As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.
Is there anyone working on generalizing the Mastodon API, or documentation to follow for apps that are using it for things other then Mastodon? #fedidev#mastodev#mastodonapi#APIdev
Right now I have more questions than concrete plans, though I think I will try to use something besides #Mastodon. And it will be a single or few-user instance, at least to start.
I'm curious what hot tips and cautionary tales people have as I get started? Anything I MUST or MUST NOT do? Or read?
this enables full-text search for posts you haven't interacted with, as well as full-text search for accounts, and includes several advanced filtering operators and parser fixes.
#MastoDev and #FediDev: In a few threads and forums there have been tons of chats about fixing the "remote follow" and related issues on the Mastodon/Fediverse WebUI experience.
Plugins are no fix. And what I'm about to share is not a "fix." But maybe a bandaid, while the protocol itself is worked out. What do you think?
It's only 55 lines of Javascript and on any page it asks you your home server ONCE, and then remembers and adapts all links from then on:
Hello fedi. i am trying to solve the "fetch all replies" problem once and for all that makes the fedi feel a lot more desolate and with a lot more reply guys in it than it should be. this is take two, where before i had it triggered by a button, but now i think it should happen on the server-side whenever you expand a post. can anyone help me out figure out how to make this more efficient by only fetching posts that the server doesn't already have? i am not sure what the best strategy would be, and if anyone with experience doing efficient rails and SQL stuff could give me some pointers that would be gr8. the patch is actually extremely simple it just needs a few nice things to make it not DDoS everyone.
Hi Fediverse admins / devs! I've got a question about instance software.
Up until now, I've been running a fork of glitch-soc that has served me well. Unfortunately, however, I'm starting to run up against some of Mastodon's limitations and the effort to maintain my own fork is just too much. (seriously, fuck Rails and especially Webpacker :blobfoxangry:) I'd like to switch instance software to something with more features out-of-the-box. I'm considering Calckey, but I don't have any experience with it or any other Misskey derivative. The feature set looks great on paper but I'd like to hear from someone who has actually run it (or at least seriously evaluated the software). I'd greatly appreciate any and all input! I'm especially curious about these questions:
The "Fediverse Software Comparison" table has a few mistakes in the Mastodon and glitch-soc columns. They're minor, but it makes me wonder if that table is really trustworthy? The table is based on personal knowledge
I haven't taken a look yet, but if we implemented a hashtag syntax for nonstandard characters to be able to use things like DOIs and ISBNs and etc. like this:
Does there exist a brief write-up of how content is federated out? Do different #ActivityPub implementors federate content differently? (@stesnac suggests so!)
Here's my head-canon at present... when a note is created, the note is sent to all followers. If users are mentioned, the note is also sent to those users' inboxes.
If a note is addressed to the public collection, do it just get blasted to all known instances' inboxes?
The max_id, since_id, and min_id parameters in #Mastodon's Timeline API assume that the post ID is a sortable number. (Is this correct?) #Hollo, the #ActivityPub implementation I'm building, uses UUIDs for post IDs internally, so I'm stuck on how to implement a Mastodon-compatible API.
has any masto instance set up a parallel #Lemmy instance where you can share your masto account and basically have two views on the same posts? I think that would be super interesting and basically how fedi should work anyway imo. I would love to set that up here, but don't have the time to dig into the internals to figure out how to set it up ATM. #FediDev#FediAdmin
boosts welcome, or links to previous conversations bc I'm sure other instances are thinking similarly
Had a shower thought / question about #ActivityPub. Would it be possible to develop a federated server without a media cache? I believe that it should be as long as the server is configured to proxy media requests back to the original source. This would, of course, greatly increase latency and decrease reliability (media is lost if the remote instance goes poof). But in exchange, it dramatically reduces the storage space needed to run an instance. That would reduce the cost of operating an instance on cheap VPS services. I can also think of a couple use cases around the current push to simplify instance hosting.
Hello! I'm Hazel, a queer foxgirl software developer.
I'm a transfem demigirl and I also describe myself as lesbian, although its a bit more complicated than that. I care deeply about trans issues, queer life, and other LGBTQ+ topics. DMs are open to anyone questioning their gender or struggling with their identity.
I also love programming as a hobby and I babble with retro-computing. I've got a particular fondness for 80s era computers, even though they're well before my time. There's just something fun about the unique and creative computer designs from that decade! I've got a Timex Sinclair 2068 that I especially love.
Some other things I like are PC gaming and TTRPGs. You'll often find me playing Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, or D&D 5th edition. I also love trying out indie games, so please tell me about your own!
My current passion project is ActivityPub Sharp - an attempt to build a static-typed implementation of ActivityPub with full support for spec-compliant and real-world federation. I also contribute to Letterbook with the hope of sparking a new generation of safer and more private fediverse software.
Feel free to start up a conversation about these or any other topics - I love to chat!
Finally figured out why #nodebb posts weren't queryable via Mastodon, turns out it does Content-Type checking, and I was inadvertently breaking #ActivityPub spec by sending in application/json when I should've been sending in "application/activity+json" or 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"'
Latter doesn't play nicely with express, so using the former and all's well!
Full credit to @bouncepaw who gave me key to figuring it out! 🏅
It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
I have been seeing lots of talk about #Firefish and the "dumpster fire" that FF social has devolved into. I have a lot of sympathy for the dev team finding as we have here at blahaj.zone that FF/IS doesn't scale well. The devolution has been more public over at FF social cos Fedi's own Guy Kawasaki was hyping it up and was part of the team until it wasn't producing the results he expected and he slinked off. I wonder if the seed funders have done the same. Chris and Kainoa had separate funders, both involved in political tech. I think they were hoping to throw some seed money at something that wouldn't drag the chain like Mastodon development and be the new Twttr for liberal politics to electioneer on. 🤮 Kainoa told me who his funder was and from that point I haven't promoted Calckey/Firefish since.
Gotta love the "but we're the good guys" tech VC people, male, white, older, cishet, been "around" social tech for a while, looking to ride this Fedi thing into "significance"/"success", who found their side project who they fed "advice" to without any real stakes/responsibility. And when Kainoa wasn't the 10x dev they hoped, they've jumped ship, not that they could do any better.
It would be nice for the sake of transparency that there was some kind of repository where such funding was disclosed. Ironic when one of the funders is about protecting democracy. #Fediverse#FediDev#FediDevs
I think I got it... the #ActivityPub spec mentions Actors, but doesn't specify how they're defined or served (as intended).
I was wondering how other apps figured out how to find that actor URI. It just seemed like apps can make their own URLs and other apps just know? Hah.
WebFinger. That's how they're discovered. It seems to be a common standard adopted by ActivityPub implementors to have a .well-known/webfinger endpoint.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2937 the Lemmy devs' response to someone asking for machine-readable HTTP API docs is even worse than Website Boy's 😒 guess they don't want anyone writing clients for it
The decision to use Ruby for Mastodon was a poor choice, to put it mildly.
The diagram below shows relative energy consumption, with values normalized to the most efficient one. So C, as the most energy efficient, has the value 1.
I prey to all of the gods that ever were or ever will be that the Mastodon developers will finally exclude the highly useful content warnings and hashtags that make Mastodon what it is from the character count of the post.
I mean come on. We already do it with image descriptions, and I'm not suggesting we don't put some kind of limit on number of hashtags or CW length, but this is just obtuse when we're encouraged to use these features, then punished for doing so. #Mastodon #mastodev #FediDev