fabio

fabio, 1 month ago

@cory the idea sounds similar to what I’ve done a while ago with #Platypush + #mopidy (and optionally Tidal). My implementation also uses the scrobbled tracks over a certain period and Last.fm’s API to automatically generate a “discover weekly” playlist.

I haven’t toyed with Plex in a while, but why did you have to run everything on Firebase/Supabase? If you have your Plex server running locally isn’t it more convenient to go for a fully local solution?

fabio, 1 month ago

@paul yeah it seems to work for me too now. I eventually went for the nuclear option - reset the db, encryption key, workdir and create everything anew.

Not sure if the problem was with some cached configuration parameter that wasn’t refreshed even after the container was destroyed, but at least things seem to work now…

@dansup

fabio, 1 month ago

@Goffi integrations like Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp mostly rely on libpurple plugins (like purple-gowhatsapp or purple-instagram) that are either poorly documented, more unstable or lack many features that are available on Matrix bridges.

By own admission of some of these developers, they usually don’t test their plugins against Spectrum2, and mileage may vary a lot. And usually when one of these plugins dies it takes the whole service down with it.

I’m in general a bit unimpressed with the state of libpurple - I feel like it’s becoming a very aged ecosystem maintained by a very limited number of developers that have to make those plugins work for a very wide range of clients. That’s also the reason why I left bitlbee.

Slidge seems to be promising, but I feel like it’s still at an immature stage.

fabio, 1 month ago

@jwildeboer I’m honestly ok with some of the ideas outlined in that interview.

Content monetization is a topic that has been floating around on #ActivityPub implementations long before Zuck’s helpers considered playing with it.

@dansup already toyed with the idea a year ago.

@Techaltar recently also brought up the topic in his series of Fediverse interviews.

And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.

And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?

Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.

Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.

The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.

I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.

fabio, 1 month ago

@Chocobozzz @thelinuxEXP @Techaltar @dansup @jwildeboer I would add that any implementation of a payment subsystem should probably be done at protocol level, so individual implementations of #ActivityPub don’t have to reinvent the wheel - doing #payments right is a hard problem, and it doesn’t make sense to fragment the efforts by solving the same problem multiple times on Mastodon/WriteFreely/PeerTube/Pixelfed etc.

The payments subsystem should be better integrated in the ActivityPub ecosystem compared to a “Donate here” link that redirects to a 3rd-party provider. This is probably the right chance of giving the HTTP 402 code the implementation it deserves.

I left the payments industry a few years ago so I’m not sure of what open solutions and protocols are in the market that could be already leveraged, but maybe something like OpenPayments could be a good starting point - there are many efforts on the open banking standards lately, with different degree of maturity, and IMHO a good implementation of payments over ActivityPub could be a great driver for adoption.

I’ve got the feeling that if we don’t do this right then Threads could scoop up this chance for an “embrace” to “extend” pivot.

fabio, 1 month ago

@koen @waag @DeGroene @gemeenteamsterdam @kimvsparrentak @sicco I’m definitely onboard with such initiatives, but IMHO the chicken-and-egg problem should be solved on both ends.

Many politicians agree with us that #BigTech centralization is bad. Yet their primary presence is on Meta/X in most of the cases. When asked “then why are you not on the Fedi?”, many respond with “because there aren’t enough people for me to justify the jump/investment”.

And that in turn feeds the other feedback loop - “why do you still have an account on X?” - “because most of the politicians/public figures are there”.

Building presence in the social infrastructure one actually believes in, even if that requires extra effort, shouldn’t be something contingent to the probabilities of getting thousands or followers on that platform.

fabio, 1 month ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard you see, there’s no right of self-defense in Europe that needs to be enforced by individuals owning their own guns because institutions here actually work.

Because I can call the police if something goes wrong and they would usually do a good job protecting people.

Are institutions so rotten in the US that you can’t trust the police nor the government and you have to resort to people owning their own tools of murder? Then the problem is probably with your country and the mindset of its citizens.

fabio, 1 month ago

@chillanarchist01 the insularism of Americans with no exposure to the outside world never ceases to amuse me.

You guys are the ones who are likely to elect again a malignant narcissist who buddies up with people who wave Confederate flags and Swastikas, and you think that it’s others who are slipping into totalitarianism.

You guys are the ones who have by far the highest number of shootings in the Western world, and yet you still fail to acknowledge that guns are the problem rather than the solution.

