billstatler

@billstatler@forum.statler.ws

Somewhat educated; not a complete idiot but I'm working on it. Social media interaction goals: try to not give offense, try to not take offense. Politics: vaguely left-libertarian but would fail a purity test. Fond of the few plants that I haven't managed to kill. Cats are nice.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

fediversereport, to bluesky
@fediversereport@mastodon.social avatar

New: Last Month in - April 2024

Last months news:

  • Brazilian president Lula joins Bluesky, and a Portugese community with it
  • Skygaze shuts down the popular For You algorithmic feed
  • grant recipients announced

Read at: https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-april-2024/

billstatler,

@vitriolix Depends on which definition of "Fediverse" you prefer. I've seen at least three in common use:

  • Anything that federates.
  • Anything that federates using ActivityPub.
  • Anything that federates using ActivityPub and isn't operated by a huge for-profit corporation.

I like the broadest definition myself. But I wonder whether the word "Fediverse" is becoming obsolete, as federated services diversify and boundaries blur.

stefan, to accessibility
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.

Who's in?

https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/

billstatler,

I think this should be left up to individual users, and not imposed on them by an instance admin. Sometimes it is urgent to send an image, and/or impossible to adequately describe an image in words.

mikedev, to random

The 'Secrets' app has been updated thanks to Mario, so you can now exchange private messages in the lovely Salsa20 instead of boring old AES. Nothing wrong with AES but the Stanford library is unmaintained and that's usually bad news for encryption. It's also possible to use custom algorithms between specific friends that are theoretically unbreakable -- if you've been following some of my earlier encryption work. But I can't legally talk about that, so I'll leave these things for you to discover.

billstatler,

Looked at the source code to exercise my brain, and I'm delighted to see that we can still decrypt ROT13. :-)

mikedev, to random

You're quite free to join us in the permission-based and consent driven galaxies of the fediverse.

Or you can keep hanging out with the 17 million or so "popular kids" who spend their days arguing about who is federating with whom today and constantly shuffling instances to try and find one that blocks all their enemies but doesn't block all their friends -- or that won't block you on some whim.

It's the same network and all the same people. It's a different way of dealing with conflict.

Peace.

billstatler,

Christopher wrote:> ...I have no desire to moderate it, or deal with these people creating block lists or feel somewhat accountable/responsible to what people say from my instance.

That, plus possibly being legally liable for a user who does illegal stuff. I want to start a second streams-based instance running 'release' (I'm running 'dev' currently), and I'd like to open it to other users, but I haven't figured out how I want to balance these issues. Just open it to people I already know and trust? Make it more open but shut off ActivityPub? I'm not sure.

billstatler, to random

Good news if you like old-fashioned forums: NodeBB is testing ActivityPub federation.

Lots of things aren't working yet. I was able to receive this post on my instance, but the delivery report for my attempted reply says "delivery rejected 403".

Nice to see that all the text formatting on the original NodeBB post displayed correctly on my #streams instance.

#NodeBB #ActivityPub

https://community.nodebb.org/user/julian julian wrote the following post Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:53:39 -0800

February Update on ActivityPub Development
Hello everybody!

It's dark and miserable outside, on account of it being rainy Image/photo in my little corner of Canada, but in this little corner of the fediverse, there are some definitely exciting things happening!

Wait, what's the fediverse?

Last month I provided an update on the work I've been doing in 2024, which is a long-running project to bring ActivityPub integration into NodeBB. A more thorough overview of ActivityPub can be found in the first announcement announcing the green-light from the NLNet Foundation.

Today marks the day that our community forum connects to the fediverse. We've updated the code and switched over to the activitypub branch, and enabled federation on two categories, the NodeBB Development category (which is read-only for everybody but NodeBB staff), and the Testing Ground, which is meant for content of no consequence.

It also means that henceforth any bugs discovered are public and I'd be on the hook to fix them post-haste Image/photo

We're doing this gradual rollout not only because I'm quite excited to share what I've achieved so far, but also because I'm developing in public and it's important to gather feedback as early on as feasible.

