That sparked a thought in me: “Hey, why not register and communicate with everyone to share some real information about China?
The 2 main Lemmy developers (who also run lemmy.ml), Dessalines and Nutomic, are outspoken Marxist Leninists and very pro CPC. This place doesn’t have anywhere close to the level of China derangement syndrome that reddit has.
Thumb-Key — A flick keyboard for mobile phones; a FOSS alternative to MessagEase created by Lemmy’s own Dessalines. It’s not perfect, neither was MessagEase, but for what it is it’s pretty damn good and definitely beats using a mobile QWERTY keyboard.
Ibis — A federated wiki created by Lemmy’s own Nutomic. It’s currently pretty barebones with little activity, but I’d like to see more interest in the project so that it can grow and improve. I think it has a lot of potential.
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Let nutomic build out the plugin system before work gets started on anything like this. These sorts of things have a way of drastically changing before they’re done. Depending on how the plugin system is built this could be possible.
You don’t really need a plugin though, Reddit has had tip bots for a long time and one could easily be built, but it would be custodial. I don’t see though how a Lemmy plugin would not be custodial, but we will see I guess.
People are interested in bridges between Bluesky and the fediverse, it turns out: Bridgy Fed quietly launched in test mode for a few people to try, but already 1200 accounts have signed up when they found out about it, without any announcement. Some interesting news about plugins as well this week, for both PeerTube and Lemmy. Let’s dive in:
Bluesky and fediverse bridge silently launches
Bridgy Fed, the bridge between the fediverse by Ryan Barrett, is now publicly available for testing. The bridge quietly became available for people to test, but as bridged posts started to appear, other people became aware and more and more people started to test and use the bridge. Barrett states that already 1200 accounts have bridged in one or both directions. Some 750 of those accounts have made their fediverse account visible in Bluesky, which can be tracked via a directory made by Kuba Suder. Barrett also says that the bridge is still in a very early state, that he was not expecting so much attention so quickly, and that users should still expect plenty of bugs and downtime.
When the bridge was first announced, it lead to a storm of protest within the fediverse. Many people felt uncomfortable that the bridge was opt-out and not opt-in, and did not want that their public fediverse posts became available in Bluesky. Barrett has listened to the feedback, and the entire system is now opt-in. In order to make your fediverse account available in Bluesky, you’ll have to follow this account. For your Bluesky account to become visible in the fediverse you can follow this account. It might take a few minutes before your account becomes visible. Barrett also says that “much of the current state is not final. Expect some design and policy choices to change. For example, right now you have to manually enable the bridge, but that may change eventually, at least for Bluesky accounts bridging into the fediverse.”
The News
A variety of news from the side of PeerTube: PeerTube released version 6.1, with new features such as account import/export, banners and avatars for instances, and a change in the way PeerTube counts a view. Now, more in line with other platforms, someone has to watch a video for 10 seconds to count as a view, down from 30. Counting is also done based on a unique ID generated by a web browser, instead of an IP address. PeerTube has a plugin system, with two new interesting plugins this week that are being worked on:
The Premium user plugin allows videos to be limited to be viewed only by paying accounts, with an integration with Stripe.
A subtitle editor plugin which allows creators to add subtitles or captions without having to use external software.
Finally, WeDistribute wrote a guide this week on how to stream with PeerTube and Owncast.
Discourse and WordPress are now directly federating with each other. This means that a forum category on Discourse can follow a WordPress blog, and the blogs on WordPress will appear as new posts in the Discourse Forum category. Demo is available here, and as of this week’s episode, my newsletter should also appear on the ActivityPub Social Hub forums. In general there is a lot of activity happening with interoperability between Lemmy, WordPress, NodeBB and Discourse. They are all focusing more on long-form writing, and the Working Group‘s meeting of this week spend quite some effort on improving how these different platforms for ‘Forums and Threaded Discussions’ can federate. Lemmy is also working on federating directly with NodeBB, and it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like in practice.
Newsmast announces that they have been working on a new feature to extend their Mastodon servers, Amplifier. With Amplifier come two major new features to Newsmast: The ability for individual accounts on the server to opt-in or opt-out of posts from Bluesky and Threads, and a feature to scroll back through time similar to Phanpy’s excellent Catch-up feature. With bridging becoming more prominent, it makes sense to have the feature clearly available as a setting to people, and I’m curious to see how they will implement it. Newsmast has not shared yet when Amplifier will be released.
