A shorter roundup this week, as it feels like we´re transitioning to a different news cycle. Last month has focused mainly on current organisations joining the fediverse. Medium, Flipboard, Vivaldi and Mozilla have all set up their own Mastodon servers, and WordPress acquired the ActivityPub plugin. The next phase is now to experience the new users that will slowly start to join via these new types of servers, and how this will change fediverse culture. Meanwhile, the current weeks are more themed around community meetups. Last week was MozFest, with three sessions about the fediverse, and the coming week will be Fediforum.
Matthias Pfefferle, the developer of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, did an interview (in German about this. Important takeaway: Automattic is actively looking to make this plugin a Canonical Plugin, with the suggestion coming from the CEO.
Bookwyrm, the federated platform for book reading and tracking, is used to maintain a list of all books being banned from public schools in the US. Bookwyrm is explicit about their involvement in social causes, so this fits right in.
The Mastodon organisation will release Mastodon merchandise soon.
Debirdify, a tool to find your Twitter followers on Mastodon, has been suspended from Twitter.
A full list of all the demos at Fediform this week.
Macstodon is a new Mastodon client for MacOS with an incredible vintage look. Worth checking out for the visuals. (edit, thanks to @liaizon: Macstodon is for very old computers only. it runs on 68020+ or PPC Mac and System 7.1 through 9.2.2 so saying its for MacOS is sorta correct but not really since it only runs on 20 year old operating systems)
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Bitte diesen Tröt teilen/retröten, falls Ihr Mastodon noch nutzt. 🦣❤️ Hintergrund: Möchte gerne mal ein aktuelles Lagebild. 🚀 Ziel ist es, perspektivisch herauszufinden, wie wir als Mastodon-User:innen hier in Zukunft weitermachen können. 🙏 Besten Dank im Voraus! 🥰
@ajsadauskas Across the internet, there's a host of niche communities on message boards and web forums, using platforms such as phpBB and its various competitors.
Is there scope to get these communities on the Fediverse?
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been trying out Lemmy (lemmy.ml ), which is basically a Reddit-like platform on the Fediverse. (For those reading this on Mastodon, this post is actually a reply to a post on Lemmy, meaning you can read it on Lemmy, on Mastodon, or elsewhere!)
It's shown me that the concept of a Fediverse -connected discussion forum certainly can work.
So is there scope to either add ActivityPub to any existing message board software platforms?
Alternatively, is there scope to develop a fediverse-connected general purpose message board platform?
Takahē is a new kind of Fediverse server which is aimed at small to medium size servers. It's unusual as it allows the same server to host multiple domains, and allows each user to have multiple identities. You can find out more from the project's official website at:
「 In an attempt to self-host a low-cost fediverse node, I started with GoToSocial, but later decided to switch to Mastodon for better compatibility. This transition presented some challenges and got me thinking about whether existing web frameworks are well designed for linked data services 」
If #activitypub is implemented on #tumblr I wonder if subblogs will be part of the #fediverse in addition to the main blog. I know I'm ignorant on the technical side of things, but it would be great if subblogs could be part of the Fediverse as well...
Fun guide on creating an alias domain for your Mastodon account. That is, if you happened to be @alis and wanted (say) @me to redirect to that account, this is how you’d do it.
(It works, incidentally, and takes about two minutes to set up. Try it!)
Hot take/rant time for #ActivityPub with the news that #Meta plans to dip their toe in the water.
I would view Meta as an existential threat to a non-corporate, AP-based #fediverse in large part because of the immaturity of and lack of interoperability in the AP spec itself.
Why?
Because when you have that big of a fish involved in your space made up of small players, the big fish gets to set the rules unless you have some pretty strong protections in place.
One of the most exciting tech developments at the moment is the advent of the #Solid web standard, which lets people "store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure personal web servers for your data."
Is it technically possible for #ActivityPub to support the Solid standard? Or this would be something apps like #Mastodon should implement?
I'm happy to announce version 2.25 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in ANSI C. These are the changes:
Federation with other instances have been improved by collecting shared inbox information from input messages more thoroughly.
Fixed an obscure bug that caused connection rejections from some instances.
Some rules regarding incoming messages have been tightened; messages that are not related to the user are not added to the timeline. This has to be implemented because some ill-behaving ActivityPub implementations were found injecting unwanted messages to user inboxes.
Messages from MUTEd users are rejected as soon as possible with a 403 Forbidden HTTP status.
Fixed a minor bug regarding the scope of the 'Update' activity (edited posts were sent to more recipients that it should).
More aggressive input sanitization (some posts were found that included strange ASCII control codes).
Added "Open Graph" HTML meta tags for better previsualization of snac links from other social media.
If we want the network of apps to grow, developers needs to talk together and find consensus. This initiative looks like it's moving in the right direction!
While doing some Fediverse exploration, I ran across two very interesting (to me) server-side applications of #ActivityPub with live instances. One is https://castling.club/ that facilitates chess challenges and game play. The other is Transit Fedilerts (https://transit.alerts.social/) that "fetches service alerts from transit agencies and publishes them via ActivityPub". It's great to see creative ideas like these being implemented.
We talk a lot about #Lemmy, but has anyone heard of #Aether? Just found it on @privacytools. I just want to know if anyone has used it and what their experience was like.
It appears that it is peer-to-peer but uses its own protocol unfortunately and not #ActivityPub.
Hi, everyone. I've just released version 2.24 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in ANSI C, that includes the following features and bugfixes:
Sending non-public messages is now much easier: a checkbox to post a message to only those people mentioned in the message body has been added.
Fixed an over-optimization bug that caused some mentioned recipients to be skipped.
Added some new administrator tweaks: email notifications can be globally disabled.
What if instead of opting out of content and #federation (fediblock), instances had to opt in to content and federation?
What I mean by that:
Instead of "things appear in the federated timeline by default" it is "only servers that have been reviewed show up in the fedderated timeline."
Instead of "follow requests require review if coming from a silenced server" it would be "non-mutual follow requests require review unless coming from a reviewed server."
I don't think people appreciate the role that #OperaSoftware played in fostering the #OpenWeb and #IndieWeb during the first #browserWar (when the #OperaBrowser was still built on their proprietary #Presto engine), and a fortiori the role it had in their demise (when they switched to being “just another #WebKit/#Blink skin”), despite their browser never even reaching a 3% market share.
Sometimes I wonder how different things could have been if the timing had been different. When #OperaUnite was first announced, #ActivityPub wasn't a thing yet, StatusNet had just been born, diaspora* didn't exist, and the only other major bidirectional federated protocol was XMPP, that had existed for 10 years and was in the process of being #EmbraceExtendExtinguish-ed by Facebook and Google.
I have no problems imagining a different timeline, where #ActivityPub had been already a better-established thing, and the demo #OperaUnite applications for media and photo sharing had implemented basic support for it, resulting in self-hosted lightweight alternatives to #PixelFed or #FunkWhale.
And this is actually the vision I have an ultimate goal for the #Fediverse, one where, thanks also to client support, hosting and participation become even more trivial than setting up a static website.
I'm pretty sure that the #Fediverse is one of the first social networks I've been on that didn't ever ask me to betray any of the people in my address book.
Lemmy shows how Fediverse-connected message boards can work. So is it time for a Fediverse-connected general purpose message board platform (like phpBB)? Is anyone working on this?
I'll elaborate on my thoughts further in my reply below, but I'm keen to hear what everyone thinks of this concept