The long-running Fediverse group service Guppe (https://a.gup.pe) will shut down on 31st May 2023 if it doesn't receive enough funding to cover its costs:
You're absolutely right that most of the things being discussed in the mastodon space are already built. Search and quote posts are both controversial, but also both old news on a number of fediverse platforms.
Just read that #calckey.social defederated at least one major server (the biggest UK #Mastodon instance) preventing their users interacting and exchanging with each other. Not sure how this walled bubble approach fits in with the enthusiastic attempts to place calckey.social as some kind of mainstream alternative to #Mastodon, but the Calckey grandees may know... I am off for good, I like to make my own decisions on a server with mature and non-arbitrary admin policies. @fediversenews
This defederation and blocking mania (have a look at the blocking list of mastodon.art as a remarkable example) is a risk for the #fediverse and I also believe it is conceptionally questionable, at least if you run some kind of flagship topical or geographical instance. Do what you want on a small community server but if you serve a huge community on a leading instance you need to deploy appropriate, proportionate, non-arbitrary moderation principles. @fediversenews
@choyer@fediversenews It's not a "risk" for the fediverse. It's the killer feature of the fediverse.
The ability to federate or defederate with other instances means that people can choose their own preferred risk profiles and join a community that matches it.
My community is a queer and gender diverse focused community. So we try to make and sustain an environment where our community members can exist with their barriers down a little bit, where they don't have to live on edge all the time, worried about a hateful transphobe dropping in to their mentions.
And so, to that end, we pre-emptively block a lot of spaces where transphobes hang out.
Now that's not for everyone. Some people prefer to choose for themselves, and that's great, but it means that often, you are blocking etc after receiving abuse. That's ok for some folk, and not for others.
The strength of the fediverse is that communities that favour both approaches exist, and you can find the one that fits your preference.
@davidslifka@bloodwrites@tchambers@spreadmastodon Adding another anecdote to the pile: I’ve run across multiple people who’ve been hesitant to join on account of worrying about making the wrong choice.
People underestimate how big a stumbling block this is to adoption.
I see no problem with steering people toward a mainstream choice, provided that they know there are others and are told where to learn more.
When you block a domain globally for a server, what's actually happening is that your instance:
• stops sending new activity's to that domain
• sends out Undo Follow activities for each follower that was Accept'ed from actors on that domain, and
• sends Reject Follow activities for any pending follow requests from actors on that domain
That's it. That's what happens.
There's debate about whether a Delete Actor activity should also be sent out.
@thisismissem Truth, the only notion that the core protocol has of "instances" is in origin checking of received messages
(basically: don't trust a message authenticated as https://example.com/@user to contain valid contents for any posts outside of scope of https://example.com/)
(n.b.2. this is also why you can't take "your" keys with you; having per-user keys is also a lie, and kinda pointless, and we could probably simplify the protocol if we didn't have them)
Some people prefer to talk about the "social web" instead of the "fediverse".
If you do, do you just prefer one term over another, or do you think "social web" could emcompass more functionality than what today's fediverse can do?
Whomp Triangle: "a metaphorical descriptor for a federated network topology that incorporates ideas from Semantic Web, Social Web, and IndieWeb that rolls it all together into one uniform system of coherence. Informally referred to as Web 420.69."
@auschwitzmuseum I would also like to suggest that you temporarily cease the feed of Holocaust victims from the previous century and begin broadcasting the names, photos, and stories of Holocaust victims from Simhat Torah
Your organization has no other purpose than to prevent the horrors which Israel experienced on Simhat Torah. Now that you have failed in that - now that we have all failed in that - the least you can do is support the war effort with every resource you have.
RE: ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress: let's assume I would work on a feature that would allow you to follow a complete blog, what would be the best identifier for that account? @feed@example.org? @blog@example.com?
What are your ideas?
I’m hearing murmurs of YouTube blocking browsers that support ad blockers.
You know where you don’t have to worry about such things? Host your videos on a #PeerTube instance and use #Owncast for your live video streaming needs.
Calckey is a Fediverse server type which includes lots of features that Mastodon doesn't yet have, such as emoji reactions, markdown, customisable interfaces, widgets and lots more.
To see for yourself, have a look on the official website at:
To clarify: Calckey is a fork of Misskey, which has been around for a while. So it's not exactly "new". Just another Fediverse software that can interact with other Fediverse software :)
To the #calckey experts: what’s the expected time of arrival for version 14? I have spent 2 full days to get #selfhosted#Mastodon to accept my SMTP settings, with very little success … I am ready for trying something else ;). Is version 14 coming soon or should I go with the latest stable 13.x version? Want to avoid unnecessary update work… @fediversenews
@NasosAlaiskas γεια σου Νάσο, ναι έχω το δικό μου σέρβερ. Από όσα προγράμματα δοκίμασα, το Calckey ήταν αυτό που μου άρεσε περισσότερο. Είμαι αρκετά ευχαριστημένος
Post from @rabble on why he's chosen to use #Nostr and not #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. He makes some compelling points. Personally I am not too worried about the server admin parts of his argument (I have enough control, even if I don't control the server), but I agree that this isn't ideal:
Pixelfed and Mastodon are not isolated from each other. I have Pixelfed users in my home feed on Mastodon. That’s a very weird definition of isolated.
UI-mismatch is the issue there and as well as with the “promise” of the fediverse. A shared protocol isn’t the same as a shared UI.
Then there’s the whole data-model-mismatch problem, where platforms only implement parts of the protocol such that things get lost or misinterpreted between platforms.
And so, despite being technically “not isolated”, people have multiple accounts all over the place to reroute around these mismatch frictions, which are significant enough to create prohibitive separations.
Whether its a misinterpretation from users or an overzealous advocacy of the power of the protocol and fediverse … I think it’s absolutely fair enough to say that we’ve arrived at a point where the promise of multiple platforms and instances all in a single unifying space is a bad over promise.
The friction involved in trying to reach for that is bad enough that most just bounce off of it, either ditching the fediverse, or giving up on this so called promise and staying on their platform of choice, or just creating multiple accounts and tolerating the chaos.
At the root of it is this lack of mobile identity (as well as, IMO, some other general design decisions). Not least because bridging these gulfs is exactly the sort of thing necessary to make the fediverse realise its killer potential. At the moment to many, probably most, the fediverse is in practice “just” a sea of disparate platforms. Which is a shame TBH, but also shouldn’t be glossed over as a non-issue.
@mike@ricmac@rabble@evan@Gargron@dansup@JsonCulverhouse@greg@emilynguyen My feeling is that the world’s UI innovators may solve this problem for us. What with Ivory and Mona and Elk and Phanpy, you can already have wildly-different experiences of the same underlying network. Seems to me that many of the things that distinguish these alternate servers can be accomplished with sufficiently good client-ware.