Since then, over 230 pull requests have been accepted. I had a branch where I was working on this, but a lot of code has changed in the meantime - among other things, ex the markdown implementation has been rewritten and, in fact, some of it is now outdated. Many files will still change and be rewritten before the release.
Before the first release, it will be done properly, and I will probably seek help and consultation from the right people https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/937. Currently, in the project's readme, I've clearly indicated that kbin is inspired by Postmill. Unfortunately, recently I've been overwhelmed by some personal matters, which caused me to neglect certain things. Now I'm doing everything to bring kbin to the appropriate state.
“Inspired” is not an honest term. You’re using someone else’s code, so abide by the license they use, or remove their code from your project until you’re ready to follow the license. You started lifting Postmill’s code several years ago now and have had sooo much time to set things right but keep dragging your feet.
This isn’t a school project, you’re gaining financially from someone else’s hard work without abiding by their (incredibly permissive) FOSS license and opening yourself up to serious legal action.
At the end of the day, I wanted to thank you for that reminder. Sometimes I really need it. For now, these two PRs will have to suffice. I'm sure I modeled them after Postmill. I can promise I'll get back to this and do it right.
As I said, the markdown implementation that received the main thing has been rewritten by contributors. I need to consult on how it should look in such a case. Now the indicated similarities are between these files (these files will also be changed soon, before release):
May I ask why you haven’t added the copyright notice to make kbin compliant while your volunteers are in the process of eliminating all of Postmill’s code from the code base?
Most of the indicated code is no longer part of kbin (unlike Pixelfed's code, to be fair). You can see the similarities in the links provided above. However, I need to thoroughly analyze everything once again to make sure nothing slipped past me and there isn't more of it. There might be a tool that could facilitate this. In any case, it's not my intention to hide the original source, even if major changes have been made. I'd gladly leave information about what the code was based on. I have no problem with that, the only enemy is time.
I think several factors contributed to this. First, I prepared the licensing tag, but when the time came to merge the branch - that code simply no longer existed. As you can see, the remaining files are what I call inspiration - it's not copied code but more of an overall concept, quite common in these types of applications (however, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a tag). Another factor is that sometimes you have to choose what to focus on first - eliminate and remove thousands of spambots, fix activitypub communication after updates from other software so as not to crash your server and others, secure the instance from sensitive content, deal with all the formalities related to the legal situation, working on moteration tools, handle pull requests from people who dedicate their private time to it and many more. Additional, I still need to make sure I can pay my own bills, and there's personal life.
And yes, two months is a long time, but for me, it was just a flash this time. A swift reality check occurred because the first release was supposed to come out over a month ago. I'm doing this the best I can, and without the help of contributors, none of this would have been possible. Due to the situation, I have to prioritize certain tasks. This is still marked as high priority, but it's waiting its turn. Nevertheless, I have the opportunity, I decided to seek external help to do it the right way before releasing the first version. I realized that it only seems like a simple task on the surface. I want close the matter once and for all. All of this also pertains to the licensing tags of Pixelfed, btw.
Gosh, how long did it take you to type that long reply explaining you’re too busy to copy a license file over to kbin? It takes less than a minute to do. Copy the file. Commit. That’s it.
You realize this is one human being managing this whole situation without getting paid? Being nice enough to share a cool, if imperfect, piece of software for all to use. Show some respect, damn. Kbin has exploded in the the past months, leading to a lot of exposure and thus also suddenly an onslaught of things to fix. License errors definitely aren’t great, but you can’t fix everything at once.
People sitting on their ass telling others what they should do because “it only takes a minute” is such a stereotype in FOSS that I didn’t think I would see a real one in the wild. Wow.
It took me from 4 to 6 minutes, I can't determine exactly. I think this is about more than just copying and committing a file - one needs to label specific files or sections of the code. I'm not sure how exactly this should look, so I'm waiting for a consultation.
I am striving to make the foundations very similar to Lemmy's, to facilitate potential migration in either direction. The main differences are that /kbin will ultimately be a modular gateway to the entire fediverse. I will tell you more about it a bit later.
