tallship, 9 days ago

@silverpill @julian

Silverpill wrote:
> Could you provide an example of such post?

Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.

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 :)

#tallship #inline_media

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tallship, 14 days ago

@simon

A couple of things there Simon. How do you know this? Are you still using the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos to which you refer, or are you just taking this on the word of good, 3rd party information sources?

If it's the former, why?

If it's the latter, then yippie kai yay! The demise of these platforms is underway and in full swing - just as Steve Ballmer once called Linux "Cancer", the fact that these silos aren't simply ignoring links to particular resources, especially those in the #Fediverse, and have taken up with the practice of actively blocking them, is a good thing; and you, as a #Fedizen, should be proud.

Yet again, if it is the former, and you really insist on validating and monetizing those privacy mining silos via your subjugation as inventoried chattel there, consider pinning something akin to the following to the top of your profile (make sure to read the alt-text for the image):

tallship, 14 days ago

@silverpill @Hyolobrika

Hehehe.... I suppose this is my opportunity to plug Joshua's free domain name service here that's been a trusted mainstay for over 20 years :p

Perhaps one of the best parts is that you can see how many days (years) the domain has been part of the service, to dissuade concerns over whether there's a likelihood of it suddenly disappearing :)

And.... who doesn't love #FreeBSD?

Aside from lotech #Sneakernet schemas, there's also several FOSS based community driven initiatives. There's been a lot of real-world, ad-hoc development since my years of participation in the IRTF/IRSG DTNRG. Full disclosure, I was also formerly employed by Semtech. The notion that there's a use case for communications that can take months, even decades to arrive (or never at all) is a valid concern for many practical applications.

More immediate, and relevant communications systems for most folks here on Terra Firma include projects like Lokinet, which has some great info HERE, and also aspires to the same level of, um... disconnectivity (sneakernet-like) or operability that @silverpill mentions above - the value of having a client/server architecture that is prepared to exploit this out of the box is much relevant that one might think.

Some of these semi-production or production ready real world initiatives and communities are:

• CellSol - It is noteworthy to mention that Texas is the only state in the USA that sports an (actually only mostly) autonomous electricity grid (not dependent upon the national grid), although it's not publicly managed, and has been criticized as such due in part to nearly 1000 deaths occurring in the winter of 2021. The repo is HERE. Here's a PoC for one such use case from the PoV of a native Texan: Apologies for directly linking to an article in the monolithic silo space.

During my years living quite literally off-grid in the wilderness of the forested mountains in Northern California, I had the privilege of meeting and contracting for several farms and individuals deeply steeped in what is generally referred to as the prepper movement. These weren't cray cay militants (at least not most of them) or paranoiacs calling for revolution or believing the end is nigh, but rather, farmers and families who were, rightfully so, extremely concerned with security and safety for their small communities and loved ones. To survive in places like that, which exist all over the world, one must begin with self-sufficiency that covers 4 seasons; beyond that, protecting the 'me and mine' aspects of your assets and property are very real considerations.

The work I focused on led me to developing microwave surveillance systems using inexpensive, solar powered Ubiquiti Nanostations with ranges capable of exceeding 10KM, strategically placed in almost inaccessible locations overlooking entire valleys as well as within small perimeters of their farms and households. This included off the shelf PTZ cameras, many of which were capable of license plate and facial recognition, but more importantly, being able to determine the difference between things like Bears, Deer, and Humans - false positive intrusions detected are quite frustrating, lolz.

All of this was coupled together with Shinobi, which can be monitored and controlled from anywhere, on any device. The repo is here.

With the extreme threat levels of thievery and other concerns in those regions, and continuous incidents of such, a comprehensive #FOSS based, #solar powered communications and surveillance system is an in demand market. Internet access is of course, problematic in such regions, which creates the market for WISPs operating in the unlicensed microwave bands a high demand commodity as well.

