels of approval. Plans move slowly, but they are in motion.

→ Let's give the fedi accounts more followers than they have on Twitter, if possible.

• For instance the Director General of Informatics at DG DIGIT, Veronica Gaffey, has 191 fedi followers in short time, while on Twitter she has 279 followers.

→ If you are on Twitter, then help encourage EC institutions to also have an account on EUVoice.

• A notable example is the European Parliament. Respond to their tweets and name-drop the fedi as THE place to be.

→ We are gathering a group of volunteers on SocialHub that can help train EC representatives in how to use the Fediverse effectively and understand its culture.

• The activities we do here, starting later this year, stand to benefit any administration or institution interested to join the Fediverse, not just EU representatives.

This post is also cross-posted to the Social Coding Movement that is dedicated among others to establish a Peopleverse on top of the fedi. Social Coding is not yet officially launched.

Last night, between 23.00 on 23 June and 1.00 AM on 24, the Poliverse instance "exploded" a thousand messages around the fediverse!

** We have to apologize to a lot of people: ** • we apologize to anyone who was ** woken up by our notifications **; • we apologize to those who have cisted their ** federated timeline invaded by messages ** coming from Poliverso; • We apologize to the ** administrators and instance moderators who know us ** who probably wondered who hacked our server; • We apologize to the ** administrators who didn't know us ** and who noticed us in the worst way • We apologize most of all ** to some of our users ** who, through our fault, have ** UNKnowingly ** behaved as a spammer ...

Unfortunately, we could not foresee this collapse and we did everything possible to limit the damage: unfortunately we are sure that our instance or some of our users have ended up in some blacklist.

** If so, we ask you to read this message, in which we explained what happened. **

PS: if any Friendica expert should realize that some considerations are wrong or should be better defined, please let us have your own considerations in the comments!

What happened to the Poliverso server?

The update

The new Friendica release, the 2022.06 called “Giant Rhubarb” is a seemingly useless release, because nothing changes for users! Yet it has greatly improved compatibility with other software in the fediverse: there has in fact been immense work by the developers and there have been many changes; in such cases it is possible that disservices arise and, although some instances have already installed an exploratory version, it is clear that some problems can only emerge during the production phase.

Precisely for this reason we decided to proceed with the installation only several days after the release, to understand what the problems would be for users and notify them in time; and yesterday 23 June at 22.00, the Poliverso server was updated.

The problem

At first it didn't seem like there were any problems and, in fact, after half an hour we stopped monitoring. But at 11.00 something happened ...

Admin 1 22.56 (the developers of friendica) have changed something: some users get a lot of notifications about old things .. then everything is fixed 22.56 (I'm seeing a lot of queue in processes)

Admin 2 23.00 So far I am not having this type of problem. Actually, I am not having any problems 23.01 To be more precise, I still can't see anything different than before ... 😅 23.04 Right now, after a few tens of minutes of pause, he's posting stuff on Twitter 23.07 Holy shit! my accounts are flooding the universe with messages

Admin 1 23.14 in what sense? : D

Admin 2 23.15 in what sense? The system is shitting out all the messages posted by the RSS Feed. It is a disaster. I'm emptying the ocean with a spoon 🤣 23.15 This time we are banned from all the galaxies of the fediverse

Admin 1 23.16 I noticed a lot of RSS stuff, but I said to myself "boh"

Admin 2 23.16 They are the queues of those messages

In short, yesterday there was a real disaster for which the Poliverse instance will pay the consequences for a long time as in reputational terms. However, the management of the problem was absolutely timely both from the point of view of resolution (at 1:00 AM almost all the messages had been deleted) and from the point of view of communication.