I really like what you are building there, but at the moment I often cannot find the communities I'm subscribed to on Lemmy so I tend to jump between those two.
On Lemmy, if a community on another server doesn't appear when you search for it, you can use the syntax "!communityname". Your login Lemmy server will then go out and index it and it will appear in the search a few moments later.
Is there a way to do that on kbin? I've tried every syntax for a Lemmy community that I know of and nothing seems to work.
Does @communityname@server.name work?
That's how I tend to find things on most fedi places (masto, pixelfeed etc) and so far it's worked fine here as well.
Thanks for the answer and all the work you put into kbin. Really like the design so far. Only have to get used to the structure a little more.
Something else I am wondering: when I registered at kbin I think I never could choose an instance. So is it only possible to use kbin with a registration at kbin.social or is a plan to allow other instances of it?
I'm intrigued by the idea of being able to talk to other Fediverse apps, but searching for my Pleroma account at @missingno to test this out turns up nothing. Is there some way to force discovery?
I would actually recommend sticking to Fediverse to REDUCE the confusion that Mastodon has caused. If people referred to Mastodon as the Fediverse or even fediversetodon or something it may help. But calling it the Twitter alternative all the time has just said "screw twitter, it's mastodon now!" and that's where people don't understand the potential it really has and then get confused. Keep referring all the fediverse sites as the fediverse and it can bring people to the smaller instances and not think that if they're not on Lemmy or Kbin that they have to make some kind of choice on which "site" to join.
I’d probably call this niche of fediverse apps “fediverse link aggregators”. Their UI really only makes them useful for that at the moment (IMO - haven’t tried kbin), and you can technically follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon if you want (it’s not a great UX), but you don’t get the aggregation doing that. At least not without sorting down to just that view.
As a “replacement” for Reddit (I think that moniker is selling it short, it can be so much more), it makes sense. Reddit and sites like it, depending on the specific community are really just a place to share content from outside sources and discuss that content with a like-minded community.
The other type of subreddit I’ve see are tech support style where someone is asking a question of a group of people who are likely to have a good understanding of the subject matter. I think link-aggregation-style sites are the best interface for these at the moment as well.
I like the approach, but think both "fediverse" and "link-aggregator" are just not good terms from any sort of branding/messaging/marketing perspective. They're both relatively technical or confusing and inaccurate. The fediverse isn't really a federation, which you forget once you understand what federation is in a computing sense or in the case of the fediverse, and lemmy and reddit aren't really link-aggregators, they're more like forums.
I would agree with you... except that Reddit has always been referred to a link aggregator (and forum) since I've used it. It's a bit of both.
The problem is that there isn't really an over-arching name that you can call these services because they are all pretty distinct in their feature sets. Lemmy and kbin get grouped together often, but kbin also has microblogging capabilities which sets it apart from both Lemmy and Reddit.
Ha yea ... the elephant in the room is that we probably just want to define ourselves as "Not-Mastodon".
Even though /kbin is a fusion of platform formats (which I think is awesome BTW), the underlying common factor is the primary basis of connecting or socialising.
IN the case of reddit/lemmy/kbin/link aggregators etc ... it's subject matters and interests, not direct person-to-person social connections (which aren't even possible on lemmy). It's a significant difference IMO, and well worth trying to package in a memorable catchphrase or term. I just don't know what it'd be (my best idea being "threadiverse", which doesn't capture this idea at all really).
I think when talking colloquially to a broader audience, "reddit-like" is good enough.
When talking internally, I don't know, "link aggregator" doesn't really describe what these are to me at all. I wouldn't call reddit a "link aggregator" it doesn't really fit what reddit is (many posts don't have links??).
I think the essential differentiator of reddit is the voting.
Actually, no. kbin currently has its API turned off, and the documentation can be found here at https://docs.kbin.pub/. However, I'm still contemplating what to do about it. A lot has been happening lately, and I'm considering integrating with one of the existing APIs.
Public? Idk, maybe. I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public. Comment and post stuff, sort of. But even if it’s public, I still wouldn’t want Meta consuming it.