A parent who would send their kid to learn about society and civilization to a place with armed guards, armed teachers and armed pupils rather than give up their distorted idea of “self-defense” (as if it’s your supermarket guns who would defend you from modern warfare) is the best definition of evolutionary failure.

fabio, 1 month ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard or maybe just make sure that deranged people can’t easily get hold of a gun at the nearest mall?

How come such talks only exist in the US? How come nobody in the civilized world would think of arming the teachers? How come a shooting in Europe is such a serious event that people talk about it for months and years, and in the US shootings have become a weekly routine? Is it so hard to understand that the ease of getting your hands of a gun is the only problem?

fabio, 1 month ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard well there are people with degrees in psychology whose job is exactly to assess whether someone is mentally fit to hold a tool for murder. I’d trust their experience. Most if not all the other Western countries have tight background checks when it comes to gun licenses, and nobody seems to complain.

Is the right for a nutcase to buy a gun worth more than the right of a kid to grow up in a safe school environment without exposure to violence or tools of violence?

fabio, 1 month ago

@djsumdog yup, indeed mail-tester.com gives a 10/10 to my new mail domain (it’s not the first time I set up one), but only a couple of hours ago @spamhaus removed it from their blacklist.

And I still get quarantine reports from noreply-dmarc-support@google.com when I send emails to GMail addresses informing me that the email has been quarantined (although the report clearly states that all the checks are green).

I’m trying to imagine how the WWW would like if in order to run my own website I first needed the approval of an external company whose blacklist is used by 90% of the browsers out there, if by default every new website is blacklisted, if removal from that blacklist involved opening a ticket to that company, and if even after removal arbitrary major browser producers out there would still arbitrarily refuse to connect to your website (using very opaque acceptance criteria).

I understand that the potential for spam/scam is higher with email than with HTTP, but if my domain checks all the boxes (SPF/DMARC/DKIM/RDNS/TLS) then a “you can send email to everyone, and if something is wrong for too long we blacklist you” policy should apply.

fabio, 2 months ago

@thelinuxcast there is a mopidy-plex extension (so you can control Plex with any mpd/mopidy client), but it hasn’t been updated in 8 years, so I’m not sure if it still works. Any reason not to prefer Jellyfin over Plex?

fabio, 2 months ago

@villares It’s a packaging problem. It’s nice to have variety (conda, poetry, or anything else), but under the hood it should always be possible to do a pip install of everything. A package that has another package manager as a dependency is a packaging problem, because it hinders the ability to use that package inside of another project without imposing the package manager that should be used in the downstream project too.

GLib’s #Python bindings had a similar issue until recently, but now it’s possible to install everything with a pip install. OpenCV had the same issue a few years ago. Eventually, it should be a developer’s/maintenaner’s responsibility to make sure that a basic installation via pip works everywhere. Using alternative package managers is just a workaround. I hope Scikit and other packages that are still not installable with a single pip install will also fix the issue.

fabio, 2 months ago

@gruff cc @evan - I’m not sure if tag notifications from the Fedi already work for Threads accounts.

fabio, 2 months ago

@happyborg @HedgiePT if you have a forge link (I couldn’t find any references by name) I’m happy to take a look when I have some time.

I would love to help either on the protocol side or the coding side, but I’m afraid that I can’t really commit much - I already maintain a dozen active open projects and my time is more stretched than Dali’s clocks. But if I see the potential I may make some time for it.

fabio, 2 months ago

@gruff @happyborg honestly I haven’t found much around. Everybody seems to hysterically yell “we all must defederate Threads, otherwise everybody’s privacy will be diluted!”, which means that few probably have a clearer picture of the settings already available and how cross-instance content forwarding works. I may work on putting together this information in a more articulate stand-alone post.

Disclaimer: this information is based on my understanding both of the protocol and the available settings, which in turn are based on on skimming through the source code myself. I’m not sure if other loopholes are available (for example posts cached on other instances and indexed), so I’d love to get confirmation from someone who has contributed to the Fedi more than me.

fabio, 2 months ago

@happyborg

Mmm, that’s like saying tolerance requires accepting the intolerant.

My proud Popperist side is horrified by this interpretation of my words.

I firmly believe that it’s our duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant, and proactively kick fascist asses to the hell they belong to.

But when “intolerant” is applied as a label to anyone who doesn’t proactively defederate a platform where the definition of “intolerant” is statistically likely to cover at most 5% of its user, I have a problem.