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-4062-b4e8-2a73-375308279474

The reasons for the problem

However, the problem was not systemic or due to problems of administration of the instance; the problem was due to a series of factors that multiplied its impact:

• Friendica upgrade bugs exist: the "system" upgrade all together, some integration problems with other activitypub instances; but all this causes a "re-reading" of the notifications from the RSS FEED; in this way, users who also repost some posts from the feed get** a new repost (😱!)** of the feed.
• this system (republishing from feed) is not very common among Friendica users; so the problem was not noticed too much on the forums
• this system, however, is very powerful and we Poliverse administrators have often sponsored it with users: therefore some of our users use it; and some "service" and information users that we manage directly on a personal level or as administrators also use it: [@ macfranc @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/macfranc), [@ informapirata @ poliverso .org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/informapirata), [@ news @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/notizie), [@ cybersecurity @ poliverso.org [(https: //poliverso.org/profile/cybersecurity), [@ privacypost @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/privacypost), [@ piratepost @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/ profile / piratepost), [@ instruction @ poliverso.org] (https://poliverso.org/profile/ Formazione)
• inside Friendica there are no valid administration or moderation tools (an ancestral and well-known Friendica problem: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/8724), which would allow us to delete messages in bulk or to immediately stop the republishing service from feed or to temporarily suspend the "unwittingly spammy" users. So we either manually deleted and deactivated everything or had users manually delete their messages - this was an incredible waste of time!

The reputational damage

All of this prevented us from predicting the problem and then amplified it. However, we can assure you that the management of the application was professional and within a couple of hours from the alert, we have erased all traces of the problem!

The fact remains that some users who followed the accounts in question probably wondered "what's going on?"; others have probably defollowed, silenced or banned the accounts of innocent and unaware users ...

The same thing will have happened for administrators: some of them, to protect their users from spam, will have silenced or banned users; or they will have silenced or banned the instance!

Fortunately, those in the Central European Time Zone were probably asleep at the time and were not online on Friendica, Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma or Hubzilla

Final thoughts

Of course during those hours we felt [a furious rage] (https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1062-b4db-9d28-f53436523782) towards the Friendica developers who caused us such a problem...

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1062-b4db-9d28-f53436523782

...but we clearly don't get mad at them. Moreover, it is thanks to them that Friendica exists; it is thanks to them that there is what we believe is the software of the fediverse that allows the most complete social experience today.

Next time, however, we recommend that you report the problem well and above all, express at least a little regret to the Friendica instance administrators and other administrators who had to manage what seemed to all intents and purposes a massive spam activity!

But above all, we send a message to all instance administrators and users who are reading us: if you have defollowed, silenced or banned some Poliverse users, think again! They had no fault, other than to use the RSS feed reposting system: give them a second chance!

I assume this is mastodon.social. Small compared to twitter, but it's progress.

Note: in hindsight, half of this post is answering my own questions as I explore this rarer side of federation, but there are still some remaining questions which I have highlighted.

Introduction

This post is created on lemmy.ml. The benefits of federating this post to other Lemmy instances is immediately obvious, since they can use most or all of the site features to read it as intended and interact (voting, replying, reporting, saving, cross-posting or browsing and subscribing to fediverse@lemmy.ml).

There is also intuitive benefit in being able to federate with other link aggregators such as lotide and Prismo instances. All these sites have the same basic interface of link-posting, text-posting, voting, commenting and voting on comments. The base format is very compatible, even if extra features are not. I wouldn't be surprised if Lemmy and lotide form a dynamic similar to Mastodon and Pleroma, two microblogging services which again have an intuitive base compatibility.

But what about different types?

What are the benefits of, for example, making Lemmy federate with Mastodon, Friendica or PeerTube?

One approach to answering that is asking what cross-interaction is already possible, like some posts in !feditolemmy which were posted from Friendica. This nerdica.net post which is also replicated on !fediverse shows a conversation in replies between a few Lemmy instances and a Friendica account, and demonstrates the clear analogue of our communities and their forums, and of our votes and their likes (it's just a test ;) )

So Friendica posts federating to Lemmy makes reasonable sense. I'm not sure about the opposite. I guess their posts are analogous to our text posts or text & link posts, so it might be possible to render their forums as browsable communities here.