It also means that — barring some crazy regression causing me to roll everything back — I'll be providing development updates on this account instead of my personal (@devnull).---

So, what works, and what doesn't?- User-specific topic lists and the global topic list
- If you navigate to /world, you'll be brought to your custom topic list of remote content, of which there won't be any unless you start following some users

  • Bi-directional user follows
    • You are able to follow a remote user from within NodeBB by navigating to their profile. Doing so at this time is rather difficult, see below.
    • Likewise, people outside of NodeBB can follow you from sites like Mastodon, Pixelfed, kbin, etc. simply by searching for your username.
    • Your "handle" is your username followed by @community.nodebb.org.
  • Bi-directional federation of content
    • Topic and replies posted to this category and the testing ground will be automatically propagated out to your followers (if any), and responses to that content from outside of NodeBB will show up here.
  • Propagation of likes to the local NodeBB
    • Likewise, if your post is liked by someone outside of NodeBB, it will be reflected in the topic
  • Announces (aka "Boosts")
    • If your post is "boosted" or shared by someone outside of NodeBB, there will be a notification within the topic.

No update would be complete without a list of what doesn't work, so here goes...- Finding remote content and users
- Discoverability of remote content is currently quite limited. You are not able to search for content outside of the local NodeBB, but this will be worked on in due course.
- You are currently able to navigate to remote profiles by manipulating the URL (e.g. NodeBB's fosstodon profile: https://community.nodebb.org/user/nodebb@fosstodon.org

  • Emoji
    • If you're reading this from outside of the NodeBB community forum, you won't see the emoji I put in the post... yet Image/photo
  • Mentions
    • @oplik0 is planning to work on integrating mentions, but that is currently at the to-do stage
  • Notifications
    • When a remote user interacts with you (e.g. upvotes, replies, and follows), you currently aren't notified
  • ... plus about a thousand other things.

There's a huge amount of work to do still, but we'll be seeing a more featureful integration in the coming weeks/months.

Also, there is a non-zero probability that when I hit post, this will cause the NodeBB community to crash.

So... here goes... 3... 2... 1...

mikedev, to random

Was up at 4:30 this morning. Had a half dozen cuppas before 5:00. It's now just shy of 8AM and another half dozen cuppas later.

Working on the groups problem still. Progress has been made and containerised groups are federating. It's frankly amazing what one can accomplish after a dozen caffeine injections.

Groups are even working from Mastodon. I thought long and hard about this and the poor buggers need groups. 8 years later and they're still waiting. Until they get some of their own we'll still be there to help them out.

Time to go out and feed the critters and check the crops. Then I might be able to dig into moderation and bring that up to 2024 standards. We'll see. I already know how to containerise that one - it's just tedious. Worst case is I'll just have to save that for another caffeine-induced sprint. Then I think we'll be in pretty good shape and I might able to move all of this into the dev branch and let some other folks poke at it a bit.

billstatler,

If I had 12 cups of coffee in 3½ hours, I'd be in the morgue.

Good news! (I mean the progress, not the me in the morgue.)

I don't know whether this is of any relevance, but Lemmy is proposing to implement private communities. If I understand correctly... no, I read it again and I don't understand correctly. They're just going to add a custom private: true attribute?

billstatler,

Forgot the link: https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/blob/662bc73d6e29247ca43f4da486280a7a90961135/0005-private-communities.md

billstatler,

"Evil bit", ROFL!!!

mikedev, to random

Interesting little dilemma I'm facing with the testing of conversation containers. The parts I'm having the most difficulty with are 1) groups and 2) moderated comments.

Ironically, conversation containers make both of these things a piece of cake. A constrained conversation by definition relays all content to its audience, which is exactly what a group does. A constrained conversation also by definition is a moderated conversation because a comment isn't part of the conversation until it has been added to it by the owner.

So why is there a problem?

Mastodon.

We altered everything we did in bizarre ways a few years ago just to make our consent-driven communications compatible with the elephant in the room. And even though this new architecture does away with all of the ActivityPub hacks and performs the same operations in completely legal ActivityPub objects without requiring any extensions, Mastodon doesn't recognise the entire concept of groups and moderated content. So we'll either need to come up with hacks that make our stuff compatible with their primitive data model, or just say "fugg it" and do it the right way and "fugg them" if they don't want to play in a more capable vision of the ActivityPub universe.