This is merely demonstrative of the need for another niche type computing arena - community networks completely unconnected to the Internet:

• A BLE LRMN project - The git repo for the dual-licensed software is [HERE(https://github.com/mwaylabs/fruitymesh).
• Many more BLE projects (many in Rust) here
• More BLE for IoT
• Off-Grid Mesh Networks using LoRa and/or BLE
• BSD licensed OpenThread
• Message Queuing Telemetry Transport - NOTE: For XMPP, ejabberd has native broker services.
• Freeing up Zigbee devices w/MQTT
• OSS-7 / Dash-7 Lora/LoraWAN technologies are sub Ghz.
• More (dry) IEEE related Mesh stuffs

All of these projects, protocols, and initiatives have solution based choices for the various kinds of Delay Tolerant Networking standards and communities actively developing for connectionless, intermittently connected systems, or autonomous networks that aren't neccessarily interdependant upon a classic, traditional, Internet connection.

Not sufficient to just eschew the deprecated, privacy disrespecting monolithic silos, it's also not prudent to depend upon clearnet aspects of the Internet either. In practice, it's possible to take pretty much any platform technology that listens for packets and fashion the ability to be accessible and available via I2P, Tor, IPFS Yggdrasil, and other IP routed constructs, yet moreover, the majority of people only consider intercommunication in terms of the IP routed packet switched network we call the Internet (powered almost entirely by Cisco IOS and the like), without due consideration given to the fact that this single common denominator is also a single choke point - kludgy platforms like masto that can't even keep up with the contemporary movements in the social networking landscape aren't going to fare well when it comes to the expanding horizons opening up with movements like those above, while others like Sreams, Mitra, and perhaps protocols such as Nostr that exhibit the ambitions to explore and exploit emerging technologies in communication will fare much better, adapting (and embracing layer 1 & 2 networking) along the way.

#tallship #DNS #nomadic_identity #sneakernet #PTZ #WISP

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tallship, 26 days ago

@Sandra

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:

1. ) 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.
2. ) 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.
3. ) 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:

• Streams
• Mitra
• Misskey, Iceshrimp, Cherrypick, Firefish, and Others
• Pleroma, SoapBox, and Akkoma
• Friendica
• Hubzilla
• WriteFreely
• WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin)
• Ghost (reportedly coming soon)
• GoToSocial
• Socialhome

4. ) 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.
5. ) 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 :)

All the best!

#tallship

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tallship, 27 days ago

@jupiter_rowland @danie10 @thenexusofprivacy @mikedev

Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.

No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?

Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.

No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.

The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.

Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.

True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.

With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.

Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.

In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when their on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.

The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".

That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.

masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.

Jupiter:
> That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.

Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.

There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.

I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.

Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!

Danie:
> thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?

In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.

My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.

The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.

I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.

And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.

Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.

I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.

They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)

#tallship #FOSS

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tallship, 1 month ago

@coffeegeek

Hi Mark,

I've got a follow up here for you :)

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 with Quote 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.

I do like the colorful buttons too in the demo here. I also like the non-traditional "Lorem ipsum" example prose too. I find it refreshing :)

• 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:
• mastodon share button
• Share on mastodon button
• MastodonShare
• Toot Proxy
• Yet another mastodon share button
  *Share to mastodon

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:

• Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family

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.

All the best!

#tallship #FOSS, #Automattic @pfefferle

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tallship, 1 month ago

@danie10 @snikket_im

I personally feel that this is the optimal delivery and update methodology for future software distribution.

I've written about this at length in several articles, and more and more service daemons and client software are taking advantage of this form of direct from the developers method of delivery - not just Android apps.

#FairEmail is one such app that even states in the docs that this is the preferred method, although they do support a total of four methods:

• Google PlayStore - crippleware due to google funding source restrictions. In all cases, this is by far the worst distribution point for software, if not with respect for the product that the developers want to deliver, but also with regards for the privacy of the users who are tracked, mined, and themselves repackaged as a quantifiable inventory item.
• F-Droid custom Dev's repo - 2nd best option, because this is built with the developer's keys when the developer decides to push the product, and contain all feature sets that the developer chooses to include.
• F-Droid repo - 3rd best option, since it is signed with F-Droid's keys and typically lags by some measure of time with respect to release dates, considering that F-Droid staff pushes these out on a best effort basis, according to the time they have available to do so.
• Direct from the developers Git repo - This is the best method. They push a release and the next time you open the app you're notified of an update.

This is part of the magic of Slackware's philosophy too - Patrick and team don't church it up like most distro's do (Debian and AlmaLinux quite often, quite heavily wrt customizations, use Apache or Nginx HTTP servers as examples). Slackware tries to package up software as close to how the upstream intends it to be.