I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s? Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network? That’d be crazy, so I assume that it doesn’t. Then Meta can’t find out your IP address.
Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network?
No this is not in the specification.
A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I’ve studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s?
In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.
Thanks for the clarification. That claim seemed really off.
I’ve assumed that what you see publicly is basically what’s synced. Obv. your instance can have a few more meta details on you, like IP, device info, possibly all the exif they’ve stripped from uploaded photos, but these things aren’t in the ActivityPub outbox
If a Threads user posts an image, and Meta hosts it, and I scroll through my feed and see it, my client will hit their server for said image. And Meta can collect my IP.
I’m wide awake, isn’t this just the information transferred when federating? But they just have to put it into a TOS because they’re an actual company with liability? I really don’t see the issue with them having this information.
They correlate the content of your posts with all the other data they have about you, taken from every app (besides WhatsApp, FB etc) that has FB trackers built in. Then that aggregated profile will be used with AdTech to serve ads and make money. I personally object to Meta making money with my personal data without me using their products.
That’s just how adtech works in general. Every ad company has a profile on who they think you are, well more technically a cohort of potential similar profiles. Also not all profiles can equated to a single person and a single person may have multiple. That’s how wishy washy the whole tech is. It’s good enough though. Way better than seeing those flashy “download these smiley trail mouse cursors” ads the old internet used to have. Still. I don’t see the problem here, it’s just about making ads more relevant to you. If you’re not the kind to let ads sway you anyway than what’s the big deal? And if you are the kind to be swayed at least they’ll be actually relevant to what you’re into.
The big deal is I help others make money of me without my consent or getting something back in return. At least not usefull to me. On top of that they track the hell out of me with surveillance.
They don’t even need an instance to get they can just scrape it, like anyone can with public info. They wouldn’t even need to make an account for the scraper.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
Won't matter much in a democracy, but in a dictatorship or atcracy it means life & death.
In India, people have been imprisoned for posts & tweets for calling out Hindu supremacist Modi govt's anti-democratic policies & communal acts, Some of them have been violently assaulted in their homes by Hindu supremacist thugs for their posts and tweets because the dictatorial govt has stooges in both Meta & Twitter who access the ip address which is tracked down by the state.
If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It's literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn't is your IP address, and that's something that I'm not sure they'd even get. That might be your host's IP address.
Remember, the Fediverse isn't a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.
Yes, but many clients are going to go look up images manually. If it’s a Threads post, it’s likely hosted by Meta servers, and they can easily see your IP when doing that. And they’re saying they might collect IPs from you even if you’re not using their service directly.
Ok, so we’re back to defederation not because of any existing tangible evidence in this circumstance, but “because it’s Meta”. It’s fine if that’s your opinion and all, but let’s stop spreading misinformation on the dangers of collecting the data required by anyone for federation.
And if you’re here and pretending to care about data privacy at least try to do the bare minimum in understanding how the Fediverse works.
But let’s be honest here. If meta made a lemmy/mastodon instance we would probably defederate them as well since every bit of data is for their financial gain and nothing else.
I don’t see how the worlds master manipulator and anti trust poster child is even remotely worth discussing about. We have established time and time again that „meta bad“. Why would we now not just accept the fact?
Like I said, that’s a fine opinion to hold. What isn’t fine is the constant spinning of facts and narratives to suit a personal bias, regardless of how I feel about that bias.
I think there is a bit of hysteria about Threads/Meta and some people are trying to push back. There are plenty of people in this thread that don’t fully understand federation and are knee-jerk reacting because it’s Meta.
However, I totally agree with the sentiment being expressed, which is to keep Meta and large corporations as far away from Lemmy as possible. This is a community-run space that is a haven from the corporate internet, and indeed capitalist society in general. Protecting this space should be our highest priority.
I feel that some of our more technical users are losing the forest for the trees in this discussion. Believe it or not, some Lemmings don’t come from a 30 year tech background and don’t fully understand how the platform, or indeed the internet as a whole, actually functions.
