@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.
One of the action items that came out was to collate the state of current implementations. Unfortunately, outside of implementations that federate non-textual content (e.g. Pixelfed Stories, Mobilizon Events, etc.), the majority of implementors just use as:Note, which is not surprising given Mastodon's treatment of non-Note objects.
What is less clear is whether there is pent-up demand for use of a different data type for more richly forrmatted content. @mikedev and @jupiter_rowland provided some very illuminating history behind previous attempts to use as:Article, but importantly it seems that Mastodon (via @renchap) may be open to supporting this in some form as well.
While Mastodon has every reason to display as:Note as it sees fit, I'd like to hopefully address the undue influence towards using it especially in instances where as:Article were more appropriate. Mike (upthread) suggested a compromise:
that as:Note be reserved for content with attachments (images or otherwise), perhaps with a limited subset of html
and as:Article be used for content with a richer set of html (e.g. tables), and including the ability to display inline images
I explicitly did not specify that Note was for shorter content and Article for longer, because there exist plenty of examples of the reverse.
Does anybody see potential complications from such an arrangement?
I'll try to give it a boost from my #Mitra, #Hubzilla, and #Friendica accounts too (if I haven't already) so you can study/compare the various treatment cases :)
Sadly, I have not yet launched streams yet for study. I know, I'm a lame-O. I'll get to it shortly, prolly just spin up a local VM on Proxmox for that here, I really am anxious to give it a go :)
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
Thank you for the optimistic PoV on the entrance of others to the #DeSoc of the Fediverse. It is an optimism that I share - especially with Matthias' announcement just an hour ago that his team behind the development of the #WordPress ActivityPub plugin has just released version 2.0.0 - considering the enormous footprint of WordPress installations across the entire Internet belonging to both common, everyday individuals and companies alike, of every shape and size, this is HUGE news.
It instantly, overnight, positions common folks and businesses to leap into the freedoms afforded them by the existing, privacy respecting, #FOSS based Fediverse that hitherto was... well, a bit of a leap for them psychologically. But now they have a familiar platform with which to begin a journey through the minefields of the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos; its proprietors programming their masses of #subjugated_chattel into livestock holding pens, where they are weighed, measured, packaged, placed into inventory, and sold.
That does raise the issue of an error in your assertions however. You mentioned, "instances in Meta's fediverses and on Bluesky".
The truth however, the reality, is that each are merely a single instance - One big monolithic silo, as described above, with the same incentives of monetization through privacy mining techniques that have made them the dreadnoughts that they are; at least in the case of #Meta (Threads).
Bluesky is of that vertically scaling market as well, but much smaller than the #Faceplant and #InstaSPAM engines operated by Meta, and now their new spearhead into the DeSoc space occupied by ActivityPub and other decentralized or federated protocol based, horizontally scaling instances.
#Bluesky hasn't actually shown their hand yet to the general public, but already, they've disenfranchised (fired) much of their talent; some, actually principal architects of their monolith who were frustrated and disillusioned with the direction Jay has been taking the company - moving further and further away from the disowned public community they spawned, organized, and abandoned following the initial trials and tests of the open source preview version of what became #ATP protocol (ATX).
Even Jack has moved on and embraced yet another horizontally scaling protocol in the DeSoc space, #nostr, and it's already bridged and interoperating flawlessly with the ActivityPub powered portion of the Fediverse, which in turn interoperates with instances running other protocols such as #Nomad, #OStatus, #Streams, #Diaspora, and #ZOT... all of them part of the Fediverse.
Many of the extant #ActivityPub powered instances in the Fediverse merely need to install these capabilities with a couple of clicks to enable this interoperability, while others bridge the divide through infrastructure developed and deployed over the past year or so.
What will be Meta's use case here for their business product?
That's the main question I think folks need to address - not punish the good people on the so-called evil side of the divide, the hitherto subjugated chattel that populate Marks so-called Metaverse or whatever he thinks he can compel people to adopt and endure. The point is, childish, domain level blocking by juvenile minds operating ActivityPub powered #Fediverse server instances only serves to paint themselves (and the users who have to date trusted those admins with being told what they can and cannot see and do) into a corner where they effectively cancel themselves, and find that their users have migrated to other spaces... maybe WordPress, where they truly control their own destiny in the DeSoc space and can now fully participate and engage with others - but on their own terms, not someone else's.
