One drawback of POSSE is that you’re bolstering the value of the silos. Instagram grows more powerful with your pictures on it and GitHub thrives on your repos.
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
POSSE has merit, being a partial design for disrupting the deprecated monolithic silos, but IMO actually falls short by only seeking to coexist with it, instead of completely obviating them.
As a dedicated FOSS and Privacy Advocate, here's my take on how we can follow a best practices modus operandi, achieving what can eventually relegate today's monolithic silos into the marginalized zone, sending them into the abyss of downtrodden insignificance.
The model can work from any Fediverse platform, but platforms that support a rich feature set with longform authoring capabilities work best, having the greatest impact. For those stuck using masto for the time being, their impact will be less dramatic, but nonetheless still valid.
The model I've been advocating goes like this:
) Create original content on Fediverse enabled properties you own, or cite (link to) content NOT residing in the deprecated silo space (Twitter, Medium, TikTok, InstaSPAM, YouTube, Faceplant, Reddit, Linkedin, Etc.). You can do this from pretty much any Fediverse platform - even masto, with its paltry 500 character limit. A paragraph or so as a rule of thumb, just a teaser/headline to create interest for the reader to follow the link.
) Optional: For added impact and if you have any, from your traditional silo account(s), as well as from less capable clones like masto, offer up a teaser, perhaps a paragraph or so, with a link to the URL of this original content.
) If you're merely pointing to an article or resource created by someone else that exists independently, that's it. Well done! If you created your original content in long form on a more capable Fediverse platform than masto - there are many excellent Fediverse platforms for doing this. A few of those are:
) Endeavor to never publish any actual content (articles, news, photos, videos) on platforms in the deprecated monolithic silo space. Instead, it is preferable to publish your photos, videos on demand, and textual content on a Fediverse Platform well suited to this. i.e., PeerTube for VoDs, Pixelfed for images, and one or more of the platforms mentioned above for textual or multimedia based content such as news articles, HowTo's, tutorials, recipes, Etc.
) Occasionally, you may find it necessary to link to content in the deprecated silo space - a video on YouTube, for example. You may be able to clone videos (depending on licensing) to a PeerTube server, but if not, then make sure you sanitize those videos by using tools such as Invidious that shield the viewer from tracking and other privacy disrespecting constructs built into those silo systems.
The philosophy here is to ensure that anything posted into the deprecated monolithic silo space entreats the reader/viewer to leave that space in order to consume the content.
This practice insures that the consumer of that information does so in a protected, privacy respecting place, presumably built on FOSS, and in the Fediverse. It further serves to familiarize the consumer in an easy and unassuming way, with Fediverse platforms that do not track them or mine their privacy.
For the Fedizen however, it provides a one way transit - anyone seeing a teaser/headline/intro on say, Twitter or Faceplant, is immediately catapulted away from those denizens of commodification that packages and inventories the consumer as the product for sale, depriving those platforms of the necessary revenue that sustains them - death by atrophe. No blissful coexistence, every single post inside the deprecated monolithic silo space is in fact an egress point bringing the consumer into a free and privacy respecting environment.
Obviously, an article on the New York Times website isn't ideal, but it isn't strictly one of the monolithic silo systems listed above either. In this case specifically, it's a walled garden however, so you're directing the consumer to a place where they'll be privacy mined anyway, which offers three other possibilities:
You can, and should unless you feel you absolutely must, elect not to send someone to that resource
You can, under certain circumstances, copy that data verbatim elsewhere and provide a link to that place where you copied the data.
You can also probably check with the AP, since we're talking about a newspaper outlet, most of which actually pull their news from the Associated Press and other similar networks that provide free access, which you can link to instead.
There's simply no way to completely ensure being so mindful of your consumers without precluding yourself from linking to some forms of interesting content - but the point here is that almost without exception, you're not sending anyone into the deprecated monolithic silo space - you're sending them into the Fediverse, where they'll begin to become comfortable with, eventually creating their own accounts here.