In earlier articles I've published on the topic, I've focused at times on a solution to a theme proffered by #Moxie_Marlinspike, who denigrates the open source model somewhat, for being at a great disadvantage when compared to that of proprietary solutions that can update and evolve protocols, APIs, etc., on a whim, because they're centrally managed and controlled by a single dictatorial source. Microsoft is one such classic example. You simply have NO CHOICE as to when you must allow your software to be EOLed, evolve, or update itself.

Using this model, however, where a central repo, or a distributed, CDN type of repo mirroring is deployed at the origin by the development team itself, FOSS has no problem upgrading even things like protocols as they evolve. Of course, it is ultimately up to the operators of the software to allow updates and the prerogative of the developers to establish the level of nags that users of the software will experience until they permit the updates to occur, but that's beyond the scope of the basis of advocating for this type of delivery model.

Okay I think I'm bordering on hijacking this thread, so I'll make a comment about these types of shennigans by Google, and how one one hand it's certainly a huge frustration, if not an impediment to being found and adopted by users, but moreover, a predatory practice by one of the most egregious violators of personal choice in the free market of consumerism and commerce.

It may hurt being pulled like that, but IMO, I don't think there's anything preventing the good folks behind #Snikket from pushing out the kind of crippleware that google wants them to, while at the same time pushing banner splashes in the app that explain just how fricken' useless it is under the terms necessary to distribute it via that medium, and encouraging users to install it instead by following the instructions at the #git_repo for a fully featured, #e2ee secure messaging platform.

IOW, there's always a silver lining - wear this dejection as a badge of honor and as the evidence to support the fact that you're on the right track!

#tallship #FOSS #privacy #crippleware

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tallship, 1 month ago

@atomicpoet @shoq

Run Paint, Run Run is still my fav Beefheart tune after all these decades ;)

#tallship #Captain_Beefheart_and_the_Magic_Band

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tallship, 2 months ago

@gabek @gcrkrause

#ROFLMAOPMP!

I love perusing the various stats, and this particular one left me with that pain in your side from serious gufaw gufaw's, ... Sulu outranks Eugen - now THAT, is fricken' funny! And he's also organically ranked above @gargron too, lolz.

Now, the sad part about this, and one would need to have been a Fedizen going back for a few years, is that as a techno early adopter, #Wesley_Crusher was summarily and relentlessly flogged and ridiculed until he was driven from the Fediverse by selfish, jealous little children here in the Fedi about 5 years ago.

I mean, sure, Wesley Crusher was a total goombah on #TNG, while #George_Takei is a superhero from #ToS, yet in real life, #Will_Wheaton was among the first generation of (albeit, minor) celebrities to embrace #DeSoc and the #Fediverse, and our local stable of miscreants (every social network has them) hounded, maliciously trolled, and harassed him until the only conclusion that could be arrived at was that the Fediverse is a hostile environment not worthy of belonging to.

That really angered me, but at least everybody loves #Sulu :)

#tallship #FOSS #Star_Trek

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tallship, 1 month ago

@darnell @gabek

And it seems after a few discussions with Mike, that he's earnestly seeking to make Flipboard's ActivityPub integration consistent with being a "Good Fedizen" in mind. I can't say the same for Threads, it's more of a Veni Vidi Vici kinda feel.

tallship, 2 months ago

@alex @linux_mclinuxface

From my PoV, it's certainly a license that's preferable to that of BSD or MIT. There's a solid reasoning behind this HERE.

After all, even Tanenbaum himself was surprised to discover that MINIX is the most ubiquitous of all operating systems:

> "I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS."

The SSPL being akin to that of the AGPL avoids that sort of dreadful situation, ensuring protections for the end users that not even the GPL affords them where #SaaS is concerned ;)

#tallship #FOSS #SSPL #AGPL

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tallship, 2 months ago

@jon @Vivaldi

You're doing great things Jon, and the longer Mozilla takes to embrace the #Fediverse the better it is for #Vivaldi.

