Interest is waning because there is no work being done on federation. Federation is the defining feature of this project, and no tangible progress has been made.
There was massive interest in the project when it first picked up some steam and for a while after. I think that most people are viewing it as a dead project. There are multiple FOSS link aggregator servers out there, and while Lemmy is i believe technically superior to them all, the interest is in federation, not another alternative link aggregator. I personally think that all feature requests need to be put on the backburner until there is at least minimal federated functionality. Of course I am not the maintainer or project manager so that is not up to me, it is just my opinion.
Also bear in mind, this instance is not for production, it is for testing. So that will play a role in people being skittish of signing up here.
I’m not a lemmy dev, and I have no rust knowledge, but I can provide some of the issues I encountered while implementing activitypub libraries in Go.
The biggest issue in the begining was the Json-LD representation of ActivityPub, which allows a property to have different typed values: it can be a URL, a list of URLs, a single Object or a list of Objects. In Go, this is possible by using custom Json marshaling/unmarshaling and some hand-wavy interface usage. I’m not sure how well Rust fares in this respect, but it might be a solved problem already if there’s a jsonld crate somewhere.
The grammar/structure of the objects themselves is trivial and only requires one to create the types that represent the different activity streams vocabulary entities: Objects at the lowest level, Actors (which are just an alias for objects), Activities which are objects with a couple of extra properties. Some of the specific Object/Activity types have different structures, but again, nothing super complicated. I suspect this is a solved problem in the projects OP already mentioned in their other post.
Exposing the ActivityPub end-points. This is not super complicated, mainly each Actor (which is the AP representatoin of a user or, in the case of lemmy, a community) must have an end-point where other AP services can reach it. This Actor also needs outbox and inbox collection endpoints, which can be queried by external clients/services.
Implementing the Server to Server AcitivtyPub interactions (what is colloquially called “federating”). This is still work in progress for me, and probably this is where the major work will happen for Lemmy too. Basically an S2S interaction consists of a server (lemmy) disseminating a new post (let’s say) to the other servers. In AP grammar this means that a “Note”, “Article” object - in the case of self posts, or a “Page” object for links gets wrapped in a “Create” activity and gets dispatched to other servers.
First issue: you need to build a recipients list for the activity. The way this is being done is not very well documented, if at all. There is a Public namespace which should send to all servers that the current one has knowledge about. There are specific lists of recipients in the forms of an Actor’s followers (eg, all members of a community) or other actor collections, or just specific actors. (Think of a mail’s recipients list, and it’s basically the same, except for the public namespace).
Second issue: authorizing the requests to the other servers. This is generally being done by using the HTTP-Signatures mechanism. Every actors needs public/private keys, that are used for signing the requests to other servers. This is probably also a solved case for rust.
Then there’s user discovery. Which you need when your server receives an activity from somewhere else. You need to load the Actor that created the activity and load their public key to validate the request’s http-signature.
In mastodon land, user discovery is being done by using web-finger. On my project I use plain ActiviytPub with a custom end-point for actors.
Now, all of this was a very light explanation of how/what’s needed to dispatch a single post from lemmy. ActivityPub has a number of other activity types that need to be implemented: Like/Dislike for voting, Update/Delete for content editing/deleting, Follow/Accept/Reject for community/user following, Announce for admin/user announcements, etc.
Each of these most probably will require custom logic - which unfortunatelly is documented only at the most superficial level in the ActivityPub spec, and much is left to the implementors.
So, in conclusion, this is no trivial amount of work, probably the devs have documented some of these steps in their issue tracker and maybe that’s a good place to start looking for low hanging fruit.
Another thing which I forgot to mention is computing/storing the scores for the posts.
In my implementation I have a real dumb way of doing it, where I just count the number of Likes/Dislikes on an item that represents the object and display that. The problem with this is that you need to load the collection that stores these on each object you want to display (eg: federated.id/objects/…/likes ), which is very slow on a post with a lot of comments.
Probably a better way to do it would be to add a “Score” property to the objects (yeah, I forgot to mention that ActivityPub supports extensions :D) which would expose the precomputed score. I will probably get to adding that, but not anytime soon to be honest.
I can't stand so many things about the twitter style of social media.
Based around following people: not communities or topics. If I follow a person, I have to see all of their posts no matter how unimportant to me it is. I might like a person's input on star trek, I really don't care if they're drinking their second red bull that morning.
There are tags, but no voting, no sorting, and no moderation, so they're mostly garbage.