I recently had some discussions with a few folks who completely turned their back on things like Twitter, which is good because it is one of those social networking systems that engages in tracking and privacy mining. Those individuals have made it easy for themselves by simply putting the existence of those privacy disrespecting resources completely outside the real of consideration - it's not like anyone is going to suffer because they didn't visit Faceplant. They may suffer a bit of withdrawals, but bear the following in mind:
There are liquor stores on virtually every corner in the real world. They sell booze at liquor stores. An alcoholic must come to terms with this and learn to live with this fact, making a conscious choice to buy, or not to buy booze in those stores, or even go outside where the temptation is even greater.
That's not the greatest metaphor I know, or maybe I just didn't deliver it well. Either way, I hope that in understanding this death by atrittion model, that people can make better informed decisions about privacy for themselves and others.
I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, and any tools that help assist folks in addressing privacy concerns. Please feel free to share this by boosting to raise awareness within the Fediverse (and beyond) of all the excellent platforms available to everyone in the Fediverse. I realize I left out large sectors of the Fediverse that can be factored into this formula - the link aggregators and forums like #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Kbin, #Mbin, #Discourse, and more. I didn't even directly address the purpose built single user instance platforms. Maybe we can give them some coverage in a later edition :)
I can’t get over how cool it is to view my posts from any server. I’m definitely going to use activitypub for my social media I’m planning on making. I was going to use @Discourse , but considering it’s like #GitLab where you are only able to self host and each instance of discourse can’t interconnect makes me kinda sad. But activitypub seems like the only way I feel happy in both ways.
For those who prefer a bulletin board interface for the #Fediverse, this is pretty darn attractive. Anyone who was active with Internet forums back in the ‘90s and ‘00s would love this quite a lot.
As many of us know, the problem with old Internet forums is that, while they provided a cozy community for folks who liked to follow specific topics, they often died because the likes of Facebook simply had a larger network effect.
But with NodeBB and ActivityPub, Internet forums may soon find that they have a network effect of hundreds of millions of people.
If you ever used Internet forums but have since stopped, would NodeBB’s foray into the Fediverse have you increase your participation with them again?
I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining steam, Fedi has arrived.
Here's a screenie depicting both sides of a typical Fediverse interaction between NodeBB and platforms like Friendica, Misskey, Soapbox/Pleroma, Hubzilla, Takahe, Socialhome, and others.
Markdown published on NodeBB is preserved surprisingly well on Mitra, including the H3 heading. The bullets in the unordered list look really nice too.
Included is a screenie of what it looks like from both sides of the interaction between #NodeBB and a typical #Fediverse platform instance.
(adres z forum wbity w szukajke mastodona wyświetli się)
"Dziś jest dzień, w którym nasze forum społeczności łączy się z #fediverse. Zaktualizowaliśmy kod i przełączyliśmy się na gałąź #activitypub, a także włączyliśmy federację w dwóch kategoriach, kategorii #NodeBB Development (która jest tylko do odczytu dla wszystkich oprócz staff NodeBB) oraz Testing Ground, która jest przeznaczona dla treści bez znaczenia."
Tak więc nowa wersja NodeBB ma federację profili i publicznych postów, komentarze z fedi "widzi" i uwzględnia 🚀 🎉
The fediverse has long had the struggle that the wider network consists of a huge variety of product types, but that in most people’s conceptualisation it mainly consists of microblogging. The news this week is another indication of the need for a broader understanding of what the fediverse is, with the announcement of an Open Science Network, as well more and more tighter integration of forum software into the fediverse with both NodeBB and Discourse.
Open Science Network announced
The Open Science Network is a new fediverse project, based on the to-be-released Bonfire project. Bonfire is a modular platform for the fediverse, for more information on that I wrote about it recently, as did WeDistribute. Bonfire aims to be modular and customisable and allow for a variety of extensions to be build on top of it. The Open Science Network project takes the Bonfire platform, and is working on adding a variety of features for building an open science network. The Open Science Network will have the ability to sign in with ORCID, automatically import publications, the ability to work collaboratively on papers, and more. Bonfire and the Open Science Network have not given an estimation for when the project launches.