But there's some glaring misgivings here that are often raised by people. Half the #Fediverse isn't mastopub - you should really consider replacing that icon in the panel with the Fediverse Logo, or even the ActivityPub Logo instead of the one you've currently got in that sidebar - It's quite misleading, and people who prefer using the more full featured and capable Fediverse platforms such as Friendica, Mitra, Socialhome, GoToSocial, Takahe, The Pleroma and Misskey families of forks, smolweb Fediverse platforms like Bovine, SNAC, Tapir, and many more, ... These stalwart #Fedizens and #Privacy_conscious people shouldn't have to look at some exclusionary elephant logo that completely misrepresents and dismisses the fact that the masses of these people don't even use that platform.

These Fedizens most certainly should not feel forced into being pigeonholed into an association, in front of others, which implies that they use masto.

Here's an example of what our diverse world of #DeSoc's #Fediverse_Logo looks like - that elephant thingy really only offers an homage to one single platform, losing user market share more rapidly each day, in favor of a better and more complete user experience with superior networking facilities.

Wishing you and the team all the very best, and looking forward to seeing the #logo in that sidebar that more accurately represents the community at large, and is also much nicer looking :)

I hope you continue to shepherd the trailblazing innovation that Vivaldi has shared and introduced, and join now with the trending wave of sites replacing that tired old elephant graphic for either of the logos that more closely and accurately represents the unifying inclusivity and diversity indicative of the residents in our Fediverse.

#tallship #FOSS #Privacy #ActivityPub #Diaspora #Nomad #OStatus #ZOT

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tallship, 2 months ago

@tallship @tallship @julien

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.

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub I can haz #Cheezburgerz? 🍔

tallship, 3 months ago

@snarfed.org@snarfed.org

Ryan,

How refreshing!

Another bridging mechanism to extend the reach and interoperability with other Fediverse protocols in the #DeSoc space is most welcome, and from the limited analysis I've been able to perform so far this is a novel approach to what some point in the future will find other Fediverse platforms incorporating in their network stacks.

So far, we've got seamless nostr interoperability to add to the other fine protocols such as Diaspora, ZOT, Nomad, OStatus, ActivityPub, and others in the mix. You might also wish to take a look at the repo for Minds to see how they've made seamless integration between the ActivityPub and nostr portions of the #Fediverse as well, and oh, pay no mind to the infantile and disparaging remarks that some small minded folks in this thread have exhibited - they are free to *defederate themselves from the Fediverse at any time.

We've been following withe some enthusiasm your project in the Fediverse-City community and it would be a pleasure to have you participate there. Your insight into the open and public aspects of Fediverse traffic in the #DeSoc world is a testament to the innovation and evolution that is possible in obviating the proprietary, privacy disrespecting, deprecated monolothic silo networks that have sowed so much acrimony and subjugation over the very people whom they seek to quantify as their business products.

You're performing a great service here, feel free to block any miscreants in this thread who don't understand the definition of public.

Also, might I suggest that instead of offering a `#nobridge keyword index, you think about offering a solution as a FEP here?:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/

There are a lot of Fediverse platform developers I'm sure that you'll find welcoming, encouraging, and willing to offer assistance in formulating solutions to silence the adolescent juvenile mindsets that have been berating you in this thread for your selfless commitment to the well being of us all.

In the future, the Fediverse that we perceive and interact within will become its own heterogeneous superset of networking protocols to facilitate effortless communications between individual parties regardless of which portions of the Fediverse and their associated protocols implemented. Just like #OStatus has been largely supplanted by ActivityPub, and #ZOT has been superseded by #Nomad, the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse will also eventually be deprecated and replaced by other stacks that will emerge from the ether of creativity. In the meantime, we'll be bridging between the various protocol stacks, and Bridgy-fed is one of those tools that serves to make that a reality :)

Thank you again, for your selfless contribution to #DeSoc and the Fediverse. it's a fantastic achievement that will serve to benefit many in both the #ATP and #ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse!

#tallship #bridgy #FOSS #Fediverse #DeSoc #innovation

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tallship, 3 months ago

@mastodonmigration @tchambers @mho

Collating reams of journalist accounts is a good thing.

The problem I have with most of the folks on that list is that it's almost misleading, in some respects. The old Twitter mentality is persistent with the perceptions of these journalists (that's our fault), and as a result, we get a tease and a link, and depending on the particular Fediverse platform or client we're using, we may or may not get a link preview.