Question 1: Does my Lemmy account browsing and making new posts on Friendica forums make sense? Or will the federation only make sense for enabling Lemmy to aggregate Friendica posts and allowing cross-rating and cross-commenting?

Note: I found this Friendica forum on Lemmy, which was properly interpreted as a community instead of a user by Lemmy, but posts aren't replicating yet. I'm guessing it's a base for future completion to allow further cross-integration. Friendica does not appear to be able to browse Lemmy users or communities yet.

I also assume microblogging sites like Mastodon and Pleroma, along with the Prismo link aggregator, can use hashtags as an analogy for communities. While a post on those sites can belong to multiple tags, Lemmy can imitate this with crossposting in multiple communities. Is this reasonable?

PeerTube is where I get more confused, and I'm not alone. As a reply there mentioned, we can view a PeerTube user account, such as https://lemmy.ml/u/thelinuxexperiment@tilvids.com and https://lemmy.ml/c/h3h3productions@h3h3.club , although it doesn't seem to work for framatube.org.

However the interfaces of Lemmy and PeerTube are radically different, as PeerTube is foremost a video hosting site and Lemmy is a link aggregator. I think it's fair to assert that a Lemmy post cannot be displayed on a PeerTube instance without hacks no-one wants, which leaves PeerTube->Lemmy posting, and mutual liking/commenting/reporting/etc.. A PeerTube video can be adapted as a link post in Lemmy. I'm not certain how a PeerTube upload would signal which communities it should be posted to in Lemmy, but there are reasonable options like an extra field in the upload settings, or a link in the description.

Question 2: Is there a plan to have anything more than PeerTube creating link posts in Lemmy communities with federation between comment sections?

Trying to learn the current situation in order to ask good questions has taught me a lot, I was in a mindset that we had to be able to make posts on other sites in order to usefully federate, when that isn't really our role as a link aggregator site. Media sites can usefully post to here with federated voting and comment sections.

Over the years, I've been studying a handful of different fediverse platforms that bring a lot of interesting concepts to the table.

As someone that has studied and reported on the developments of these various systems, I've decided to put together a summary of things I'd like to one day put into my own federated platform, should I ever develop enough brainpower to actually develop one.

Does anyone know what this thing is? Some kind of decentralized, open source, anti-establishment, etc platform aiming to be an alternative to twitter, but we plebs aren't allowed to see or participate in the development process or even see any source repositories yet.

To me there's a bunch of red flags, but I can't put my finger on what I reckon they're flagging. It's that combo of roll-your-own-crypto and promises of decentralization and secret-open-source-development-model all tied together with node.js and blockchain.

No mention of other decentralization efforts, their envisaged place/relationship with the fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon, possibility of extending their new blockchain protocol ideas with other platforms. Nothing even about how they're better than the fediverse or whatever.

They were banned from twitter tho so they "must be legit"? The slides on the "tech" page mostly have this "COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE - NOT FOR UNAUTHORISED USE OR DISSEMINATION" watermarks, which is pretty weird.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/G08ek

https://archive.is/panquake.com

Email is already nicely federated, but I think it's time for a change. Services like protonmail claim to offer encryption between users, but you can't host your own instance. It would be awesome if there was a spec somewhere for a federated email service that defines

• email encryption between users
• markdown
• ~~connection with activity pub? (What would this look like)~~ I mean some way to "email the web", ie: add comments via email
• compatibility with standard email users (if you send/receive to/from a user who does not have email v2 implemented it just uses normal features)
• somehow better support for email discussion groups (hop in and out, public interface defined)
• this spec should be focused heavily on usage for humans instead of automated mailing, I expect html would not be defined.

I'm just spit balling here. Does anyone have any ideas? Does something like this exist?

Thanks, Evan