#Reddit users are mad about the #API charges that hit third party #apps, but I actually find this from #Huffman much more concerning: "...data licensing is a new potential business for us."
What he's actually saying - they want to sell user data to AI companies for them to train their models. This should be a reason to delete all your content and leave the platform. In Europe, you should raise a #GDPR-deletion request.
Yet another question people are asking me: "How can I, a common person, help hasten the demise of #Meta through #ActivityPub?"
Again, I want to re-emphasize this. #Fediblock is not an all-purpose tool. It's useful as a hammer. But in this scenario, we don't just need a hammer. We need drills, pliers, saws, and blowtorches.
That said, we must protect communities that choose to defederate from Meta. Which means that if those servers don't want to receive messages from any Meta-owned services, we must not only be respectful of that, we should make damn sure that those servers are quarantined from Meta. So much of the success of fighting Meta will require safe spaces from Meta.
The next thing we need is lots and lots of nodes. Currently, we only have ~25,000 nodes on the Fediverse but we need more. Preferably, these nodes should be small, agile, and well-moderated. If you have the finances and/or skill to run a node, it's important that you do so. To compete with Meta, we need to build scale -- and the easiest way to build scale is by adding more nodes to the Fediverse.
What will also be key is lobby servers. These will be servers specifically set up for migrants from Meta-owned services to help onboard them towards the rest of the Fediverse. To run such a lobby server, they need to be welcoming, moderated well, and free of the elitists and gatekeepers that poison so much of the Fediverse currently.
How to get people from Meta to try out the rest of the Fediverse? We need people willing to be ambassadors on #P92 who are ready and willing to evangelize the rest of the Fediverse. Folks like @tchambers are very good at this on Twitter, and I have no doubt that we can do the same with P92. Except this time we'll have the benefit of federation already happening 😉
Now if there's one thing I've learned about the growth of the Fediverse it's that bad corporate decisions pay dividends. We've already experienced waves of migration from Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit. And I have no doubt that it's only a matter of time before Meta makes another corporate mistake -- as they tend to do.
In which case, we need to strike fast. When another Cambridge Analytica happens, we need to remind everyone on Meta about the lobby servers that are on standby, and ready to take them on. Unlike previous migrations, let's not be unprepared for this. Let's be especially prepared since Meta plans to join the Fediverse.
Finally, we need more devs. Specifically, we need devs willing to build innovative server and client software that takes aim at Meta. And to do that, we need to support the devs that currently exist -- show evergreen devs pondering whether they should invest here that we, as a community, are appreciative of our current devs.
If you like #Mastodon, #Calckey, #Kbin, #Friendica, etc., it's important that you open up your hearts as well as your wallets and fund the next stage of Fediverse development.
This will take a lot of work. But if you want to fight Meta, challenge their dominance of social media, this is what must be done.
Personally, I'm hyped about the future of the Fediverse -- regardless of whether Meta eventually lives to tell the tale.
Are you a developer? Do you want to help one of the most flexible, long-established and interesting Fediverse projects?
Friendica (https://friendi.ca) needs developers to help on the frontend, between the server-side PHP modules and views and the client-side HTML/CSS/Javascript aspect.
(It would also be nice if they ran their own Friendica node to help with testing.)
➡️ Are you interested? If so, get in touch with @hypolite
I would like to endorse other minor web apps in the #Fediverse, but most of them are full of UI glitches, are incomplete and downright buggy looking odd things.
From my designer point of view #Mastodon and #Pixelfed are the only effective ones, because they speak to people who are used to proper visual design language (read: Non-nerds, non-engineers, the regular people and design oriented people).
Things like #BookWyrm, #Lemmy, #Friendica and newer niche apps cause reactions like: "What is this?", they look like back end is fine but nobody is in charge of the design and the UI has no direction whatsoever. It's the general culprit in the programming world: A back end developer thinks everything is fine when we add a CSS framework and that's that.
If we just get the UI right everywhere, we get more people to the #Fediverse. I just wish there was more #CSS/design people willing to contribute. #UI#UIDesign
Point blank, a mass Fediblock isn't going to work with #Meta.
The cold truth is that people will use #Barcelona whether it federates or not. Even if it fails, Barcelona will probably have more users out of the gate than almost every project save Mastodon. Hell, it will probably eclipse #Bluesky too.
And even if you convince every server to defederate -- which you won't -- this will not be a PR coup for the Fediverse. Newspaper headlines won't blare "Fediverse successfully resists Meta." Instead, they will probably follow @gruber take with "Open source zealots complain that an open protocol is open."
Again, as I've said countless times, I'm not saying you should federate with Barcelona or any Meta-owned property. If you want, defederate. The joy of the Fediverse is freedom of association.
But a mass Fediblock doesn't solve a few important problems with Meta, and perhaps makes them worse.
The most critical problem is that Meta users need to migrate away from Meta-owned social networks. Until now, a migration path has simply been unfeasible to most. But when Barcelona gets launched, it is possible that many of them will become aware of a greater Fediverse.
How to build that awareness? By interacting with them through services beyond Barcelona.