The volume of journalist published information is minimal, much akin to what things like Lemmy and Kbin, HackerNews, or Reddit might afford us - and it's unnecessary. A list of external, 3rd party news resources is great, but I am here. Right here - In the Fediverse, with my Fediverse client (That's my reader), and a shitload of journalists who themselves have already migrated over. I have RSS, ActivityPub Follow and alert capabilities, and can appreciate journalists actually publishing their articles here, in the Fediverse, much more than elsewhere that I have to travel to, so to speak... and maybe hit a God damned paywall.

I think part of the problem here is that many of the journalists flowing into the Fediverse are indoctrinated with the old mastodon/twitter decrepit shortcomings that left them with little capability other than to publish elsewhere and link to it from here. I don't want to have to go somewhere else to read the things that interest me - and there's no need. All the tools are here. In the Fediverse. Now.

Most Fediverse platforms don't constrain the users and publishers like the old mastopub way of doing things. i.e., lack of #Markdown or other #Rich_Text capabilities and the inclusion of inline graphics or other multimedia file types in articles, or that persistent, cringy, paltry, 500 character limit that the draconian mastodon interfaces are constrained with, along with their inability to Quote-post. This is why the so-called #mastoforks have been so successful, overcoming many, if not most of those barriers, although they're still almost indistinguishable from the typical #mastopub interface.

We're building critical mass amongst journalists, and this is remarkable, yet we need to encourage greater awareness initiatives on just what the Fediverse platforms have to offer nowadays (and it's only getting better).

Those journalists that I've had the pleasure of admiring here have for the most part, leveraged things like one of the Misskey family of platforms with multiple link previews per post, and quite the rich formatting of their text to make their articles pop with life and entice the reader to visit.

Another issue? Many of these journalists and commentators publish their articles and provide links, but they resolve to paywall sites. I think we need to rethink our ability to, at the instance level for each and every individual user, block shit that links to paywalls. We already have several good browser plugins that do so.

The sooner we sufficiently inform the lions share of these journalists to the opportunities they have on Fediverse platforms that are more contemporary and capable than mastodon, the sooner they can get down to the business of focusing on the monetization of their repertoire here in the Fediverse (and keep ALL the money earned); in turn, we (the rest of us) get quality, original, unique content here, compelling even more folks from the world of the proprietary, privacy disrespecting, deprecated monolithic silos to come and co-exist here with us as fellow Fedizens.

Already, several Fediverse platforms enable the full immersion into the ecosystem here with facilities for monetization - either native to the platform or as a plugin. For example, one of the quickest ways for a journalist to take advantage of a "Substack", "Medium" or other popular monetized platform in the Fediverse is to merely create an account on one that provides these utilities - Like WordPress or Mitra or WriteFreely - create an account, plugin your donation/subscription payment info, and start publishing interesting, informative, original content :)

***One thing we as consumers of the news can do right now, is take the time to individually contact each person we can on this list of journalists and let them know these things. Point them to this article with a link, or to the actual resources that they can experiment with and deploy their unbridled and untapped resources to reach out and in turn themselves be reached.

I'll leave links below, to a couple of the Fediverse platforms I've referenced above. If you're viewing this post on a platform that is one of the Misskey family of forks, then you'll see the graphic below as well as all of those link previews for all of those resources.

Enjoy, and I hope that helps!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

https://mitra.fediverse.observer/list

https://writefreely.org/

#tallship #Fediverse #FOSS #news_aggregation #journalism #journalists #publishing

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tallship, 4 months ago

@gabriel

Just making sure that I correctly understood your request...

>Give me backup tips like I just lost all my data and you want to rub it in

You mean like the time I arrived on a client site to find that a second HDD on the Sun Enterprise Server Solaris box in the RAID 5 Array had failed, yet they chose to run the machine in that degraded state w/o calling me to simply plugin a hotswap drive and rebuild the array before the second drive failed?

Or maybe when I told them, no problem, I'll just rebuild a fresh array from scratch, and then just run a full restore from the previous night's DLT tape?

Or perhaps when I saw that look in their eyes and they admitted that they hadn't been swapping tapes each night for about three or four months?

Their CFO looked at me as if everything was still going to be okay (Coz I'm a fucking Rock God) and said: "Well, we've never had a problem before." to which I did my best to respond without letting loose a condescending gufaw....