And that, I believe, is what the whole thing has always been about, going back as far as #AngelFire and #GeoCities :)
I do agree with you that we should indeed embrace these common, everyday individuals who, through their programmed ignorance, are mostly clueless as to exactly what the Fediverse is, and more importantly, has always promised for them. This is an opportunity, like Steve Austin, (the Six Million Dollar Man): "We can rebuild them, we have the technology, we can make them better, stronger, faster..."
One more thing I should correct you on, the Fediverse is an internetwork of networks, on the Internet - there are no fediverses, Fediverse is itself a plurality, but your intent wasn't lost on me.
Great article, I enjoyed the read and most of all, your optimistically tempered intent. Thanks for sharing and I hope to see much more from you in the future!
#PeerTube just gets better and better - something the rest of the #Fediverse could really benefit from is observing how it leverages external technologies through its plugin network.
No longer just a #VoD platform, or a #Twitch replacement with native #LiveChat via plugins with all of the goodies one would expect, but now with #podcast support the raises the bar even higher...
And everything is easy peasy when integrating Fediverse OAUTH... more on that later ;)
We need to better incorporate our Mastodon feed into the CoffeeGeek.com website.
Part of the problem is, in the platform we use (Wordpress / Elementor), there's almost zero support for Mastodon in our share, follow, and embed tools. So either we have to write something from scratch and make it work with our existing share tools, or... well if there is an Elementor / WP friendly share plugin out there that actively supports mastodon, I want to know about it.
Any thoughts? Ideas? Guides? Step by step to make it happen? The research I've done so far shows it's tricky to have a proper share popup for Masto like you can have for Facebook, for eg (second screen cap below) because of the decentralized nature of mastodon.
For instance, I want to have a Mastodon share button in this cluster, which is created via a convenient widget in Elementor:
A few items, but for the tl;dr please scroll down towards the end. The first few appear to be precisely what you asked for, the third is my rather enthusiastic recommendation.
I believe this first one is the plugin I mentioned, and was found to be quite lacking, further, frustrating to most - This showcases the glaring problem associated with conflating mastodon with that of the #Fediverse - most things break, early and often, over and over again.
A simple share button that breaks about a fourth of share attempts:
Here's Terrence Eden's article on the Share on Mastodon plugin. I thought a link to this article best, as it leaves you lots of breadcrumbs to pick up along the way to the plugins page at WordPress. Including Jan's blog article. I believe this was the one with the least utility, that caused the most problems with people, which is quite a bit more than frustrating for a lot of people, angering many. masto isn't even the big man on campus anymore - those days have passed, and are in the past; it's just one of many increasingly popular platforms that people use in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.
I believe Jan is incorrect on the number of images that masto can accommodate - yes it used to be four, but lately, when authoring articles in the Fediverse with platforms that accommodate inline media in the posts, I've noticed that masto actually will include 5 images, the rest it summarily discards, making for an even more confusing event for those on masto (NGI Zero funding has just been secured BTW, to at least bring masto into the 21st century withQuote Posts- like pretty much everyone else has had for a long time,some for a decade now).
Perhaps in time this will improve, or you can get into it with the aid of some of the others below, or just move past all that and install the plugin at the end of it all which performs famously ;)
Conflating mastopub with the Fediverse is a Bad thing:
I've heard a few good testimonies of how well the Fediverse share button performs. Note that no where in the description or documentation is the word mastodon used; no one is mislead to believe that there is such a thing as a mastodon network - because there isn't.
People should be offered the opportunity to share interesting content into (and throughout) the Fediverse, not some small slice of the available platform choices existing there:
This next option was heavily inspired by the old AddToAny plugin back when a kazillion different silos were popular and extant. I remember using that plugin to support sharing across upwards of 30 or so various social networking, bookmarking, link aggregation, and other types of obscure sites in far flung places of the world. I've also heard some good things about this solution too - please take note of all the certified platforms that it supports, and yes, mastopub is one of those ;)
If you do choose this method, do please join us in the Fediverse-City Matrix room to offer a review / evaluation as to how well Fediverse Share works for you. Several project leads there are always interested in viable solutions that are inclusive and accommodate the wider community at large without any marginalization through misleading brand recognition.