I'm leaning towards the latter. We're creating a better, friendlier, and safer fediverse. This train has been building momentum for 14 years and has no brakes.

Please don't stand on the tracks.

billstatler,

Assuming the fugg track, do you currently have a sense of what will work with Mastodon? (If anything.) It would be convenient if we could still talk to Mastodon using their primitive "everything is public" interactions.

If we can only have "constrained conversations" with unMastodonians, so be it. I'm just a user, and even so I'm frustrated with trying to adjust my usage for Mastodon's inadequacies. I can't imagine your frustration level. So, fugg as you please, and I won't complain.

jupiter_rowland, to random

Since the BridgyFed drama, there might be four more reasons for Mastodon users to want Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) out of the Fediverse. I mean, aside from their usual atrocities like their users writing well over 500 characters, using text formatting, quoting and quote-posting like it's totally normal. Because it is for them. And aside from no instance on any of the three having rules and moderator numbers on par with Mastodon.

One, they aren't based on ActivityPub. They're technically bridged to Mastodon. They're bridged one instance at the time, and the bridge is a plug-in on the instance and therefore part of the project. But still, it isn't that much different from BridgyFed connecting Bluesky to the rest of the Fediverse.

Two, since they aren't based on ActivityPub, they're aliens. Aliens of basically the same kind as Bluesky, only that they've mostly got those features that Mastodon has that Bluesky doesn't. But the BridgyFed drama isn't about Bluesky's features or lack thereof, and it isn't only about Bluesky being commercial either. It's also about Bluesky being too different in technology, functionality and culture. But let me tell you a secret: Bluesky is probably much closer to Mastodon than Hubzilla. I mean, I've already mentioned how Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users "misbehave" from a Mastodon point of view. You won't see any of this come from Bluesky anytime soon.

Three, Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky. It's a feature that was introduced with the latest stable release.

Four, speaking of Friendica, that allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica. Only that the user who started that particular thread is on Firefish, and Fediverse News only automatically forwarded what he had posted.

So where's the outrage?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #BridgyFed #Bluesky #Bridge #BlueskyBridge

billstatler,

The actions of masses of people is a mystery. "You can have safety and privacy, and still talk to your friends on Mastodon." "No, I have to join Mastodon because my friends joined it."

mikedev, to random

That was an intense development session. Been at this one for a few weeks now.

Another milestone finished. LD-signatures - dead and buried; with a stake through the heart.

Happy days are here again. Tra-la-la.

billstatler,

You're talking about this, right?

FEP-8b32: Object Integrity Proofs

jupiter_rowland, to random

Personally and regarding my Hubzilla channel here, I'm not too worried about Threads.

First of all, I'm not going to connect to anyone on Threads. Not even when more than those select few can be followed. As if there's anything going on there that's of interest within the scope of this channel.

Second, Threads users can't follow anyone outside Threads anyway yet.

Third, even if they could, doesn't mean I'd let them if I don't want to. It's up to me to decide who connects to my channel and who doesn't. I have to confirm each new connection, and if I don't, that actor doesn't receive anything from me.

Fourth, the typical incentive for non-Threads users to follow me isn't there for Threads users.

One of the two main reasons why Mastodon users follow me is because they expect me to explain the Fediverse outside Mastodon to them. Your typical Threads user neither knows nor cares for the Fediverse. They're on Threads because it's "Twitter by Facebook without Musk".

The other and even bigger reason for Mastodon users to follow me is because they've just arrived from 𝕏, and they need some Twitter-like background noise in their personal timelines, so they follow everyone they come across. Threads probably forces loads of background noise upon you right away, so you don't have to take care of that yourself.

Fifth, a channel owned by a virtual world avatar that's primarily about obscure virtual worlds with no real-life information isn't worth data-harvesting. Especially not if I keep badmouthing Horizons and using the term "metaverse" for stuff that's both over a decade older than Horizons and more alive than Horizons because that stuff has been using that word for over a decade itself. Meta would probably rather block this channel before anyone on Threads finds it than harvest it. In fact, I could try to make this process quicker with a few well-placed memes.