This approach works. I've interacted with many Mastodon users through services beyond Mastodon, and this has resulted in adoption of other Fediverse software. #Calckey is a case in point.
However, there's a bigger problem concerning Meta: Fediverse replacements for Meta-owned social networks aren't getting mass adoption. And it's not because these apps aren't good.
#Pixelfed is an #Instagram replacement. It is also one of the slickest apps on the Fediverse. Yet, Pixelfed only has 150,000 registered accounts.
#Friendica is a #Facebook replacement. It's been around since 2010. It is a mature product that does many things very well, but Friendica only has 17,000 registered accounts.
The software is great but we are failing to effectively market the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Now I'm trying my darnedest to change this, and so are many people. But facts are facts. Fediverse alternatives to Meta are a blip on the radar.
Refusing to federate with Barcelona won't change this. How do I know?
Because we don't federate now, and the status quo remains intact.
Meanwhile, Meta is practically gifting Pixelfed and Friendica an opportunity for federation, and it would be foolish to not consider broader implications.
How is it that more people aren't considering this opportunity?
Dare I say that most people -- including devs -- suffer from myopia concerning what the Fediverse is. The Fediverse is not Mastodon, and it is wrong to view the Fediverse solely through the eyes of Mastodon.
And I'll go further: by focusing Barcelona on text, I suspect that Meta is likewise making the same mistake of viewing the Fediverse as a "Twitter killer".
What they may not be considering is that the Fediverse might be a "Meta killer" too. And connecting Barcelona to the Fediverse is opening a can of worms Meta hasn't entirely considered yet.
If Barcelona is indeed text-based, what will happen when a Barcelona user encounters Pixelfed and asks, "Why does this post show reels? And why can't I do the same?"
Believe me, this is the kind of content that triggers migration.
We need to think bigger than Fediblock. Yes, for your own mental health and safety, you may not want to federate with Barcelona. However, there needs to also be a means for Barcelona users to encounter content outside Barcelona.
Perhaps there needs to be "lobby" servers that help Barcelona users enter the greater Fediverse -- helping them make the switch beyond Meta.
Lemmy ist eine ist eine Art Forensoftware im #Fediverse: Man kann Foren (die in Lemmy "Communitys" genannt werden) abonnieren, Links teilen und an Diskussionen teilnehmen. Ausführlicher haben @Tealk und ich es hier beschrieben.
Du kannst zum einen #Lemmy -Accounts folgen, dann erscheinen die Beiträge in Deiner Timeline und Du kannst darauf antworten, sie teilen usw.
Zum anderen kannst Du auch von Mastodon etc. aus Beiträge in Lemmy-Communitys erstellen.
Einer Community folgen:
Am einfachsten ist es, den Accountnamen vollständig in die Suche zu tippen bzw. eben die URL zu kopieren ins Suchfeld. Das gilt sowohl für Communitys (z.B. [ät]fediversede@feddit.de) als auch für Lemmy-Accounts (z.B. @caos ist mein Lemmy-Account) als auch für einzelne Beiträge in Lemmy (z.B. feddit.de/post/964225 ist ein Beitrag in Lemmy).
Beiträge in Communitys erstellen:
Beiträge in Lemmy-Communitys kannst Du erstellen, indem Du den Communty-Account taggst (deshalb habe ich oben [ät] eingefügt, weil sonst der Beitrag in dem Forum landen kann.
Das ist im Prinzip genauso wie bei Friendica-Foren: Wenn der Account mit @ getaggt wird, teilt er den Beitrag und der Beitrag erscheint dann auch im Forum.
Das ist zum Beispiel ein Beitrag, den ich von Mastodon aus erstellt habe im Testforum von feddit: feddit.de/post/772628
Von Mastodon und Calckey etc. aus ist nur zu beachten: Der Beginn des Posts/ der erste Absatz wird der Titel des Foren-Beitrags, da Mastodon kein Überschriftenfeld hat.
Im ersten Absatz bitte keine Hashtags und keine Links verwenden, die werden in der Überschrift nicht richtig angezeigt!
Also am besten den Beitrag so beginnen (s. Bild 1):
Das ist meine Überschrift (möglichst aussagekräftiger Titel, am besten hier keine Hashtags) @community
Das ist der weitere Text, Link etc.
ggf. ein Bild (nur im Ausgangspost wird ein Bild von Mastodon nach Lemmy übertragen)
Nach interessanten Foren/Communtys suchen könnt ihr entweder auf einer Instanzseite oder übergreifend auch hier oder hier im neuen "Lemmy Explorer" (s. Bild 2).
Dann URL ins Suchfeld und dem Account folgen.
Wenn Du eine interessante Community gefunden hast, kannst Du deren URL in das Suchfeld reinkopieren, um dem Community-Account zu folgen (s. Bild 3) oder das Handle des Accounts in der Form @communityname eingeben (in Friendica etc. auch mit !) .
Die vergangenen Beiträge werden dann oft nicht angezeigt, aber die, die dann in Zukunft kommen, erscheinen in Deiner Timeline.
Was nicht geht von Mastodon etc. aus, ist eine eigene Community zu erstellen. Dafür braucht es einen Lemmy- oder kbin-Account. Sonst geht eigentlich fast alles (bis auf Bilder in Antworten, die werden m.W. nicht föderiert, siehe im Detail hier).
