Can’t install #gancio on my local machine because it’s Apple Silicon. Can anyone recommend a cheap webhost for messing around with something like this? Or should I just wait a few days to get home and install Linux on some old spare X86 computer? https://mastodon.social/@misc/112174293777254584
@pip@relay Qué buena noticia! 😃
Pueden seguir a @gancio para novedades y para comunicarles si quieren que les listen o no en https://gancio.org/instances
Nosotres estamos vinculades con @agenda , ya nos vamos leyendo! 💜 🏴
Thinking of setting up a #Gancio instance for #Boston events. I have no experience doing anything like this but it seems like a good learning project? Any advice? https://gancio.org
Like, recommendations for a hosting provider ... tutorials for setting it up... flashing red warnings that I shouldn't do it? Should I try installing it on a local machine first? That kind of stuff. Basics.
Last weekend FOSDEM took place in Brussels, Belgium. However it was O₄FFDEM that provided the space for about 20 people to meet and discuss the future of events in the Fediverse for the whole Saturday. Among them developers like @lesion (developer of Gancio), setop (upcoming coordinator of Mobilizon), @dreirik (foss.events), @laurin (contributor to ActivityPods) and community members, (h)activists and event organizers like @becha or @eest9, just to name a few, and myself. Eventually, there were people from half of Europe: Montpellier, Strasbourg, Graz, Amsterdam, Italy, Vienna, Ljubljana, and Rotterdam.
Expectations
It was impressive how, despite the number of people present, it was possible for the group to de facto moderate itself, in particular through the experienced careful intervention of a few at the right moments. We began with a short round of introductions, in which expectations for the day were also clarified. We first decided to talk about values, to clarify what needs and concerns are generally present. We were all united by the desire to become independent of Big Tech, although there were several completely different concepts of how this would be achieved from a single point of view in the mix.
Dilemmas
It has become evident that in the case of events, from of a software developer’s point of view, one cannot simply speak of users, but must distinguish between organizers and participants, although the distinction can also be blurred in the case of a small community. Following dilemmas were identified:
regional vs global calendars
topical vs mixed calendars
aggregation vs autonomy
moderation vs censorship
Advantages of a physical meeting
The discussion about these aspects was extensive and, admittedly, did not always seem to me to be very target-oriented. However, it was necessary to balance our different backgrounds and bring us up to the same level of knowledge and it became more concrete after the lunch break when we decided to compare and work out the intentions and use cases of the existing applications and developments in more detail. I could recap this in detail here, but I think it is best to write a stand-alone follow-up article. Each project has its own approach: some focus on local communities, some focus on private events an another wants to provide a way to organize larger political movements with as few social features as possible. On top of that, people have come up with use cases that no developer ever seemed to think of before.
One activist’s question, “What’s the difference between federation and interoperability?“, which had been floating around the room all day, was finally addressed in a satisfying way with examples. Even if all applications can successfully aggregate and display events of others, it does not mean that they respect all mechanisms that control how the event is listed, whether the event is joinable via ActivityPub, whether these joins have to be manually approved, whether some event details visibility have a certain scope, etc.
Calendiverse
Perhaps one of the most important points was to enable the creation of event calendars, which are also aimed at people who do not want to have an account anywhere, but are simply looking for events. From the point of view of people looking for events, regional or topic-specific calendars are particularly important. Which events are aggregated and shown on an individual platform would be in the hands of the platform operators, which would then automatically play a major role in moderation.
Why use ActivityPub?
ActivityPub covers most of the features iCal offers for creating calendars by aggregating multiple sources, but adds a few more:
Follow relationships become tangible
Social media like features:
Boosting
Liking
Replies
Push, not pull based
Joining (Participants management)
Use moderation and governance tools from the Fediverse
Getting to a Common Ground
Mobilizon has already introduced a huge set of custom properties and ways to manage event objects in the ActivityPub world. We decided on a process to re-evaluate their choices and draft a Fediverse Extension Proposal (FEP) for the least common set of them. What makes an event:
Private locations which may be disclosed on participant’s acceptance
From Whom
To Whom: Public, Private, Unlisted
Why if not want to get listed just not “send” the event: e.g., Mobilizon -> federated groups -> federated private events
Let the sender of an event set the discoverability : the recipient might mistreat that
We decided to deal with advanced mechanisms such as sub-events, recurring events, irregularly rescheduled events in the future.