Either through simple naivety or conscious exclusionary arrogance, here's some other masto branded share options, at least one, IIRC, was much less than satisfactory, but I typically don't traffic mastodon branded things anymore when the insinuation is that the product represents the Fediverse. You may find, however, that one of these is just what you need, and that with a little bit of tweaking will fit nicely into your website's business processes. A little branding can go a long way, but sometimes a solution depends on, for example, a "share API endpoint", not strictly compliant with the W3C's published specifications, that serves to marginalize all other platforms by excluding them (that's commonly regarded as EEE). I'll just post the links w/o commentary:
There's another utility by Nikita Karamov (creator of the Toot Proxy above) that doesn't embrace the predatory branding of a diluted trademark:
Share₂Fedi - Share₂Fedi isn't a button, exactly, but the functionality is there and it is inclusive of the larger diaspora of the ActivityPub powered portions of the Fediverse, avoiding any sort of marginalization as a result of marketing through leveraging overt, and predatory branding campaigns.
Alright, I know you're interested in getting to the good part. Yes, I'm guilty of that same sort of mindset that makes you scroll down to the bottom of the ToS before you can click on the submit button. But before we get to the tl;dr:, we have one more which in spirit at the very least, is promising, I encourage you to read it:
Honorable mention goes to shareOnFediverse, which works even with GNU Social, Diaspora, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Lemmy, Friendica, Kbin, Misskey, Pleroma, Etc.
tl;dr:
That bit of markdown above (the H1) may not show up on your platform, depending. Regardless, you've arrived. Here's the solution that I personally recommend, a very fine solution that not only allows one to share their content into the Fediverse by providing links back to their website, but providing the gateway for people in the Fediverse, #Fedizens, if you will, to engage the authors of news and blog and lifestyle and cookbook style tutorial and HowTo sites, directly, with two way commenting and sharing of dialog in true open and participatory fashion:
First, (and it has indeed come a long way since the post of this article), a page on how exceedingly simple it is to install and configure this, the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin:
Bear in mind that the plugin was in beta at the time, so never mind the sourpusses in the comments who wanted it, and yet couldn't have it because they weren't self-hosting #WordPress. I must reiterate that development has come a long way, the plugin is in general production release and available for any WordPress site, managed, self-hosted, or otherwise, and it's got a powerful feature set.
Posting links back to clear-net websites on the open Internet is fine, it's not like clicking a share to Faceplant or InstaSPAM button when you share an article that you like into the Fediverse, After all, it's every blogger's mission to drive traffic to their own site (not Faceplant or InstaSPAM), but then your visitors are limited to offering comment replies in the manner of a form submission on the site that really only allows you to subscribe your email for subsequent comment notifications for the article or thread that your commenters spawned.
What the #ActivityPub plugin enables for those who engage with you, is to provide an instant audience of several million MAU (monthly active users) throughout the Fediverse who will be able to directly participate and engage in the conversation from their own native Fediverse platforms, receiving replies as well.
I've called this, A Game Changer, before. A few times, actually. @matthias@pfefferle and his small team of developers created and curated this plugin that enables this hitherto (mostly) inaccessible feature set for the masses. Literally anyone in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse can now comment and reply to the comments of others on WordPress sites, which is pretty much like 40% of the entire word wide web nowadays, and you can check this out for yourself right now by visiting his blog at https://notiz.blog/ in the comment section of any one of his articles.
There were some issues, which could be attributed to the predatory marketing practices by Mastodon gGmbH, whereby a lot of what is actually ActivityPub or Fediverse centric was being referred to, and worse, attributed to mastodon in one sense or another, further diluting their trademark which places it in jeopardy of losing its registration (the first item in mastodon's general guidelines states, "Only use the Mastodon marks to accurately identify those goods or services that are built using the Mastodon software." - but the defense of trademarks themselves is another matter entirely, although the discussion has come up many times with the responsible parties, often, in very heated, public, forums.
Anyway, Mattias and his team have become incrementally more mindful of placing emphasis upon #Fediverse, the brand, instead of masto, the brand, and that's a good thing because it goes a long way toward correcting the existing confusion that exists due to the abuse certain marketing personalities have, and continue to pursue. Indeed, the plugin itself is named ActivityPub, which is appropriate - and it certainly is not an exclusive tool for mastopub.