Sixth, I can easily silence bad actors on Threads with Superblock.

I was about to ask what the odds are that Threads can federate with Hubzilla in the first place, exotic as Hubzilla is with its ActivityPub support through an optional add-on. But I've got in-bound connections from all over the place already now, from Diaspora* to Misskey to GoToSocial to micro.blog.

Then again, I don't know how Threads handles posts with over 500 characters. After all, it was designed to federate with vanilla Mastodon by people who at that point believed that the Fediverse is only vanilla Mastodon. It could actually be that Threads rejects posts with over 500 characters, just like Misskey and its forks reject posts from a certain length upward.

Finally, if bad came to worse, I wouldn't even have to move away. I could switch ActivityPub off entirely. Granted, that'd mean that I'd lose most of my connections, and I'd have to try and remake those to Friendica using the Diaspora* protocol instead. But that'd completely lock Threads out on a protocol level.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Meta #MetaMeta #Threads

billstatler,

...I don't think it is right to punish innocent people because guilty people are on the same server. ...

I agree with this in principle. Sometimes there are multiple principles that apply to a situation, and that makes the decision more difficult.

Example: There may be some very nice people who join pedophile instances. I mean, I doubt it, but it's possible. In this case, I have no problem banning the whole instance, for my own legal protection if nothing else. Anyone who joins an instance like that is responsible for the results of their decision.

Example: Some instances exist primarily to organize harassment campaigns against vulnerable people. Nobody joins an instance like that without realizing this. Maybe they don't participate in the harassment, and they just want "free speech", but I don't have any sympathy.

Example: Threads. This is a whole different thing. The overwhelming majority of Threads users are okay people, and they don't "deserve" to be blocked. The problem is Meta itself, which is not like any other Fediverse entity. There are distinct principles that apply to Meta just because of its size and its history. I haven't decided what I'm going to do about that for my own instance. But if I decide I want protection against Meta, or if I want to avoid assisting their business plans, this will override the resultant "punishment" of innocent Threads users.

mikedev, to random

Streams

New addon for the streams repository. It's called 'fckmeta'. If this is something you feel you need or want for your streams based site, install it. It currently blocks egregious scraping of actor records and profiles and as a side effect prevents communication with Meta properties from your site/instance members. It should be considered a work in progress.

This is available in all branches of the streams-addons repository, but as it does not change the version of the core repository release version, you may need to update manually if you wish to pick it up today.

billstatler,

That code is so simple that even I can understand it. :-)

Maybe I'll get ambitious and write my own add-on to block some other evil user agents. A few months ago, I noticed that "R6_CommentReader" was my second-most-popular user agent. "Salesforce Radian6: social media listening software, provides keyword monitoring and sentiment analysis functionality across 650 million sources including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news sites and forums." Yuck. Amazing that they found my single-user instance!

jupiter_rowland, to random

My face when I spend minutes upon minutes trying to take good portrait pictures of @Juno Rowland and myself to show our cool outfits...

...even making sure they won't lead to another 10,000+-character #ImageDescription by having next to nothing around and behind us...

...only to remember I can't even post them because there's absolutely no way for me to conceal them from sensitive people on #Mastodon who require an #EyeContact #ContentWarning.

billstatler,

I was looking up info about Content Warnings, and I came across a huge long discussion...

  • Mastodon should rename Content Warning to Content Note.
  • No, it should be Content Hint.
  • No, Content Note, because that's more in line with ActivityPub specs, and by the way Mastodon uses the Subject line from ActivityPub for Content Warnings.
  • No, Content Notice is better than Content Note. Here's an article about the difference between Notice and Note.
  • No, Content Wrapping.
  • No, rename Content Warning to Subject.
  • We can't use Content Notice because people will think CN means Chinese language.
  • No they won't, because ZH means Chinese language.
  • There shouldn't be any CW or CN letters at all, just an icon.
  • We should just have a Content Preview.
  • It's proven that trigger warnings have no effect.
  • Why is Mastodon conflating ActivityStreams "summary" and "sensitive"?
  • Go away, you're working on a non-Mastodon project so we don't care.