No way to see what's popular: or sorting based on voting whatsoever. Updates stream in, which means you can't subscribe to more than a few people unless you want your entire day to be gone.
Length-limited content emphasizes gotcha soundbytes, and not discussion.
No tree-based commenting: meaning I have to click into a lot of threads just to see replies.
AFAIK, some instances have a way to view popular posts on the “/explore” page. The instance I just migrated from had it, but the one I am on now doesn’t, so it isn’t all of them.
NB: Can’t believe I had to register here with an e-mail address to comment about privacy…
Problem I have with searx is it does no regional searches at all - I just can’t find what I’m looking for in my own country. Results seem to be .com results. I see a Github issue was opened for that about 4 years ago and is still open.
I notice that DDG does allow users to set their search method to POST requests and support redirects to prevent search leakage. Partly the problem of browser and OS etc identity is our own browsers that are sending this info? DDG does do good regional search too.
So my big challenge is give me a metasearch engine that can at least do regional searches. For someone living in the US they probably don’t have a problem with “global” results, but outside the US we need results for locally in Botswana, South Africa, Egypt, etc and language is no good to filter on.
NB: Can’t believe I had to register here with an e-mail address to comment about privacy…
Supplying an email address on Lemmy used to be optional. Has that changed?
Problem I have with searx is it does no regional searches at all
I think that’s determined by the searx instance. Some instances let you choose your UI language, as well as the results language. You can also do “site:de” if you want to search *.de sites for example.
I notice that DDG does allow users to set their search method to POST requests and support redirects to prevent search leakage.
Why would POST prevent leakage? As long as the site is HTTPS, the query is encrypted regardless of whether it’s HTTPPOST or HTTPGET.
The only thing I really hate is the polarization. I like hearing different viewpoints from people who disagree with me, but oftentimes people will outright block you for disagreeing with them, or even associating with “the wrong people”.
I never said or implied that. This trend of assuming anyone who disagrees with you is ‘far right’ or ‘alt-right’ helps nothing. Also curious is how all of my comments in this thread suddenly have 1 more downvote than a few hours ago before you replied. Probably just chance.
That aside, I actually agree with the views here, I just don’t like being beaten over the head with it platform-wide.
I didn’t read the usernames, but it looks like i did downvote you a few times. I don’t think anyone who disagrees with me is facist but if being anti facist is too radical for you, you’re fairly far right
that's very little politics, they're banning one single political ideology. And fascism is an ideology that's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of human rights, whose need of respect in the 21st century should be taken for granted and shouldn't be a political question, i.e. a question which is answered in the political discourse, at all. So yeah, little politics. Fascism = bad, should be universally recognized as true. Nationalism per se not necessarily bad, but palingenetic ultranationalism, which is definition of fascism I'm using, definitely.
I can’t see which post you’re replying to. These thread lines are an optical illusion.
Antifa’s method of activism is controversial
While there is nothing controversial about being anti-racist, Antifa is not simply anti-racist. It’s the style of activism that’s controversial. From wikipedia:
Antifa is an anti-fascist political movement in the United States[2][3][4][5] comprising a diverse[6][7] array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both non-violent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform.[8][9][10][11] Antifa political activists engage in protest tactics such as digital activism and militancy,[11][12] sometimes involving property damage, physical violence and harassment, against fascists, racists and the far-right
Petitioning for policy reform is relatively non-controversial. But that’s not Antifa. Obviously some of the more extreme actions (e.g. violence and property destruction) are controversial - and Antifa is open to them.
Antifa’s ideology is controversial
Components of Antifa ideology:
anti-racism (non-controversial of course)
anti-capitalism (obviously controversial and IMO unpopular)
anarchy (obviously controversial and IMO unpopular)
I can’t even get my head around how it’s possible to be both anti-capitalist and anarchist at the same time. Anarchy is also favored by the extreme right, and obviously anarchy is a recipe for pure uncontrolled capitalism – most oppressive form of capitalism. What am I missing?
Lemmy censorship
In the case of lemmy.ml leadership, what we see is extreme censorship. We’re not just talking censorship of trashy messages. I recently posted a thread on the status of the cock.li email servers, and it was censored because the word “cock” appeared in the domain name. (proof). Obviously it’s essential to mention the domain name of the service we’re talking about.
No one will care if racist msgs get censored, but any post that’s incompatible with an anti-capitalist or anti-government viewpoint is also likely to be censored when you see how fast and loose they are with the censor trigger.
kbin.social
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