Lemmy announces a Proof of Concept for a plugin system. The system is currently fairly basic, and developer nutomic says that he will not implement the system until it is clear that there is interest, and at least one plugin is in development. The responses do show that there is clear interest in such a system though, and it’s worth watching to see what comes of it.
Viverse, the metaverse platform of HTC, has joined the fediverse. Viverse allows you to visit 3d worlds directly in your browser. The fediverse integration means that you can now chat from your Viverse account with Mastodon accounts, the blog shows how this looks in practice. What stands out to me about the announcement is that the fediverse is becoming attractive for products to bootstrap their social network. Viverse does not appear to be particularly busy, the most visited ‘world’ is visited some 7000 times total, and adding fediverse integration is an interesting way to increase visibility.
Conversations on Mastodon forks are nothing new, but have popped up recently again, after some public pushback against some of the board members of Mastodon’s new U.S.-based non-profit organisation. Jon Pincus of The Nexus of Privacy makes a case for a hard fork in this article. Fediverse developer and Mastodon contributor Emelia Smith wrote a response on why she thinks a hard fork is not the way forward. Roland Pulliam, who works on the shared deny list project The Bad Space, announced a fork Awujo, but not much is known about the fork yet.
E2EE encryption might be coming to the fediverse: ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou got a grant from the Summer of Protocols Initiatives to add end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, together with developer Tom Coates. WeDistribute has a closer look as well.
Tusks is a new iOS app for Mastodon with the goal of “makes posting on Mastodon feel like publishing to your blog”. It only shows your own posts, and focuses on helping you write posts, especially threads. Tusks is available iOS as well as the iPad and Mac, and the full product is $4.99.
For the people interested in protocols: A call to participate help the lead author of the original Webfinger RFC with improvements.
The Links
The DotSocial Podcast interviewed Ryan Barrett about building bridges to the fediverse.
Robert W. Gehl, who is currently writing a book about the fediverse, has a blog post about decentralisation vs noncentralisation, and Bluesky vs the fediverse.
There have been some scattered discussions I've seen over the past year that mention that @pfefferle's WordPress ActivityPub plugin federates their blog posts out as an as:Note, and that the only reason this is done is because Mastodon only treats as:Note (and as:Question) as a first-class object and relegates anything else to a fallback handler that takes a short snippet of the content, and shows a link back to the original source, thus losing any in-app benefits (boosts, replies, etc.)
Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know. So that's why I'd like to ask Mattias — or anybody else with some context — here.
For reference:
as:Article: Represents any kind of multi-paragraph written work.
as:Note: Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length.
as:Page: Represents a Web Page.
I have also noticed that Lemmy, perhaps out of principle, sends out an as:Page for new generated content, and only the replies federate out as as:Note. It has unfortunately led to some assertions that Lemmy's federation is "broken", even though it is arguably not the case.
I don't even blame Mattias for opting to send everything out as as:Note.
End of the day right now it doesn't matter how Mattias or Nutomic represent their higher-level collection of data, because Mastodon is the largest implementor and neither they — nor anyone else I know of, for that matter — treat anything that's notas:Note or as:Question specially.
But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.
What's important to me right now is what the landscape looks like right now, and why that is the case.
N.B. The discussion here will eventually make its way to online real-time discussion at one of the future WG meetings.
@julian@pfefferle@pfefferle@nutomic Mastodon already can display long Note content (it adds "Read more" at the end), I think it is reasonable to do the same for Article and other types of objects.
>The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards
@silverpill@julian@pfefferle@pfefferle@nutomic I am not very knowledgable about ActivityPub so I cant discuss the specifics, but we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon.
If there are discussions about this, or a WG working on the topic, please send me the links so I can reference them for us to read when we start working on this :)
One of the ideas would be to support an embedded "view more" modal, that somehow displays the remote content.
I Read part of this as "Is Matthias lying". And although we've never spoke directly, I thought "What an absurd proposition".
It likely makes sense for things to be Note when mastodon wants to read them. I Wonder if there is a possibility of content negotiation, so that when mastodon asks (presumably with mastodon user-agent) it gets a note, but future improved software could have a different type.