This group of people, which includes me, are acting rationally by opposing any interaction with Meta on grounds of principle. We don’t know exactly what we are scared of, but we do know if there is any vulnerability or weakness that Meta is trying to exploit, they already know their plan and we won’t know until it’s too late. Meta is a terrifying behemoth just waiting for a chance to consume Lemmy. I would argue that a little bit of hysteria is justified in this case.
Edit: just to clarify, this is more of a response to the parent comment, I think we are in agreement. I didn’t want to start another reply thread so I figured I would build off your point.
Thanks for pointing that out. I‘m sort of between the two. Doing IT more or less professionally for 20+ yrs but I can’t tell you the definitive workings of the fediverse either. I understand the principles and I like them.
not because of any existing tangible evidence in this circumstance
Oh, we’re defederating exactly because of tangible evidence that Meta steals every information it can about you. I personally stripped Meta almost entirely out of my life, I definitely don’t want them crawling back just because someone else wants to use Threads.
And if you’re here and pretending to care about data privacy at least try to do the bare minimum in understanding how the Fediverse works.
Oh, I do. I’m my own instance admin, I work as a senior architect and grasped the concept of Fediverse quite fast.
Most of this is just part of Federation. When I saw this comment my client/server didn’t have to fetch it from your server. It was pushed when you posted it so I had it locally.
Yes, but if you host an image, and my client prefetches it, it’s going to exposed my IP to your image server. And if you have clauses saying you’re collecting IPs…
Meta basically invented this shit. They’ll do it again. It’s what they do.
if any of the big corperate socmed sites were just standard fedi instances I'd defed from them in an instant for a litany of things. just goes to show how abused we are on them.
@jax kbin crosses both domains. It allows you to follow regular users on Mastodon, Calckey etc, and it also has a nifty aggregation feature that lets you see non threadiverse content by attaching hashtags to a particular community
Seeing some push back here on the idea of confusing things with more terms than just "fediverse". I get that. The problem is that that cat is very much out of the bag. Surely, for the vast majority of people that have any awareness of the fediverse, they think it's just Mastodon.
Either way, "Mastodon" is a much larger "brand" than "fediverse" or anything else on the fediverse. So trying to get some conceptual branding going makes sense. It make things more clear, as the idea of the fediverse itself is kinda fuzzy and complex and probably best left out at the beginning. It's a little bit like the matrix, you have to see it with your own eyes, IMO.
So, my lame contribution ...
Threadiverse!: "Social media, but woven into threads, like Reddit or Forums, not like the chaos of Twitter, but all on the Fediverse so you can find anyone else doing anything else too."
Yea, and it retains "fediverse" in it too. Not to love my own creation too much, but I'm liking it the more time I spend with it ... I'll probably start using it all over the place now LOL.
Importantly, it's not just Lemmy and /kbin, there are other thread or forum based platforms out there too (See, eg @mariusor and their work). Advocating for them all with a single umbrella term surely helps.
Also, after a quick check there are some domains available too.
Why should we just accept that some naïve twitter refugees have misassociated the Fediverse as being just Mastodon? This isn't branding, this is raising awareness of the interrelatedness of this federated network! Disassociating from the Fediverse just makes the problem worse, I'd say.
Why should we just accept that some naïve twitter refugees have misassociated the Fediverse as being just Mastodon?
Because no amount of ideological objection will change the fact that this is exactly what has happened. People are using it this way, and what I was trying to raise here is a way to talk about this particular niche of the web without running in exactly the same problem with lemmy
Well, I honestly haven't come across anyone who uses it that way so I can't really advise.
I just feel like it's not so widespread to just assume we should accept that the "cat is out of the bag". We can just focus on correcting people, like we do when they conflate Lemmy with lemmy.ml.
I tend to agree. Now its forum-like apps where fedi integrations are made. Next it is more video apps, podcasting apps (via podcasting hub), coding apps (via the forge federation movement), and you-name-it different app domains.
Are we going to invent new names for each new app type that becomes federated? Might as well give the term Splinterverse right now then. Nothing feels connected anymore, and a "unique selling point" (to stick with marketing-like brand terminology) is lost.