In short, I don’t think that it’s ok to be intolerant towards those who are on the same side as yours, but just happen to have a different “intolerance tolerance” bar, because nasty fracturing feedback loops may occur from such a transitive law.

And I also don’t believe that voluntary reclusion that excludes that 95% of potentially innocuous users amid fears of encountering that 5% of potential jerks is a scalable solution that empowers vulnerable people to be really part of the society - it instead reminds me a lot of the features of a cult.

fabio, 2 months ago

@thezerobit everybody loses for two reasons:

1. Compatibility always loses when hard forks are involved. The two versions will have to be kept in sync. That takes time, and it’s not guaranteed to work forever, nor guaranteed to work for all the features, nor it’s guaranteed that the system of incentives will always play towards maintaining mutual compatibility - see what happened with the MySQL/MariaDB fork for an example, or more recently with Gitea/Forgejo. Since Redis is used in so many applications, many applications will also have to make their code compatible with both the versions, or fork it as well - think of what may happen with widely used applications like Celery. Developers that build products on top of Redis will also have to adapt their code to support KeyDB as well, or whatever other fork may happen soon. Eventually that spreads out development resources. And distro maintainers probably will also have to update the repos if it turns out that SSPL licenses aren’t FOSS-approved and they have to go for alternatives.
2. The AGPL license strike a good balance. It’s a win-win with a compromise. Tech businesses can benefit from community work, but if they run it as a service or modify it they will also have to release the changes. In exchange, FOSS software doesn’t try and tell businesses what they are supposed to do with their own software if they want to use the open code. By taking a hard stance with a license like SSPL, the hard fork will happen and, if it’s based on a license like BSD/MIT, businesses won’t be compelled to contribute back to the open product at all. They will probably develop 100% closed products on top of the BSD codebase and are likely to break compatibility on purpose at some point, and there’s nothing the open product can do about it. Eventually, efforts will split as well, competition is likely to shift towards mutually exclusive features, and that’s where everyone loses.

fabio, 3 months ago

@aral @laura public money for public code. The idea is quite simple. Everything else is workarounds that rely on the private sector and inevitably create conflicts of interest.

Until the EU (and hopefully others) start putting their wallets where their mouth is, and taxpayers money is directed towards open projects, rather than providing tax breaks to Apple, courting AWS for its data centers or advocating for “European champions” shaped after the American ones, rather than advocating for a more sustainable development model, we’ll keep seeing open projects relying on the temporary benevolence of their own executioners in order to survive.

fabio, 4 months ago

@skyportradio @RL_Dane @mozilla I know, but my point is that, after looking under the hood, it almost looks like things were broken on purpose.

It’s not just about the feed icon. It’s about the whole support for a content type that used to work up to ~10 years ago being purposefully removed. And that’s why I think that some explanations are due - it was a deliberate business decision that needs to be motivated.

fabio, 4 months ago

@samir We learned how to use a hammer, now we're entitled to assume that the whole world is made of nails.

On the other hand, one day you can simply remove the base64 encoding, and brag that you've increased data throughput by 50%.

fabio, 4 months ago

@faithpeterson @smallcircles I think that there alternatives to public libraries in the digital world too.

First, the job of the Internet Archive is enormous and incredibly understated. Not only it barely receives any funding from governments (those who fund the preservation of physical books and cultural heritage should also fund the preservation of digital media, but that's not happening), but their activities are increasingly seen by Google and friends under a hostile lens.

Countless hostile actions are taken almost on a weekly basis against youtube-dl, yt-dlp, and other tools whose job is simply to download a media file from a URL. Instead of being properly funded, archivists have to constantly operate on the edge of illegality and fears that the tools that they use to scrape the Web are just one DMCA takeover or API change away from being pointless.

Not only there are no financial incentives to ensure that the job of archiving the Web can proceed unimpeded, but the laws of online content are also extremely skewed towards the platforms (and, in part, a tiny minority of high-profile creators) rather than the users - and even less towards our sons and grandsons who may be around when Google and its servers may no longer be around.

Second, if you already know that publishing your content to some closed platforms comes with many risks when it comes to accessibility, preservation and trustworthiness of the platform itself, then we shouldn't upload content to that platform in the first place. The "I can't migrate" excuse only really applies to those who already have tons of followers on their YouTube channel - and, as underlined by this study, that may be <1% than the total number of people who uploaded at least a video to YouTube. Even without running our own servers, we can just leverage services like PeerTube that rely on open protocols and decentralized architectures to distribute the media.