It's an interesting problem, as you can never truly own all clients
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Je cherche un fork/alternative de Wikipédia En Français sans la transphobie des admins et bureaucrates (qui avait provoqué une polémique je rappelle), est ce que ça existe?...
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
It's not really my job to take care of your media competency and I don't really care whether you believe it or not but it is pretty well known that the Lemmy devs are Tankies, which you can easily see on the Lemmy Github page when you look at the main contributors like Dessalines or Nutomic.
Right now, I’m feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I’m hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or...
I like lemmy but also I’ve been following the drama from the sidelines, so I think the focus on Rust vs Java has nothing to do with the choice to create a lemmy alternative.
The reason sublinks exists is that the lemmy devs have made some large technical and PR mistakes that have led to multiple larger instance admins losing faith in them.
There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their “entitled” “demands” with them. It’s not surprising to see various alternatives to lemmy springing up as a result of the devs telling people to do so.
There was the illegal content spam incident which required instance admins to interact directly with the image database in complex ways for each image to remove the content from their servers, and I believe lemmy.world disabled submitting images if you are using a VPN or the tor network as a result. The lemmy devs have made some bafflingly derisive comments about that incident.
And then there’s the recent update that has broken federation of bigger instances, which is an ongoing issue. Communities are having to move instances to help with this bug which should have been caught in testing the update.
So sublinks seems to be some folks deciding that they can do it better.
Choosing Java is one way that they think they can do better. The argument goes, significantly more people know Java than Rust. Lemmy has had some problem getting extra help as a result of this limit, so hopefully sublinks will have a much larger pool of talented devs who will step up and submit code.
Sublinks isn’t the only one, too. Piefed is the python Lemmy alternative that’s cropped up recently and I believe there are some others in other languages.
Whether any of them can do it better remains to be seen, but it does seem like the Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn’t always the most important part of a project.
There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their “entitled” “demands” with them.
They were kinda acting entitled to not just free labor, but to have their issues prioritized over others.
Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn’t always the most important part of a project.
I mean, Lemmy was explicitly written in Rust because the creators of Lemmy wanted to do a project in Rust. The complaints that I’ve seen about the language choice are just bizzare with that context. I’m quite happy with others hoping in and making their own compatible things in different languages because that makes the world more interesting and gives more people something that they might want to contribute to.
For those who were not able to attend the technical alignment meeting of the informal "Threadiverse Working Group", I have taken minutes during the meeting and are sharing them here.
Thank you to all those who attended, we will meet again next month! Follow myself or the WG category to be notified about additional developments.
Attendees
Angus McLeod
Julian Lam
Evan Prodromou
Aaron Grey
Rimu Atkinson
Erlend Sogge Heggen
Laurens Hof
Other participants are not listed as they are not mentioned in notes below, but there were ~20 participants.
Notes
Participant introductions
“Forasphere”/”Foraverse” vs “Threadiverse”
Both have a topic-like structure and so much of the technical structure is the same
More helpful to focus on the differences from microblogging as the de facto implementation of ActivityPub
No matter what name, it is mostly UI distinctions with some different handling based on nomenclature
Rimu brings up discussion regarding nomenclature; related document
“We don’t call things the same words”
Aaron posits that “Circles” could be a useful common term
Julian posits that end of the day no implementor here will likely consider changing their already-established terminology
Aaron proposes a goal for the group: determine a common set of terms to use in discussions going forward; a lingua franca
Evan proposes a goal to produce documentation that other forum (or reddit-like alternatives) can use to become compatible
Additional goal (added later): reaching out to other forum devs (who aren’t already in this WG or looking into AP). Additional outreach/engagement from other forum softwares.
Julian suggests that perhaps the FEP process would be a possible path forward
Mastodon’s microblogging concept leads to other implementations following suit
Coordinated effort to increase compatibility between threadiverse-type applications is attractive
Erlend wants to see better interop between threadiverse apps. Discourse to NodeBB, etc.
Angus states that we’ve reached half-way point and summarizes (see above)
Meeting focus shifts to debate re: FEP process or Task force under SocialCG
Julian proposes on behalf of Johannes Ernst (in absentia) that the WG be organized under the FediDevs umbrella
Evan proposes that the WG be an official task force under the SocialCG
W3C/ActivityPub has many task forces already, one for data portability, one for webfinger, one for testing, etc.