I get you. In the end, for me, and I settled on this a while ago, "Fediverse" is a bad name. It's confusing, seems like a Marvel thing, sounds weird and even unappealing frankly. Mastodon works because it's a cool appealing word. It's not just twitter refugees and their ignorance. The "fediverse" has a marketing/branding problem. And if you want "refugees" or "migrants" (which I acknowledge are problematic terms for actual IRL refugees, sorry), you've got meet them where they are.
Additionally, platforms are actually products. In fact, relatively vertical products with often sub-par interoperability for something that claims to be the "next internet protocol". So, whether you create some branding or not, "you", as a platform, are putting branding out there even if it's the absence of an attempt.
So my recommended approach would be to happily "brand" a platform, but always be pushing and clarifying that it's on the fediverse and what that actually means. Also, I'd start talking about "the social web" rather than just the fediverse, because that's what it is and it's a better term IMO.
I don't know that I agree that just being heavy with product branding and trying to list interoperability as a feature really addresses the issue, but I 100% agree that "Fediverse" is an awful name.
But then, so is "world wide web". Or "Internet", for they matter. We get stuck with so many awful, awful names that sound like they were the idea of villains from a low budget 90s sci-fi tv show.
I’d guess that for early to mid 90s, World Wide Web was fine and Internet was actually good (remember the film “The Net”?). I was too young then to know though.
A name for forum- and aggregator-style fediverse software. and instances sounds like a good idea to me. I agree with the points you and @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone make elsewhere in the thread about the problem that most people coming from Twitter currently equate Mastodon with the "fediverse" as equivalent to Mastodon (a problem in general because it leads to centralization and marginalizing other implementations, and an even bigger problem currently because of Mastodon's reputation for anti-blackness and reply-guyism), and not wanting to have similar dynamics with people coming from reddit.
I'll have to think more about the specific term threadiverse. I see what you're getting at but Mastodon / Pleroma / CalcKey etc all have threads as well even from a microblogging perspective, and Kbin also has a microblog (as opposed to forum) view.
Yea I know. I guess the idea was that it's the part of the fediverse that starts with threads rather than adds them to a social network. I couldn't think of any better term for a "post + comments" structure ... ?
One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.
Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as "Jabber", I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn't have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don't think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn't work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.
A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don't use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I've told a few of them about it, but it doesn't really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I'm aware, XMPP never really became it's own "thing" and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we've passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they're tired of reddit and make the jump.
Because of this difference in dynamic, we're in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta's platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to "embrace, extend, extinguish" will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we'll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.
As someone who is on just about every social media and aggregator site there is, I find myself gravitating toward sites that allow for as much interaction (or little) as I would like. My friends and I communicate through Facebook messenger, which obviously requires FB, but I use a browser/app called Ferdium, which lets me open messenger directly without the annoyance of opening the Facebook app itself. But each site has its own specialization that it does rather well. I mean, look at Discord’s little communities, which are really designed to support the gaming community, and say, Instagram, which does photos very well. I get that companies would like the One Site to Rule Them All, but I look at it like I would at McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. McDonald’s caters to one of my tastes, and Dunks does the other. Like your example with AIM I’ve largely given up with trying to get my friends to sign up for services. I’m older, and remember AOL when it was just starting out and even remember Compuserve when it was little more than a list server.
You are spot on. The difference between the products/services/values offered by XMPP and AcitivtyPub based fediverse is a very crucial distinction.
XMPP's value is derived from its connectivity. It is bandwagon effect at work. A single fax machine makes no sense but what about another one? Or another 100 ones? Now you have a positive network externality.
The bulk of the AcitivtyPub based fediverse works very differently. The value is from the content, be it people shitposting or memes or cats. As people who frequent online forums and communities can tell, the majority of members are mere readers. They are content consumers. Content producers are often the minority. The reason why soneone will stick to a particular platform is because of the content and the expectation that more is coming.
I'm not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn't even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can't interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the "better" experience with more direct activity. (And that's without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly "popular" option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
The bit with office is when you operating as a business you want ease of compatibility when communicating with other businesses and it is easy to write the cost of the software up as just the cost of doing business. Otherwise you just risk frustrating other parties.