Hundreds of posts, on and on.

Well, I guess it keeps them busy so they don't actually make any changes.

billstatler,

I don't see it doing anything in (streams). The sentence "This is a summary" is just displayed like regular text.

billstatler,

No, (streams) shows neither "View Article" nor "View Summary", just the plain text.

billstatler,

If I were posting from (streams) and trying to make Mastodon users happy, would I put a Content Warning at the top of my post inside BBCode 'summary' tags? (It looks like that would work for Hubzilla users.)

Sometimes I think I should get a Mastodon account just so I can see how my posts show up there. But so far, I've always come to my senses.

billstatler,

Maybe I'll write a FAQ on how to communicate with Mastodon users. 😝 It can start: "Mastodon is a SMS text message emulator that resembles X (Twitter) and federates using a non-standard modification of ActivityPub..."

I assume Mastodon ignores the 'spoiler' BBCode? I'm pondering how to combine 'summary' and 'spoiler' to maximize the number of platforms on which material is hidden behind a Content Warning.

billstatler,

Okay, I'll do that when I start seeing CW: short #ShortPost.

I'm contemplating where I want to draw the line on content warnings. I recognize that some people have strong emotional reactions that come from PTSD or phobias, and I'll try to be nice about things like that. (Although I had NO idea there was an eye contact phobia.)

If someone is merely annoyed because their corner of the Fediverse works differently from my corner of the Fediverse... no. I'm not going to assist with that sort of intolerance.

jupiter_rowland, to random

I'm halfway expecting #Mastodon users to demand a #ContentWarning for #TextFormatting.

Like, everyone outside of Mastodon must issue a #CW if they use

  • bold type
  • italics
  • a code block
  • a bullet-point list

or anything like that because it irritates those who are still used to the #Fediverse only being old-school Mastodon. You know, just like #LongPosts with over #500Characters.

billstatler,

Mike created Friendica and Hubzilla, but as far as I know, he is not actively working on either one today, and other developers have taken over both projects.

billstatler,

Nobody is in charge, but Mike controls what gets into the Streams repository on Codeberg. Anyone can make their own repository for add-ons -- I think Waitman Gobble is working on one. And anyone can make a fork if they want to make major changes or they disagree with Mike's decisions.

There is some technical documentation in the repository, in the form of "*.md" files in several different folders. When I have some time, I'll make a "Table of Contents" for those files.

billstatler,

"bundling of forces rather than dispersion" -- I would like to see that too, but I don't think it's happening at present.

billstatler,

"There's a sort of table of contents if you visit /help via the help app..."

I was thinking more about the various .md files scattered around in other directories. For example, you recently added spec with a bunch of specifications for Nomad etc.

For my own convenience, I made a few links in doc/site/en/ like:

FEATURES.mc -> ../../../FEATURES.md<br></br>FEDERATION.mc -> ../../../FEDERATION.md

Might as well use (streams) as a Markdown viewer!

billstatler,

I think you've set things up so it can go both ways simultaneously (working together and forking off separately). I believe that's a good thing, because it lets people collaborate, and also lets them take off in their own wild direction. Who knows what they'll come up with? And if people have different visions for what they want to build, that doesn't preclude collaboration and merging of different developers' code.

I think you did it right. It'll be good.

billstatler,

Jupiter Rowland wrote:> "Ideally, there'd be loads of people developing add-ons for (streams) so that those who run instances can throw together whatever they need."

That would be good. I hope people will create more add-ons than forks. That's how WordPress became so useful: you can build zillions of different sorts of website from WordPress, but the core software remains the same.

Jupiter Rowland wrote:> "(streams) can only thrive on word-of-mouth, more than any other Fediverse project. So what we need is mouths to talk about it, especially from a user's point of view."

I sort-of agree, but I don't know whether this is the right way to be thinking about it. We don't really care whether (streams) thrives, we care whether the users thrive. We believe (streams) is a really good tool to help users get what they need and want -- they just don't know it.

It's a subtle difference: help (streams) acquire more users, vs help users by bringing them to (streams).

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