Differences between task force report and FEP:
Both similar documents
FEP has a more asynchronous process for clearing out objections, less cohesion than SocialCG
Discussions take place on SocialHub
Most FEPs individually authored
SocialCG reports collaboratively edited and put forth to W3C
Some questions re: FEP process
Evan answers: Anyone can propose, comments collected. After 6 months author can determine it finalized, but implementation varies. Many draft FEPs are dropped due to lack of interest or are hypothetical in nature.
Penar asks whether FEP or W3C report process is faster
Both are roughly equivalent, SocialCG reports are “a few months” to draft, and “a few months” to be accepted/finalized.
Aaron posits that SWICG (or SocialCG) is a better group since it eventually goes into a published W3C article
Aim towards convergence, consistent UI. Safe and usable user experience where the end-user has choice.
Laurens remarks on the increased level of cooperation that has not been often found in the fediverse, sees this as an opportunity to forge a path toward what we want instead of being bound by an FEP.
Angus motions that we join the SWICG as a task force
Motion carries with 12 ayes out of 16 present
Next meeting of SWICG 5 Apr 1pm Eastern; Angus and Julian to attend
3pm Eastern; meeting scheduled end, Evan and Erlend (and some others) drop out
What do we call the group “foraverse” “forasphere” “threadiverse”
Benti posits that it is weird to call ourselves representatives of the threadiverse as that distinction is reserved for Lemmy and nutomic is not present
Julian suggests that the term is not exclusive to Lemmy/kbin and asks to simply expand the definition to include Piefed, Discourse, NodeBB, Flarum, et al.
Additional back and forth regarding how and where to carry on discussions outside of monthly calls
Shared Google Doc sufficient for now, can explore additional options later
Julian posits that a federated option is ideal, acknowledges bias when suggesting that NodeBB be used. However, as it would be federated, where the discussions take place is mostly incidental.
A federated solution would be easiest way to reach fediverse developers.
Angus motions that we call ourselves the Threadiverse Working Group (or Task Force)
Motion carries with 9 ayes out of 13 present
Action Items
Angus or Julian to set up shared Google Doc for meeting/agenda prep for next meeting
I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.
That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.
Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.
Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.
And no one of the sublinks team can do rust really, so it was just a matter of what languages can be learned faster and/or have already good knowledge about a programming language.
Nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust either when he started contributing. It’s really not so difficult to learn as it seems.
I’d love to help anyone learn btw. I unfortunately don’t have the time to contribute to Lemmy myself but I love teaching so if anyone would like to learn some Rust, hit me up.
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Besides Lemmy which I love a lot, I’m also enjoying a microblog platform called Catodon, which is much less basic than Mastodon and has a very nice interface. Pixelfed is also fantastic if you like photography rather than just being Instagram influencer nonsense. Where else are you hanging out? What have you liked and not...
deleted_by_moderator
China is burning all its bridges with Israel (asia.nikkei.com)
What open-source software would you like more people to know about?
Lemmy subscribe to post
Is there a way to subscribe to a post/comment of others to get notifications for new comments? If it’s currently not available, is it being worked on?
Lemmy Development Update 2024-05-11
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Tipping XMR with proof of concept with Lemmy plugin system (github.com)
A popular feature in other social media is tip crypto like Nostr using Lighting and Farcaster using Ethereum tokens....
How Anarchy Works (youtu.be)
Lemmy Development Update 2024-04-26
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Existe t-il un fork/alternative de Wikipédia FR? French
Je cherche un fork/alternative de Wikipédia En Français sans la transphobie des admins et bureaucrates (qui avait provoqué une polémique je rappelle), est ce que ça existe?...
Lemmy Development Update 2024-04-12
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Lemmy.ml (fedia.io)
Teenagers. (lemmy.ca)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/18500298
Regarding sublinks and feeling concerned about what is going on with it (lemmy.world)
Right now, I’m feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I’m hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or...
Feedback from all moderators
Hello world!...
Lemmy Development Update 2024-03-29
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
What other parts of the fediverse are you using?
Besides Lemmy which I love a lot, I’m also enjoying a microblog platform called Catodon, which is much less basic than Mastodon and has a very nice interface. Pixelfed is also fantastic if you like photography rather than just being Instagram influencer nonsense. Where else are you hanging out? What have you liked and not...