Forum Federation
Forum software NodeBB now connects to the fediverse! In the February update, developer Julian Lam shows that the forum for NodeBB itself is now connected to the fediverse. You can see the post made on NodeBB on Mastodon for example. The project is still under development, but major functionality is now available, with both accounts and public posts now bi-directionally federating. This means you can follow NodeBB accounts from the rest of the fediverse, and posts by NodeBB accounts you follow show up in your fediverse. Comments you make with your other fediverse account also show up in the comment section of the NodeBB posts. The announcement posts shows some examples, with some replies being made by Mastodon accounts that show up in the NodeBB forum topic.
Meanwhile, Discourse has also made progress with their ActivityPub plugin, so that Discourse forums now also are able to follow fediverse accounts. It is unclear at this point how federation between these forums will interact. One thing is clear though, with the development of ActivityPub integrations for NodeBB, Discourse coming online, as well as platforms like PiedFed and Sublinks, is that innovation and change in the fediverse is not happening in the space of microblogging, but of forums instead.
In other news
Newsmast has released a new update, allowing anyone to log into their platform with their current Mastodon account. This way, you can experience their curated community feeds on their platform, without having to make a new account at all. The ability to log in with your Mastodon account sidesteps one of the issues that the fediverse currently has, namely the need for a new account for every new project. For more information on Newsmast, TechCrunch published an extensive article on the project, which is worth checking out.
Funkwhale is working towards a version 2.0, and in their latest update they talk about how to ‘make Funkwhale a truly interoperable and social platform for audio enthusiasts and content creators everywhere’. Funkwhale is still early in the process, and shows how much unsolved the concept of federation is. People have some understanding of what federation means in the context of microblogging, but federation of platforms that serve other functions that microblogging is still an under-explored space.
Benjamin Bellamy, who is behind the Castopod project, joined the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, to talk about Castopod and ActivityPub. In the episode, Bellamy says that currently somewhere between 300 and 500 people have installed their own version of Castopod, up from a couple dozen a year ago.
Content Nation is a platform in development that has been working on adding ActivityPub integration that experienced significant backlash this week. WeDistribute has an article explaining the situation.
The Links
Threativore is an automoderator bot for the threadiverse by @db0.
A blog exploring the bridging between the fediverse and the ATmosphere from the perspective of GDPR.
Mona, a Mastodon client for iOS and MacOS has a major update, v6, and MacStories has an extensive review of the update.
A study on ‘User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms’.
The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group is restarting a schedule of monthly group calls.
Mastodon updated their Android app, allowing you to share your profile via a QR code.
The Decentered Podcast’s latest episode is an interview with @jaz from IFTAS.
For Dutch-speaking people: PublicSpaces is organising a workshop to help guide public organisations in The Netherlands to make a transition towards Mastodon.
A blog by Codeberg reflecting on the recent spam wave in the fediverse.
Regular meetups for the FediDevs group are restarting, with the first one being March 7th, with a show-and-tell of FediTest.
Friendica has a script to make Friendica user nicknames function as Bluesky user handles.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
Choosing Discord or Matrix as the official way to get support is frustrating. There's really good information jammed in there, but finding it is next to impossible. The people are nice, so you can't be mad at that.
Why not use GitHub Issues or Discourse or NodeBB or just about anything else that gives just the tiniest bit of structure and advanced search?!
We need a NodeBB bot that sweeps up questions and answers in these channels and creates forum threads.
@thenexusofprivacy it's additional work to implement an allow-list for federation, although not much more than instituting a deny-list. What's easier is accepting content from everywhere, but I can definitely see how indiscriminately accepting content from just anywhere is a recipe for potential abuse.
I'd like NodeBB to support both, although it might not be available during alpha phase.
At the end of the day, if an implementor chooses to send everything as as:Note, that's their call, but more "correct" types should be used. Even as:Page is a step in the right direction as it is sufficient generic to encompass a lot.
