@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

deadsuperhero

@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

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deadsuperhero,

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It’s also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

deadsuperhero,

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there’s constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can’t say for sure. What’s weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I’m not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

deadsuperhero,

It’s an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they’re both flawed:

  1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.
  2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn’t match ends up not being used.
  3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it’s simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it’s not as efficient as it could be.

Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin (wedistribute.org)

We sat down with Matthias Pfefferle to talk about his journey in developing an ActivityPub integration for WordPress, along with the challenges of implementing a protocol for a platform that everybody customizes in a wide variety of ways....

deadsuperhero,

It’s the WordPress competitor.

PubKit Officially Launches Closed Beta (wedistribute.org)

PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project’s lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.

Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging (wedistribute.org)

We sat down and interviewed Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.Blog. Micro.Blog is an IndieWeb platform with microblogging capabilities that marries a social experience with a more traditional personal website / blogging concept. It federates via ActivityPub, and has been a part of the Fediverse since 2018.

deadsuperhero,

Radio Free Fedi is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

deadsuperhero,

Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

deadsuperhero,

Literally just saw this in my feed: nbcnews.com/…/trump-sues-truth-social-co-founders…

deadsuperhero,

Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.

“Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!”

deadsuperhero,

Yeah, I don’t have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

There may be a “minimum threshold” for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I’ll readily admit that this is conjecture.

deadsuperhero,

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven’t tried anything else.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

Decentered Podcast: Interview with creator of Blacksky (wedistribute.org)

This ended up being such a great interview. I know some people will shrug it off, because it’s Bluesky and not Mastodon, but Rudy’s a super smart dude and an amazing guest, and he shed a lot of light on building a community space for black people on an emergent platform. There’s so much good info coming from this man!

deadsuperhero,

Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.

The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.

I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.

Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.

deadsuperhero,

So…it does do what it sets out to do, just not in the way you would think.

ActivityPods doesn’t bring Solid to ActivityPub accounts. It brings ActivityPub protocol capabilities to Solid Pods. The reason this is significant is because Fediverse platforms historically use relational databases, whereas this is like using Google Drive and files to create a graph database. Additionally, ActivityPods is a framework for building apps on top of.

Damon, my friend and co-founder at We Distribute, is building a really killer app on top of it called Memory.

deadsuperhero,

Basically, it’s the second half of ActivityPub that’s for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

What’s cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says “whatever, that’s valid.”

It could be brilliant for prototyping.

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