I understand how the Fediverse has instances, and how they communicate, and how you can (in theory) access the entire Fediverse from one account. But I don't do that, for a few reasons:
If I see a server with more than a handful of communities I am interested in, I want a presence there in case they need to defederate for a time for some reason.
I find browsing by "all" to be way too overwhelming on some instances. I find it easier to browse by "local".
Different instances have different moderation standards so if I am subbed to multiple communities there having an account makes it easier to keep the differences in mind
Jerboa can handle multiple logins.
It reduces confusion because I can grab the same handle in multiple places.
So, I have an account on multiple instances, even though I understand I only need one. I won't ever feel the need to migrate because I am already the same human in multiple contexts.
You could've always done this, infinity has always been open source. However using this just means that you and others will be paying reddits ridiculous pricing for their own api access JUST to use infinity. Which iirc is gonna be around $25 a month per user depending on amount of use. Everytime you open that app itll be charging you for data..
This seems popular to some users now but I don't see it going over to well when the bill comes due. Id rather take my chances going all in on Lemmy and helping support an instance with a community. Decentralization ftw.
I'll admit I wasn't familiar with the free tier. But if it gains any kind of traction though it'll go away too. They've vehemently shown through their actions that they want 3rd party apps gone, nsfw content gone and ads served.
Personally I'm much more excited for Sync for Lemmy.
Oh I am too, however in the mean time I have compiled a version of infinity for Reddit using my own API key so that I can keep using Reddit though a 3rd party after the 1st. If you or anyone else wants to do that as well. Here is a free Google CoLab sheet that you input your API key into and it will compile a version of the app infinity but using your own API key. If the instructions aren't clear, hmu and I can help out.
Yeah I made the same thing. Seems really silly and sectarious, also hypocrital for me people who insults you or downvote your comments a lot because you let to know the people this alternative or also by still using Reddit. I can use both, and they before were on Reddit, so less bullshit. Due a comment like this where I linked a Colab for the same, people downvoted me -13 and I received a stupid coment... Anyways.
It is dumb when people downvote something helpful just because they disagree. I will keep using Reddit until Lemmy has as much knowledge on it as Reddit. I'll use the browser before I'll use the official app but at the end of the day Reddit has over a decade of good advice on niche topics and when I need to know something I'm still gonna check Reddit first. At least for the time being.
Yeah I made the same thing. Seems really silly and sectarious, also hypocrital for me people who insults you or downvote your comments a lot because you let to know the people this alternative or also by still using Reddit. I can use both, and they before were on Reddit, so less bullshit. Due a comment like this where I linked a Colab for the same, people downvoted me -13 and I received a stupid coment... Anyways.
I already know which this has been always possible, but an user published how to do not so much time ago. If you have unlimited plan data, like most people, that fact wouldn't be a concern so please don't spread misinformation just to scare people into not using Reddit anymore. The API use is free to regular users and with their limitation reasonable for just one user. And if not were of that way, which highly doubt it, would charged to the ISP then or no problems if you have unlimited data plan, or limitate their data usage with apps with a bunch of open source tools which allow that.
And all of that which has solutions, only in case that this you said about 25$ would be charged for the current free API 100 request per minute, would be true, and I didn't saw any official announce of Reddit. They plan to enter in stock market soon, I highly believe that they will not start to charge 25$ to every users by the use fo the current free API of 100 request per minutes, that would be so much having in count the last polemic with their abusive practicals, and people would be in a massive exodus, even higher than current happening now with a lot of people comming to Lemmy, which is great and I love that fact. They have to care about for their users, because the users decisions as a colective affects to their inversors, and they will take care about them more, we already saw it...
but I do not feel comfortable with depending on Microsoft for this service.
Why don't you feel good about it? When Microsoft acquired Github, the worst things were predicted by some users. That was in late 2018 if I'm not mistaken. Now it's 2023, what terrible things have happened so far? From my point of view, Github has actually developed very positively since then.
Sure, Github could delete repositories at any time. But so can any other provider. However, this is not a big problem for the code alone, since you always have at least one current version stored locally. Issues and pull requests can be exported, albeit unofficially. Corresponding scripts for this are even offered directly on Github.
What else could Microsoft do? Use the code that is available in a repository. Microsoft can also do this if the code is stored by another provider. Git clone is already sufficient for this.
So I personally see few problems to use Github. Especially since there are the most users and therefore the probability is higher to find people who participate in a project.
But apart from that, I host a few projects at Codeberg.org. Responsible for this is a non-profit organization in Germany. Except for some technical problems when switching to better hardware a few months ago, I can't complain.
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/](Github has banned developers in Crimea, Iran, Syria) because of US export rules. This is a good enough reason for me to be worried.
Apart from that do you trust Github not using your private projects for their AI training?
The idea popped up in my head because I am planning to open-source some of my work, and my organization wants me to keep it on our Gitlab instance. The problem there is that nobody will ever run into this project, which is why I want to keep it on Github ( only for discoverability ). But this would not be necessary if our Gitlab instance would be actually discoverable from other Gitlab instances, hence the federation.
I wasn't aware of the sanctions, so thanks for sharing that! As for the AI, it is inevitable if the source code is public. Having it hosted elsewhere might slow the consumption, but it's coming regardless.
Still, I do think a federated platform is a great idea. The more we can do without relying on a centralized, corporate platform, the better off we'll be as a society.