Summary
All in all, it was simply nice to get to know each other and exchange ideas with other people who pursue common or similar goals. Especially the exchange between developers and non-developers, who were in the majority, was of great importance from my point of view. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to capture all the aspects in such a short recap. If you are missing something important, please have a comment. Many thanks to all of you, especially the organizers and those who were taking the meeting minutes.
so I have been looking at #gancio lately, and it seems quite interesting. although I think this open event calendar might easily be flooded with a lot of stuff you might not want there as soon as it would take off.
When writing the initial version of our project plan as signed and agreed with by NlNet we didn’t know yet about the dynamics of the community, specifically about how the cooperation between the maintainers of the #WordPress#ActivityPub plugin and #Mobilizon would be like. The level of collaboration with other #Fediverse developers would determine whether our project goals could only be achieved through a series of workarounds, or whether we could work together to strengthen interoperability and compatibility in the Fediverse.
Mobilizon was, until our project, the only Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio limits its ActivityPub capabilities to sending notes, but is working on a true federation of events, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: #304#33#321#1509#1507#1392#1385#1388#1387#1378#1376.
The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress AktivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @pfefferle again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.
Tasks done (almost)
We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.
Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.
If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress yourself if your operate a WordPress site with events, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.
@mikedev@blog Thanks for your thoughts! The WordPress ActivityPub implementation is currently focused on getting the publishing side of ActivityPub right. After that, we will consider such cases. The friends plugin is of interest in this regard, but also creating events within WordPress that are invite only might use a different approach than sending a Create Activity. When the time comes, I might ask you again to chat about this! Regards, André
Hallo Fediverse! Bitte um Rückmeldung + Ergänzungen: Übersichts-Tabelle mit Fediverse-Diensten, Vergleichsdiensten und Funktionen
Ich schreibe einen Artikel über den #FediverseFachtag und in dem Rahmen natürlich auch über das #Fediverse . Zielgruppe sind Leute, die wahrscheinlich zum Großteil noch gar nix vom Fediverse gehört haben.
Dazu bin ich dabei, eine Tabelle zu erstellen, in der einige Fedi-Dienste sowie deren Haupt-/ besondere Funktionen aufgeführt werden sollen.
Das ist der derzeitige Entwurf:
"ähnlich wie..."
Ein Vergleich mit kommerziellen Plattformen ist natürlich immer nur zum Teil passend. Ich kenne auch keinen der kommerziellen Dienste aus eigener Erfahrung, aber für die avisierte Zielgruppe kann so ein Vergleich vielleicht trotzdem eine hilfreiche Orientierung sein. Vielleicht gibt es da aber auch Vergleiche, die passender sind. Einige Dienste (bspw. Medium, Podigee) kannte ich auch noch nicht mal vom Namen her, sondern habe das nur aus ähnlichen Vergleichstabellen übernommen.
Zu den "besonderen Funktionen":
Insbesondere Friendica, Firefish und v.a. Hubzilla haben so viele Funktionen, dass diese im Rahmen der Tabelle nur exemplarisch aufgeführt werden können und die Auswahl ist subjektiv. Hier wäre die Frage, ob das eine passende Auswahl ist, ob besonders wichtige fehlen oder ob andere Funktionen wichtiger oder besonderer sind.
Wenn Ihr also Anregungen oder Ergänzungen habt, gerne her damit! Danke!
@Sascha Ja, das wäre super, wenn es bald noch mehr #Gancio -Instanzen gäbe (nicht nur, damit #Köln nicht mehr zum "Bonner Umland" gezählt werden muss ;-)