So just speaking from my personal experience, XMPP was absolutely useless for me, whereas OpenOffice wasn't. Microsoft did succeed in preventing OO from eating significantly into its market share, but OO continued to exist and be useful. It eventually caught up on the ability to read and write MS Office XML files, and in the meantime I only had a few occasions where I had to tell people "I can't read docx, send it to me as doc or rtf". To be fair though, I'm not a super heavy user of Office software.
In contrast, XMPP was basically nothing without Google. I couldn't use it before Google federated, and I couldn't use it after Google defederated. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Kbin/lemmy/mastodon are in a far better bargaining position than XMPP was, and in a better position than OO as well. They're perfectly usable without being connected to corporate platforms, and they don't need to market to corporate customers either. To be clear, I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't block the corporate platforms. I think it's actually probably best if some of them do and some of them don't.
This is a really good call out. I've been thinking about this article since I read it earlier today, and I never thought about the distinction between user groups and how people used xmpp vs how people use a activitypub Lemmy/kbin.
I think you are spot on.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
My friends are like your friends in that we all use reddit, but never even share our usernames with each other.
Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
Yeah, I guess there's more of a focus on individual personalities. Still, mastodon has its core of users that choose to use it despite the fact that it doesn't have the celebrities or the millions of people that twitter has. They don't need any of the corporate platforms to federate with them, whereas XMPP did. That puts them in a much better negotiating position as far as protocol changes go.
Personally I find Kbin more usable (while still being reddit-like) as it also has functionality letting you follow on normal microblogging content from Mastodon and other places, making it more intertwined with the whole fediverse.
Just checked out Kbin from this comment (and signed up) - the functionality definitely feels better. I love that I jumped straight into this same thread immediately from the Kbin homepage. Federated content is awesome.
And if it helps, you can see and interact with posts on Mastodon, Calckey, etc from within kbin. Each 'magazine' has a mod set list of words/hashtags it looks for, so it's not everything all at once.
Ah no. Your login is only good for the server you signed up on. But once logged in you can talk to most of the fediverse. So the content is more or less the same. What differs is the experience between services.
I'm not quite sure how exactly everything works but it seems like a lot of things on kbin get thrown to /m/random, does anyone know what's up with that? A lot of communities from lemmy show up as a 404 and posts end up there.
I will check that out! One of my confusions with the fediverse is that I thought having one account would allow me to access all the services, and the account acted as a kind of "base" through which I did everything. I now understand that federation basically happens at the application level, or really at the administration level, and how many services the community provides for any given account.
What I wanted was to avoid having to create so many accounts for everything the fediverse offers, but I guess it is not possible, and honestly is no different than having separate accounts for any other online thing I participate in.
Yeah, that seems to be a common misconception. But it's more that your Twitter account can interact with FB, IG, YT, etc, not that your Twitter account lets you log into all the different services.
I ended up with probably a dozen as I was exploring the fediverse, but ended up with 3 more or less but only primarily use two of them (kbin and Calckey… I have a Pixelfed, but use it as much as I used IG, which is rarely).
That is okay. A little bit of compartmentalization is healthy. Each site has its own set of expectations and mode of interactions. I should be more willing to explore and find out what I like, otherwise I could miss out on an amazing community that makes my life better.
Yes! You get it! I'm glad I didn't stick with the popular services and tried out some of the others. You may find that after searching you're happiest back where you started, but at least you can say you've made an informed decision.
There is definitely some truth to "the media is the message." The structure matters, and there is no sense on settling with something that feels wrong just because it is getting traction.
Mastodon allows you to verify other ActivityPub accounts with a special link-back HTML element. I wish that there was either a universal method or that more applications had something like it. Something that indicates "this is me, and you can see my other activity over here and here and here".
Maybe we need a dedicated ActivityPub service for just that lol. Maybe I should be the one to make it...
Yes! I have never been one to fracture my (veiled) identity with several accounts. This is social media afterall, part of the charm is being recognized and getting to talk to familiar people.