Microsoft is surprisingly pro-FOSS - probably more than any of the others in "big tech." It's the same reason MS isn't in the FAANG acronym. They've consistently forwarded and contributed to the FOSS community over the past several years. They have massive stakes in the linux foundation, which is either conspiracy or just a shift in attitude (i haven't decided myself yet). For a more concrete example, with LLMs, Microsoft (despite basically owning OpenAI) is contributing to free and open-source language model development, with Orca and TBAAYN, as well as publishing free and open-source tooling for LLM, such as the guidance repository.
I think they're really nice people in general, they just have their own purpose that might not align with everyone.
I prefer to join instances that are more open about accepting "non-perfectly-aligned" people, it's more up to you to fend for yourself and conflicts can occur ofc, but also more interesting interactions can spur from it.
I do understand what they're doing and I do respect their choices, it's just not for me, that's it.
Interesting idea, but just thinking out loud... Would this only work for public repos? What about private ones? For private repos how would one ensure that admins can't just open the database and read the repository? How would you ensure the correct collaborators are the only ones who can push / merge? If a server goes down, are you stuck with a read-only repo? Do you have to just fork that repo and start again?
While this idea might have legs, one of the key aspects with Git and places like GitHub / GitLab is backups. Personally I have my local repo on my dev-box, a self hosted server running gitbucket and finally a copy on GitHub. So I can in theory loose any two of those and still have a copy of my code somewhere.
Now what could be interesting is if using federation we could maybe auto publish to these other off-site locations? But again how do you deal with access rights? Most of my repositories are private while I work on the MVP. So making sure that those repos are secure and undiscoverable while initial develop is underway and ensuring that only those that I authorize to make changes to it can do so. And then finally if I lose access to my "user" because a server went down, how do I make sure I can still contribute?
Interesting idea, just needs some questions answered, in my opinion.
Yup. This would be my concern as well. I would be very hesitant to publish private projects there. And if I were a business, I certainly wouldn’t trust it.
Ah ok, but the idea is to give you flexibility. At the moment you can host your Gitlab instance, but your public projects on your instance can only be found by googling.
The idea behind federation in this case is to have public projects be discoverable across instances, that you can star a project, open issue and make pull request across instances.
Ignoring the public/private repo issue for the moment. Let's assume this is only for FOSS projects. How do solve the issues of Authorization and Recoverability?
In theory you could implement an allowlist instead of the current ban list that Lemmy and others use for Communities. But this raises a 2nd problem, recoverability...
If the instance that contains my account goes down how can I ensure that I can still contribute to my repositories? I could create accounts on multiple instances and authorize all of them, but this increases the attack surface of someone gaining access to one of my accounts. At least with a centralized backup like GitHub, should I forget my password I at least temporarily have my SSH/GPG keys. And if I lose my SSH/GPG keys I still have my GitHub account to upload new ones to. Maybe a variation on ActivityPub could be created that uses SSH/GPG keys instead of an account name?
So maybe not unsolvable but at least some very interesting problems to solve first.
I didn't really look into it, but somebody commented on this topic about Lemmy git repo being hosted on GitHub and linked this: giveupgithub.org/
at the bottom(edit: after 6 edit i still can't make it readable, check the source)
Resources to Give Up GitHub
Here are some resources to help you quit GitHub. We'll be expanding this list regularly as we find more resources. If you'd like to suggest a resource not yet listed, you can discuss it on the Give-Up-GitHub mailing list.
Alternative Hosting Services: - CodeBerg - SourceHut Self-Host (or join a group that self-hosts). A few options: - Gitea - GitLab Community Edition (note, the GitLab Enterprise Edition, which is provided to the public on gitlab.com, is (like GitHub) trade-secret, proprietary, vendor-lock-in software) - SourceHut (We'll be adding tutorials soon on how to self-host!)
Personally, I find entering various parts of the fediverse more fun on broader general instances with fair moderation. Beehaw sounds nice, but also a little oppressive. And in the end, it's still a lemmy instance.
I think it's too early in the post-reddit days to worry about the chaos. Communities/magazines are being built with wild abandon now, but I imagine users will coalesce around a few key ones for each topic. Reddit allowed for infinite subreddits too, but eventually the popular ones took off. There's no rush there, it should settle organically.
I do find it interesting that lemmy, in general, seems to have the momentum over kbin. But again... early days. I'm just glad they are pretty good at talking to each other, though lots of kinks to work out still.
lemmy.world feels pretty good so far to me. Good active local feed, some good homegrown communities that are working to take off, and haven't seen too much drama yet. Good enough for now!
For anyone curious, here are some relevant tickets for the major FOSS git forges discussing implementing federation - there's a lot of interest so it seems like it's only a matter of time before this happens.
I think it's important to note that they only really defederated from two big Lemmy instances (discounting lemmygrad, because it's not, uh, big by current measures). They didn't even defederate from lemmy.ml...
So it seems like a pretty good community to replace the need for reddit, but they apparently require an application to join. I'm not sure what the criteria is, but they rejected my request to join without giving a reason.
Well I said that I wanted to move from reddit out of protest, I am interested in exploring their communities, and that I generally don't post but I vote and comment occasionally.
So they either have terrible judgement to think of me as a bot or spammer, or there is some other reason. I mean, that's their prerogative, but it is discouraging.
There seems to be a bug in the application system right now, where the reason for rejection isn't delivered to the applicant. So they may not be at fault here.
Yeah, it ultimately doesn't matter why, I just didn't realize these communities were so closed-off. Makes navigating a post-reddit reality pretty frustrating.
Is the application to create an account, or to subscribe to their communities? If it’s the former, it seems like it would be better to create an account with some other instance that they’re still federated with.
Doesn't seem very practical, something like this being possible (one click from account settings) would be very useful for the decentralization of the platform.
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