In case someone wants possibly the longest thread on the fediverse for testing purposes, here you go: https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/112322747861701800
With the way I store replies in #Smithereen, this will soon exceed my limit of 256 levels ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I believe Flipboard will prove to be a counterweight to Threads and a prime location for news & pundits (as #Meta does not really desire the latter two on their platforms).
Flipboard curators have seen over 100,000 boosts, likes and replies from people across the fediverse since April 11. Given this positive signal from the community, today we're federating another 100 accounts representing more than 2,500 Magazines about everything from climate to culture. Read more here:
#Fedify, an #ActivityPub server framework, has released version 0.8.0! Here are the highlights of this version:
• fedify lookup: a command to look up any ActivityStreams objects (including actors); see also https://todon.eu/@hongminhee/112341925069749583
• fedify inbox: a command to spin up an ephemeral ActivityPub server so that you can debug and test the activities you send; see also https://todon.eu/@hongminhee/112354353470490915
• followers collection synchronization mechanism
• improved overall performance
• fixed several bugs
Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
I have raised the alarm bell already several years ago. Explained how the (at that time mostly dormant) Working Group at the W3C that is responsible for #ActivityPub must be reinvigorated (that happened) and must became a loud defender of the #fediverse (that didn't happen) or else we risk losing our ecosystem to fragmentation and infighting.
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.
@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.
How can European open-source projects and technologies be funded? Let's explore the role of the NLnet fundation and the @NGIZero program with Lwenn Bussière, Technology Assessor at NLnet!
@evan I was wondering, when you add E2EE DMs to #ActivityPub (and/or an implementation of it) in some way, will you keep future extensions for account and data portability in mind?
Moderation in #Fediverse currently works this way (as far as I can tell):
Instances could enforce their instance block and mute list. This gets passed down to all members of their instance.
Users could have their own block and mute list of users or instances. This only applies for them, on top of the home instance's list.
This works great for the most part, but previously there have been plenty of discussions/arguments of instance members perhaps not agreeing to certain blocks/mutes enforced by instance maintainers - in cases such as this, since individual members have no power to "override" these rules for their account (i.e. to federate with users of another instance that's been blocked by their instance maintainer), their only choice as the last resort is for them to move to another instance.
I imagine it'd be great if it works this way instead:
Instances could enforce their instance block and mute list. This gets passed down to all members of their instance by default.
Users could have their own block and mute list of users or instances. This only applies for them, on top of the home instance's list.
However users could also override the home instance's list granularly, if they would want to for example, federate with an instance that's been blocked by their home instance.
As someone who's not really delved into the workings of the Fediverse/#ActivityPub or any of the projects using it all too much, this "feature" suggestion might totally be technically nonsensical or maybe expensive though for it to make sense or be possible to achieve. Just thought this might be an improvement for what I think is already an excellent moderation system that we have here.
Herausgekommen ist es eine Liebeserklaerung an Blogs, das #Fediverse und #ActivityPub mit einigen ganz persoenlichen Anmerkungen.
Ich wuerde mich bei dieser Ausgabe wirklich ganz besonders freuen, wenn ihr sie ueber Boosts & Reposts unterstuetzt... vielleicht aber auch auf anderen Netzwerken teilt.
Danke fuer all euren Support in den zurueckliegenden 26 Monaten. Das war/ist sensationell 🙏
@stux I'm quite uncertain: part of me curious to try this Autopost, but unlike #ActivityPub from @pfefferle it just posts here on Mastodon without giving me interaction with possible comments. Or, I can decide to get Activitypub working then post blog's posts on my personal page here. Don't know.
@stux@pfefferle I'm thinking about deleting the blog from Mastodon.Uno, keeping it up and running just into #ActivityPub and this account is my personal one. So, I can get rid of #JetPack for autopost on Mastodon at least, keeping me all slots for letting me keep social autoposting free feature's limitations sufficient.
I'm unable to pull this up and boost here. Was able to get the whole stream on a Glitch-soc box np, and I can follow the curator here too, but I'm too tired to try testing on Hubzilla or Friendica at the moment; so I'll just post the link then, which may be of interest to some, ... Actually, I suspect, many.
We've had some discussions about this over in the Fediverse-City Matrix room, Where Ryan is also a participant. It's apropos of the recent onboarding with respect to Flipboard curators and also the nacent interoperability we're experiencing with Bluesky's ATP.
😂 That was odd! When I mentioned @darnell on my #WordPress blog, it pinged my #Flipboard account on my iPhone even though #ActivityPub is not yet activated (I received a push notification, which later revealed nothing 😆).