You can download the latest and greatest version of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin HERE, which was released just 3 days ago, and I know because I was on the periphery of an issue that was resolved, making this an even more relevant and quickly becoming (IMO) essential tool for #DeSoC and Fediverse aware bloggers, journalists, chefs, and anyone else that knows they can benefit from deploying their own WordPress site for business or personal use in communicating with the world beyond the walls of the deprecated, proprietary, privacy mining monolithic silos.
In wrapping things up here, it goes without saying that one of the very most powerful aspects of the #WordPress_ActivityPub_Plugin isn't actually that people can respond to your published articles from the comfort of myriad clients such as #FediLab, #Husky, #Phanpy, or the native web or desktop interface for their Fediverse instance, but the reality that they can simply follow you, on your blog, and receive your blog or news or HowTo articles in their streams whenever you publish a new item. From there, they can boost (more exposure for your published works), reply (of course), and even offer a bit of narrative introducing your work with a #Quote_Post. It's like a butterfly affect, or concentric circles emanating from one little plop of a pebble into a pond.
Oh, one more thing, there's nothing preventing you from including one of the pretty little Fediverse Share buttons either, in conjunction with the ActivityPub plugin. After all, some folks like to comment and let you know their thoughts, while others prefer to simply share it with others who will also tell two friends or themselves offer comments to your articles - it's a win win for everyone on both sides of the line that divides the Fediverse from those so-called Big Tech institutions comprising the walled gardens of subjugation by the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome.
I hope you've found this helpful, I didn't want to send you on an errand of discovery without making sure that there's been some decent coverage of several different alternatives currently available for you.
Ghost is an excellent platform for publishing. I used it a lot a few years back for publishing articles when it was headless - that was optimum. Compose at your leisure within your own local environment, then push it up to your own self-hosted instance.
Unfortunately, they let it fall into disrepair, left it unmaintained, and last I checked the Ghost desktop was nowhere to be found in the repo. One of the maintainers explained to me that they just didn't have anyone willing to maintain the app and so I migrated away from the platform myself.
I'm going to give it another looksee to review what happened to the elegant, #headless nature that Ghost used to espouse as one of it's key ingredients for using it in the first place. I just hope that they don't try to go the way of #OOo, #Bacula, and other #FOSS projects that were forked, and somewhat marginalized, as a result of decisions to force community versions into #Freemium products that lacked most functionality without fee based subscriptions. Lord knows, the last time I checked their managed hosting solutions for Ghost it certainly wasn't even competitively priced.
With this newfound revelation in the form of some kind of epiphany, let's hope their commitment to #Fediverse and FOSS exceeds that of their grasp for excessive monetization.
Be sure to check the Link below in the link that @jeze left and sign up!
Pretty kewl, IMO. Thanks for sharing Elley :) it looks really nice and I created an account for myself. Seamless federation with the others too - very nice :)
October 28th, 2019 - Highway 36, Humboldt, California.
With the season coming to a close, them trimmigrants can't be choosey about where they're gonna hibernate for the winter ❄️
Seen along the way to the #Mad_River Bar - a town, if you will, with 3 buildings in it; a bar, a post office the size of a closet, and a butcher shop. There's also the "Mad River Burger Bar", a locally famous trailer on jack stands that sells takeout burgers 🍔 & fries 🍟
#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
More great news on the #rPi front - remote access for #SOHO and Home based networks as simple as a single apt install command!
Give it a try today and let us all know what you think! I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences with this invaluable remote access tool.
But what about those #MS_Windows users out there? How about a gzipped tarball, all nicely packaged up so you can distribute around, of a custom built #PuTTY client that will securely connect people to your #Synchronet_BBS over telnet?
Roast Fish Cornbread installation in Torrance (Los Angeles). An international event by Kyle William Harper.
This old lockout music studio received a facelift of free paint by street scene artists from around the world. This one by Soup and others by him especially impressed me.
5 bands performed at the event (not that there was any shortage). More of Kyle's work is available at his website.
So Ryan, thank you for this most valuable tool to bring people around the globe together in #DeSoc - creating (and curating, as you have) ***Bridgy_Fed is one of the very best things that the Fediverse has to offer people on both sides of the protocol divide, and I really don't think that there are enough Thank you's to go around for all of the selfless effort you've put into this service.
So as meek and perhaps insignificant as it may sound, THANK YOU!
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.