"Well.... you do now."

Stupid goes all the way to the bone.

https://duplicity.gitlab.io

#tallship #BOFH #IT_nightmares #tech_support_recollections #funnies #nightmares

tallship, 1 month ago

@forsaken

> What do you think the future of XMPP will be like? I think it might be the protocol I enjoy using the most

Interesting, and refreshing, to see optimistic XMPP thoughts on, I guess, adoption? After 25 years?

People have been proclaiming the death of Jabber/XMPP for many a moon, yet its utility and existence just below the surface of mainstream awareness remains healthy. Yes, it is sometimes thought of as long forgotten, and no, it's not losing any um, ... Market share, so to speak.

For most things, and especially as a chat/communications platform between people, I migrated away and onto other solutions, leaving it alone and largely dormant for nearly two decades; yet it has always been part of my infra - mostly just between me and machines I've managed (notifications mostly).

I think part of the reason for it being so summarily dismissed was due to the rise of things like AIM, YIM, etc., and its perceived 'death knells', following Google's choice to (at least publicly) migrate away from it in the course of killing some of their public services.

More significantly however, IMO, were the abhorrently ugly and unintuitive UIs most chat clients sported - I'll call that era the time when XMPP clients mostly appeared like something you'd see on Angelfire or GeoCities web pages - before the MySpace and subsequent early Faceplant years following the breakage of the Pimp my Myspace page phenomina.

Like Samuel Clemens, once stated, ... "The report of my death was an exaggeration." If XMPP were itself able to express such sentiment, I believe it certainly would, lolz.

XMPP is simple to use, fast, secure (not by default), and by creating a situation where the user is transparently ignoring the JID + "/resource" and numerical priority that served to constantly confuse laypersons with multiple devices, the neo-adoption of XMPP and the introduction of 'pretty' clients has to a large degree, made it seem as if XMPP is something that is rather novel in the communications (chat) sector.

Clients like Conversations, at least on the #Android platform, have enabled this renaissance. There's also more desktop clients that sport a good look (pretty), offering an intuitive UX.

Is it going to be the next great thang? Doubtful. As @silverpill stated:

> I think It will remain a small network, unless something really bad happens to matrix (its main competitor).

... There's that elephant in the room.

On the other hand, for those of us who were early adopters of the hopeful #Matrix protocol, the promise hasn't quite been realized as expected, and further, it's been rife with disappointments - How many times have I myself integrated Matrix into system monitoring infrastructure only to feel that dissapointment?

XMPP doesn't offer me that - it works, every fucking time, fast, and I need it fast. I need to be able to call my customers and tell them that there's a problem and that I'm working on a fix before they even know there's a problem. I can plugin Zabbix, Observium, Nagios, Cacti, #NetFlow, etc., and when I hear that cacaphony of an alarm in the middle of the night, know that I need to get out of bed and start putting out fires.

I use Matrix - daily, all the time. But when people close to me ask which one of my non-email contact methods is best (besides actually calling me on the phone), I let them in on a little secret - "If you really need to get a hold of me, like, right now, and want my undivided attention when some IM pings me, then use my Jabber address". It's the first thing I check when I wake up, and I don't even usually check Matrix (it's mostly just for discussions and private chats nowadays anyway in my work flow).

Do I care if it's going to be the next great thing? Well, I prolly, when thinking about it, would prefer that it not be - Here's why:

• Mass adoption by my friends and colleagues who I converse with would only serve to dilute the priority to which I assign my #XMPP communications
• Migrating from Matrix (or something else) to XMPP for my virtual social interactions would prolly spur me towards wishing I had a dumb beeper again on my belt, lolz.
• Sure, I can take advantage of different JIDs/resources, and even install separate XMPP clients if I wished, but managing different alert sounds, etc., and, ... Basically just complicating something that is so simple and effective the way I use it now kinda defeats the purpose of having a (mostly) dedicated interface between me and my boxes :p

Well, that's my 2 cents ;) and of course, my XMPP addy is in my profile if someone wants a priority chan to rattle my cage - but please do use #OMEMO as a matter of practice, even untrusted e2ee is better than clear text and I believe that we should, whenever practical, use encryption by default....... because. Just because :)

#tallship #FOSS #chat

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