Wenn Du vielen bzw. sehr aktiven Communitys folgst, kann es v.a. in Mastodon etwas unübersichtlich werden. Einen übersichtlichere Ansicht gibt es, wenn Du es auf die Seite der Community selbst ansiehst, also extern im Browser öffnest.
(Edit: die Original-URL von Beiträgen versteckt sich z.T. hinter dem #Fediverse -Logo)
A massive thank you to to every server admin on the #Fediverse who tried to keep their server going under the tsunami wave of posts about Eurovision - whether your server was #Mastodon, #Calckey, #Pixelfed, #Friendica, etc. You all did a fantastic job on the night, no matter the result. I would like to think everyone cannot thank you enough.
Seeing everyone participate in Eurovision on the Fediverse was spectacular. I've never seen so much excitement and chatter before. I felt like I was part of a wholesome community - something I've longed for in other social media platforms, but never truly got with all the anger, aggression, and trolling. None of that was here, and it made the Fediverse absolutely beautiful! ❤️
I just had a bit of a look at kbin.social and I have to say, kbin looks really impressive!
If you've never heard of kbin, it's a fediverse platform specifically focusing on groups. Broadly speaking, similar to lemmy, the goal is to create a fediverse take on the reddit experience. However, kbin also integrates fediverse groups like gup.pe, chirp and friendica groups, and that is a killer feature as far as I'm concerned!
We've been running a lemmy instance for a few months now, but it might be time to look at spinning up our own kbin instance too!
When writing the initial version of our project plan as signed and agreed with by NlNet we didn’t know yet about the dynamics of the community, specifically about how the cooperation between the maintainers of the #WordPress#ActivityPub plugin and #Mobilizon would be like. The level of collaboration with other #Fediverse developers would determine whether our project goals could only be achieved through a series of workarounds, or whether we could work together to strengthen interoperability and compatibility in the Fediverse.
Mobilizon was, until our project, the only Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio limits its ActivityPub capabilities to sending notes, but is working on a true federation of events, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: #304#33#321#1509#1507#1392#1385#1388#1387#1378#1376.
The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress AktivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @pfefferle again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.
Tasks done (almost)
We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.
Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.
If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress yourself if your operate a WordPress site with events, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.
I tried to report to #GitHub that their social links feature fails to correctly validate #fediverse handles unless they are hosted on a mastodon, and all I got was a link to their community discussions 🙄.
Since Microsoft is big enough to only care about things when there is enough noise, here is a link where you can upvote / make noise. :nes_fire:
Until this is addressed, if you happen to be using any other server type (e.g. #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #Calckey, #Friendica etc), GitHub will not accept your handle as a fediverse social link.
Despite the sadness of seeing them leave the platform I'm working on, I can't express how cool it is to be able to still follow people who moved to any other platform #Friendica is compatible with, including Mastodon, Diaspora, and more, all from my same account.
It's completely unheard of in most other social media context, and yet here it's completely seamless.
Fediverse-Fachtag: „Die Welt nach Facebook, Twitter und YouTube. Eine neue Generation des Internets?” am 22.9.23 in Köln
Der Fachtag richtet sich an Multiplikatorinnen der politischen Bildung, an Lehrkräfte, Vertreterinnen öffentlicher Institutionen und Bildungseinrichtungen sowie an alle Interessierten.
Bridges in other social media have always been an integral part of Fediverse. The #Friendica release 2023.09-rc has integrated a bridge to Bluesky for this purpose. This does not rely on a third-party provider. The integration takes place via the add-on system. The admin of the instance can activate or deactivate this.
Once the user has activated the add-on for their account, the connection is established via an existing Bluesky account. The bidirectional interface allows communication with contacts that you follow on Bluesky.
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.
If you haven't heard, sadly, #ChirpSocial, one of the popular #ActivityPub “groups” platform, is shutting down “probably” on February 29th.
In an email they sent to admins, the owner and developer can no longer support https://chirp.social financially as they failed to find a new job after they were laid off by #Google last year.
This reminds us the importance of having a built-in groups feature, and one where the groups feature actually federates.
Back in 2008, when the #Fediverse was born, we did have a built-in federated groups in #Laconica / #StatusNet (today known as #GNUsocial). We used bang (!) instead of at (@). A built-in groups feature is more stable as established instances can host them.
Today, we have #Friendica and #Hubzilla (as well as #Streams-based instances) to fill in that, as groups is a built-in feature in those software products. It's just a matter of finding an instance that's open to hosting groups for any topic for the ActivityPub protocol.
That said, any Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams-based instances you suggest for groups?
Mike Macgirvin, the long-time developer that brought us #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Streams, and the #Zot protocol, is bringing his most powerful concept to the rest of the #Fediverse: Nomadic Identity.
@mike 's contributions to #FOSS and #DeSoc go back much further than just the #ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse, well over a decade in fact, as the creator of #Mistpark, now #Friendica, and also #Zot6 and #Nomad, which promises to be a show changer for identity in the world of Social communications.