The best I can do is use the same username for every website, and hope no one copies it.
Yeah, it's really the opposite of that. One account let's you access all oftthe content (or most of it, not everything is totally interoperable, and admins do block other sites sometimes), but now there's 10,000 separate, totally independent websites.
But it's absolutely what basically everyone thinks at first, because most people hear about it from people that don't really explain things very well.
Wow. I had no idea is was that large. I am assuming a lot of that are technical people running their personal servers, but it is still a wild number. 10,000 running websites not motivated by monetary gain or lust for power.
Yeah, I haven't actually sat down and read up on how the technology works, but I plan to.
Yeah, there's a lot of small or single-user instances. And that count is across all of the Fediverse, so Mastodon, Misskey, Calckey, Foundkey, Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, PixelFed, PeerTube, FunkWhale, BookWyrm, etc., etc. But it's a big place.
I said elsewhere, the internet used to be expansive and sparse. Well, we're starting to reclaim that here.
I have had literal dreams about how the internet used ro work. I swear I have memories about websites acting like an alternative hyperlinked operating system. I remember it being so EASY to fluidly and organically navigate to interesting websites.
Now I am lucky if I stumble upon something worthwhile through search engines.
To me, it seems to be the most "reddit-like" of the options out there. It pulls from across the fediverse so it has content from Mastodon, Lemmy, and whatever gets posted locally on kbin itself. While not perfect, it is being actively worked on so I'm really hoping it'll get even better.
I literally just posted that in r/RedditAlternatives to answer the question, "Where would you go?" lol
Please no... For the love of Foss, no. Apple would start making private changes to the ActivityPub protocol to support mundane things like images and polls in their own way while images and polls from other instances wouldn't load properly and would be in a green bubble.
WebKit is only open source because its a fork of KHTML, originally developed by the KDE project ^[0]^ for the Konqueror browser ^[1]^. KHTLM was developed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) ^[2]^, which limits companies from taking the hard work of open source projects and claiming them as their own without giving back to the community.
If Apple's surprising you with the "open code" released under the WebKit project, it's because they're legally requried to. We can thank the Free Software Foundation's LGPL for that.
No doubt. I was careful not to give Apple credit for WebKit's open source status, but nonetheless it remains surprising to me that Apple participates in open source software all.
Personally I would block any corporate instances on principle. It's a community project and not a shopping mall. But I don't make decisions for lemmy.ml alone.
Good point. Are there any protections to prevent that? I believe if they use Mastodon, they have to publish the source code. I believe Activity Pub would be the same, assuming it has a good license. But they could always use their own code without touching the open source implementation.
The ultimate protection shared by ActivityPub and all the platforms currently on it is that they are completely open. Which means they can't be taken down unless no one wants to run them anymore. Even if the whole ecosystem follows some corporate manipulation to get screwed down the line, we can always pick up again from where everything is right now and continue using all of this as though nothing happened.
There is a whole range of alternatives, several for microblogging (Misskey, Calckey, Pleroma, Akkoma, ...), some for macroblogging (Friendica, Hubzilla) and some that specialise in certain functions (e.g. Pixelfed for pictures, Bookwyrm for books, etc.). Some short descriptions can be found here in the JoinFediverseWiki: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F
Its kind of both, it has its own centralized website, but also self-hosted instances. They were popular with web designers before social media took over the internet because they were easy to set up and super customizable.
Oh wow so they had 1.5 milion subscribers on Twitter but they have half a milion on Mastodon unnerv.jp/ I wasn’t aware that Mastodon is that popular in Japan.
I wonder how much of that is recent / related to this service, and how much of it is from before. It’s great to see different countries getting going with fediverse stuff.
I always thought it was weird when governments and institutions had to tiptoe around these tech giants. It makes so much more sense for them to host their own thing on their own infrastructure.
We're trying to organize a hackathon, and one of the users has a proof of concept gateway running allowing Red Reader (and other 3rd party apps) to switch to Lemmy with no changes (except for the API url). It's basically providing a reddit-compatible api for lemmy.
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