fabio

fabio, 9 hours ago

@cory the idea sounds similar to what I’ve done a while ago with #Platypush + #mopidy (and optionally Tidal). My implementation also uses the scrobbled tracks over a certain period and Last.fm’s API to automatically generate a “discover weekly” playlist.

I haven’t toyed with Plex in a while, but why did you have to run everything on Firebase/Supabase? If you have your Plex server running locally isn’t it more convenient to go for a fully local solution?

fabio, 20 hours ago

@paul yeah it seems to work for me too now. I eventually went for the nuclear option - reset the db, encryption key, workdir and create everything anew.

Not sure if the problem was with some cached configuration parameter that wasn’t refreshed even after the container was destroyed, but at least things seem to work now…

@dansup

fabio, 1 day ago

@Goffi integrations like Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp mostly rely on libpurple plugins (like purple-gowhatsapp or purple-instagram) that are either poorly documented, more unstable or lack many features that are available on Matrix bridges.

By own admission of some of these developers, they usually don’t test their plugins against Spectrum2, and mileage may vary a lot. And usually when one of these plugins dies it takes the whole service down with it.

I’m in general a bit unimpressed with the state of libpurple - I feel like it’s becoming a very aged ecosystem maintained by a very limited number of developers that have to make those plugins work for a very wide range of clients. That’s also the reason why I left bitlbee.

Slidge seems to be promising, but I feel like it’s still at an immature stage.

fabio, 2 days ago

@jwildeboer I’m honestly ok with some of the ideas outlined in that interview.

Content monetization is a topic that has been floating around on #ActivityPub implementations long before Zuck’s helpers considered playing with it.

@dansup already toyed with the idea a year ago.

@Techaltar recently also brought up the topic in his series of Fediverse interviews.

And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.

And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?

Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.

Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.

The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.

I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.

fabio, 2 days ago

@Chocobozzz @thelinuxEXP @Techaltar @dansup @jwildeboer I would add that any implementation of a payment subsystem should probably be done at protocol level, so individual implementations of #ActivityPub don’t have to reinvent the wheel - doing #payments right is a hard problem, and it doesn’t make sense to fragment the efforts by solving the same problem multiple times on Mastodon/WriteFreely/PeerTube/Pixelfed etc.

The payments subsystem should be better integrated in the ActivityPub ecosystem compared to a “Donate here” link that redirects to a 3rd-party provider. This is probably the right chance of giving the HTTP 402 code the implementation it deserves.

I left the payments industry a few years ago so I’m not sure of what open solutions and protocols are in the market that could be already leveraged, but maybe something like OpenPayments could be a good starting point - there are many efforts on the open banking standards lately, with different degree of maturity, and IMHO a good implementation of payments over ActivityPub could be a great driver for adoption.

I’ve got the feeling that if we don’t do this right then Threads could scoop up this chance for an “embrace” to “extend” pivot.

fabio, 5 days ago

@koen @waag @DeGroene @gemeenteamsterdam @kimvsparrentak @sicco I’m definitely onboard with such initiatives, but IMHO the chicken-and-egg problem should be solved on both ends.

Many politicians agree with us that #BigTech centralization is bad. Yet their primary presence is on Meta/X in most of the cases. When asked “then why are you not on the Fedi?”, many respond with “because there aren’t enough people for me to justify the jump/investment”.

And that in turn feeds the other feedback loop - “why do you still have an account on X?” - “because most of the politicians/public figures are there”.

Building presence in the social infrastructure one actually believes in, even if that requires extra effort, shouldn’t be something contingent to the probabilities of getting thousands or followers on that platform.

fabio, 5 days ago

@amerika @kimvsparrentak @koen @gemeenteamsterdam @DeGroene @sicco @waag to be fair, recent European laws are as anti-monopolistic as they can get. The DMA is a good piece of legislation that, if implemented right, can really lower many of those barriers erected by those monopolies - from hostile approach towards 3rd-party integrations to the tyranny of the app stores.

IMHO you don’t have to explicitly encode incentive structures when you are dismantling existing barriers. The goal of dismantling barriers arbitrarily created by someone else (e.g. by E-E-E of open protocols like RSS/XMPP, by takeover of potential competitors, by hindering inter-operability, by opposing alternative clients/stores etc.) is to re-establish the level-playing field.

Once the level-playing field is restored, competitors have a fair access to the market again, and have market incentives to create e.g. alternative clients for Facebook, alternative app stores, social platforms that support cross-posting across walled gardens, experiment with alternative business models without having to compete with the established stalk-and-throw-ads monster, etc.

There’s demand for these things (the number of screenshots posted on walled gardens about stuff that happens on other walled gardens are a sad manifestation of such demand), there’s potentially supply to fullfil those demands too, the only thing that stands in between is a handful of monopolies who have no incentives in opening up.