Perhaps #nodebb will send topics as as:OrderedCollection, because at its core, what is a topic but an ordered collection of posts/notes?
Has anyone patched either Mastodon or Lemmy so that Lemmy's posts display the whole article in your Mastodon feed yet? At this point it seems like it might be as "simple" as changing the post type from "article" to "note" since Mastodon is now able to display a good amount of formatting and stuff inline #fediverse#ActivityPub
@liaizon as you alluded to in your reply, WP gets around this by assuming type as:Note which I disagree with from a protocol fragmentation standpoint. It implicitly acknowledges Mastodon as the dominant #ActivityPub player with clout to change the behaviour of others, and I stand against it.
#nodebb will send type as:Page (like #lemmy and #kbin), and we will work with @article_interop (and hopefully @pfefferle) to encourage Mastodon to handle it properly by modelling the appropriate behaviour.
@0x1C3B00DA Our working understanding right now will treat the "unlisted" visibility level as a Mastodon-only quirk that has no meaning in #nodebb. Will update with more info re: post ACLs as we develop.
#Mastodon supports mentioned-only which is unintentionally leaky (one errant mention and the jig is up). We intend to fully de-couple mentions from the ACL, so you can mention anybody you want, but that doesn't change the ACL if you restrict visibility to certain people.
It seems this happens occasionally on #fedi where malicious users decide to take advantage of instances with poor moderation to spam widely.
There are many solutions, but let me offer a simple change that stops spam dead in its tracks:
#nodebb has a post queue built in. If you have 0 reputation, you need your post to be manually approved. You can adjust this as needed, but even the default (allow regular posting after 1 upvote) is sufficient. Stops 👏spam 👏 cold 👏.
The fact of the matter is, a lot of popular #fediverse software is rather new, and that's super exciting, but also means some of the software is rather green and not battle tested.
#nodebb went through its own growing pains, so I feel like there are some lessons that can be learned from outside orgs looking to join #ActivityPub devel.
I'm not saying we're perfect, but if we can help soften some of those growing pains for all of #fedi then 👍
Another interesting thing that @Flipboard is doing is creating a hierarchical topic space in the #fediverse by concatenating topics into user names.
In plain speak: more than one user handle for the same account but different topics.
Example: there is @Semafor, @semafor@flipboard.social and @politics@flipboard.social, probably more. Not sure yet exactly how the convention works, but it's needed just like blogs often have sub-RSS feeds in lower-level topic categories.
@J12t@Flipboard That's an interesting approach, and one that has some appeal to me.
Just how important are handle aesthetics? It is certainly nice to have @ devnull@crag.social but how much extra metadata can we stick in there before it becomes unwieldy?
#nodebb right now exposes categories as cid.2@whatever but would cid.2.tag1.tag2.uid1.uid2@whatever be an antipattern? lol
Just had an amazing call with @devnull of #nodebb on behalf of #flarum. His progress on their #federation implementation is already quite impressive. We've decided to keep in touch, share and collaborate on supported FEPs and regularly touch ground in the future.
Last week I broke the screen on my phone and have been using an old broken Pixel 3a in the interim. A significant portion of the keyboard does not respond to taps, so I can't even log into Google (as the login screen is portrait-only), so no play store, and it's been an interesting experiment to carry on my day without apps.
First thought: people absolutely SUCK at building fast websites. Mastodon, Fastmail, Discord, Messenger (duh). Hot garbage.
I'm not even sure what to blame, and yeah, I'm totally biased here, because #nodebb is a product I built from the ground-up, but seriously people.
Why am I, some common schmuck of a dev, able to build something that beats the pants off of every existing site, speed-wise, with only minimal focus on speed?
I discovered #NodeBB via Cloudron 2 years ago. I am very happy with and highly recommend both products.
And can recommend the actual Cloudron forums for not only the excellent support by staff that goes above & beyond, but also the valuable input from users when it comes to discovery and filtering for quality apps.