You don’t need to give those monopolies incentives to stop monopolizing and implementing rent-seeking behaviour. You just need to hit them hard where it hurts them the most, because they will perceive any change from the status quo as a net loss and will oppose it with all the means they have.

The retreat of a monopoly is already a great incentive structure for competitors to fill in the gaps. The only additional incentives should probably be directed towards businesses and entities that instead embrace openness (sticking to the “pick the willing, not the winners” principle). And this is probably an area where the EU could do more (e.g. through direct investing into companies like Nextcloud or Fairphone, or funding to medium-sized Fediverse server admins), so they have a better chance of standing against multibillion companies and build credible alternatives.

fabio, 11 days ago

@davidculley my experience with Ruby on Rails application mostly involves running both Mastodon and Gitlab on my servers.

In both the cases, what I’ve noticed is that it’s not the language itself that is slow and heavy (Ruby’s weight is comparable to that of e.g. Python), but Sidekiq.

Sidekiq is the standard framework used by Ruby on Rails application to schedule and run asynchronous jobs (processes, threads…), kind of akin to what php-fpm does for PHP.

In my experience, it’s hard to configure properly, and when not configured properly it ends up with endless pools of active jobs doing all kind of things and sucking up all resources you give to them.

fabio, 14 days ago

@chillanarchist01 the insularism of Americans with no exposure to the outside world never ceases to amuse me.

You guys are the ones who are likely to elect again a malignant narcissist who buddies up with people who wave Confederate flags and Swastikas, and you think that it’s others who are slipping into totalitarianism.

You guys are the ones who have by far the highest number of shootings in the Western world, and yet you still fail to acknowledge that guns are the problem rather than the solution.

A parent who would send their kid to learn about society and civilization to a place with armed guards, armed teachers and armed pupils rather than give up their distorted idea of “self-defense” (as if it’s your supermarket guns who would defend you from modern warfare) is the best definition of evolutionary failure.

fabio, 14 days ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard or maybe just make sure that deranged people can’t easily get hold of a gun at the nearest mall?

How come such talks only exist in the US? How come nobody in the civilized world would think of arming the teachers? How come a shooting in Europe is such a serious event that people talk about it for months and years, and in the US shootings have become a weekly routine? Is it so hard to understand that the ease of getting your hands of a gun is the only problem?

fabio, 14 days ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard well there are people with degrees in psychology whose job is exactly to assess whether someone is mentally fit to hold a tool for murder. I’d trust their experience. Most if not all the other Western countries have tight background checks when it comes to gun licenses, and nobody seems to complain.

Is the right for a nutcase to buy a gun worth more than the right of a kid to grow up in a safe school environment without exposure to violence or tools of violence?

fabio, 14 days ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard you see, there’s no right of self-defense in Europe that needs to be enforced by individuals owning their own guns because institutions here actually work.

Because I can call the police if something goes wrong and they would usually do a good job protecting people.

Are institutions so rotten in the US that you can’t trust the police nor the government and you have to resort to people owning their own tools of murder? Then the problem is probably with your country and the mindset of its citizens.

fabio, 14 days ago

@chillanarchist01 @Bernard you’re completely disregarding the foundations of modern civilization.

Defense from crime and abuse is a task undertaken by governments in basically all civilized countries.

You have laws that set clear boundaries on what’s allowed, courts whose job is to enforce those laws, and a police force that is trained to use weapons if needed in order to protect other citizens from law abusers.

Civilized societies are shaped around such separations of concerns and accountability - something that you don’t have if every citizen feels that they have the right to pull the trigger whenever they like.

This is how things have been working at least since the times of the Greek polis and the Roman empire.

If you mistrust institutions, elected governments and police forces to the point that you feel that you have the right to take care of yourself however you please, then either you have a problem with rotten institutions, or a mindset problem. Either way, your idea of advanced civilization was already outdated 2500 years ago.

And you can’t see that if you’re the only country following these principles, and you’re the only country with a major gun violence problem, then probably the problem is with your country, not with everyone else.

fabio, 17 days ago

@djsumdog yup, indeed mail-tester.com gives a 10/10 to my new mail domain (it’s not the first time I set up one), but only a couple of hours ago @spamhaus removed it from their blacklist.

And I still get quarantine reports from noreply-dmarc-support@google.com when I send emails to GMail addresses informing me that the email has been quarantined (although the report clearly states that all the checks are green).

I’m trying to imagine how the WWW would like if in order to run my own website I first needed the approval of an external company whose blacklist is used by 90% of the browsers out there, if by default every new website is blacklisted, if removal from that blacklist involved opening a ticket to that company, and if even after removal arbitrary major browser producers out there would still arbitrarily refuse to connect to your website (using very opaque acceptance criteria).

I understand that the potential for spam/scam is higher with email than with HTTP, but if my domain checks all the boxes (SPF/DMARC/DKIM/RDNS/TLS) then a “you can send email to everyone, and if something is wrong for too long we blacklist you” policy should apply.