Fediverse

PS- The "real" (non-joke) full guide for the Masto-curious is here.

Does something like this exist? As far as I can tell, setting something similar up would require:

• A dedicated Lemmy instance for Mastodon tag-based crossposting (probably, since most existing instances probably don't want to clutter their instance with thousands of script-generated communities)
• Some kind of form on a site where users who want to follow a Mastodon tag that is not already set up as a Lemmy community could submit the tag they want added, which would automatically set up:
• A Lemmy community for that tag on the aforementioned instance, and
• A Mastodon hashtag bot that automatically crossposts all posts with that tag to the linked community

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4204288

I think a big problem behind the reluctance of alternatives to the strictly chronical timeline on Mastodon is that people fear that too much power is taken out of their hands if they are introduced. But the fact is: it is already the case that we put a lot of trust in administrators to put the correct software in place. A strictly chronological timeline makes one thing less to worry about but basically, it only reduces the symptom of the problem. Instead, I think the real problem needs to be faced: take away the fear of users that their instances are not working as they are supposed to and give them the power to check themselves whether the instances they are on are actually doing what they subscribed to.

As the most important, I think of the following two:

• Defederation Tool: shows from which other instances your own instance defederated (I think that already exists).
• Timeline tool: is the timeline curated based on the algorithm the instance proposed.

If these are in place, you could check that you see the right posts by the right instances, which is already a nice thing to know to begin with and would at least me quite content for introducing custom timelines and thereby giving more power to the admins. And with the mentality of this being an important issue, there would always be someone trying to see if an instance is run as promised and most admins wouldn't bother trying to do bad things.

Additionally, the algorithms would need to be determinstic and data collected by the instance about the user downloadable.

PS: Of course admins are doing a great job here, also given that most of them are volunteers. I'm not saying they are bad people, I'm just saying there need to be tools to control what they are doing if more powerful tools will be introduced to them in the future like custom timelines.

This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Meta is moving forward with their plans for Theads and the Fediverse, and their adjusted terms reflect a new impending reality for Fediverse users.

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/1133610

I am seeing a lot of fearmongering and misinformation regarding recent events (CSAM being posted in now closed large lemmy.world communities). I say this as someone who brought attention to this with other admins as I noticed things were federating out.

Yes, this is an issue and what has happened in regards to CSAM is deeply troubling but there are solutions and ideas being discussed and worked on as we speak. This is not just a lemmy issue but an overall internet issue that affects all forms of social media, there is no clear cut solution but most jurisdictions have some form of safe harbor policy for server operators operating in good faith.

A good analogy to think of here is if someone was to drop something illegal into your yard that is open to the public. If someone stumbled upon said items you aren't going to be hunted down for it unless there is evidence showing you knew about the items and left them there without reporting them or selling/trading said items. If someone comes up to you and says "hey, there's this illegal thing on your property" you report it and hand it over to the relevant authorities and potentially look at security cameras if you have any and send them over with the authorities then you'd be fine.

A similar principle exists online, specifically on platforms such as this. Obviously the FBI is going to raid whoever they want and will find reasons to if they need to, but I can tell you for near certainty they probably aren't as concerned with a bunch of nerds hosting a (currently) niche software created by 2 communists as a pet project that gained popularity over the summer because a internet business decided to shoot itself in the foot. They are specifically out to find people who are selling, trading, and making CSAM. Those that knowingly and intentionally distribute and host such content are the ones that they are out for blood for.

I get it. This is anxiety inducing especially as an admin, but so long as you preserving and reporting any content that is brought to your attention in a timely manner and are following development and active mitigation efforts, you should be fine. If you want to know in more detail click the link above.

I am not a lawyer, and of course things vary from country to country so it's a good idea to check from reputable sources on this matter as well.

As well, this is a topic that is distressing for most normal well adjusted people for pretty obvious reasons. I get the anxiety over this, I really do. It's been a rough few days for many of us. But playing into other peoples anxiety over this is not helping anyone. What is helping is following and contributing the discussion of potential fixes/mitigation efforts and taking the time to calmly understand what you as an operator are responsible for within your jurisdiction.

Also, if you witnessed the content being discussed here no one will fault you for taking a step away from lemmy. Don't sacrifice your mental health over a volunteer project, it's seriously not worth it. Even more so if this has made you question self hosting lemmy or any other platform like it, that is valid as well as it should be made more clearer that this is a risk you are taking on when making any kind of website that is connected to the open internet.

It's hard not to overstate how much of a big deal it is that Mastodon is adopting this kind of search functionality. Mastodon still makes up a vast portion of the Fediverse.

While other platforms have supported this for way longer, having buy-in by the biggest player in the space will probably have a huge effect on standard expectations moving forward.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4150119

The assumption is that centrally managed social media is bad because their algorithm is bad. But actually, they are bad because they are centrally managed and force one algorithm onto you. I’m not even advocating algorithm-by-choice. Even instance-specific algorithms would already work and would make the whole experience much more enjoyable and less boring. And if an instance’s algorithm(s) is too aggressive, it gets defederated. That would result in a much more exciting experience imo. And by the way: what’s the problem with getting old posts back in the timeline if it makes the overall conversation more interesting?

Please be creative! Will there be more communities? Will we refer to each other based on the instances we belong to? Will there be beefs between instances? Will there be doomed romances of two peoples meeting from different places of the fediverse?

Pixelfed, an alternative to Instagram, has matured over the years. One of its biggest, most powerful features is about to touch down - federated groups. And it will be compatible with Lemmy and Kbin.

https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/c/poptalkmeta

(The site is already down, and my instance wasn't subscribed, so I can't properly link, hopefully the bot will help).

Link from LW: https://lemmy.world/post/3979585

I realize that Mastodon is specifically intended not to have any sort of algorithm, and I understand and appreciate that, but it's not what I want, personally. I want to have the posts in my feed sorted by the ones with the most "engagement" as those are likely the most interesting ones.

Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can't easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem. The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don't know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?

The last couple of days I experienced something that I never felt since I've been using Fediverse services. For the first time since half a year ago, I felt like actually being sucked into the Fediverse. I only realized it a couple of days later that I hadn't looked into Twitter and that's the crucial point: didn't even felt like I was missing something or had even the urge to do so. I had actually forgot that I was in the Fediverse, I had felt home. But then suddenly I felt like: oh, what if I did miss something? I again opened TwitterX (didn't miss anything).

It was also not a purely positive experience, it also concerned me a bit for reasons I do not know yet.

Anyone else experienced this? Is there a word for it?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3932795

I thought about this already for a while and with Lemmy and Mastodon the opensource community has a place to really try itself out and coordinate. Then even things like open-source planning-systems (like at Amazon) and AIs are possible.

At least in Germany there is currently no really political movement that could be described as left-libertarian at least seriously. Maybe the Fediverse could be the root for something like that.

Or will the Fediverse will become more like the new landscape of the internet, which encompasses everything and in which every party will need to move and have a certain stance to somehow?

When it comes to subreddits, lemmy communities, and lemmy instances, the people enforcing the rules are the same people making the rules. To borrow from legal terminology, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches are the same. Mods and admins are judge, jury, and executioner. This gives them a lot of power and allows biases in the way they enforce the rules to go ignored.

When it comes to the reddit admins, however, and sitewide bans and content removal, the people enforcing the rules are employees. They report to a boss, and have to follow guidelines already established. The content policy has already been written, and changing it is a big deal. If a ban is unjust, it can be appealed using the rules. When biases in the ways the rules are enforced happen, it's easier to undo them. And I'm not saying it's easy, but on Lemmy, it's impossible. You can't even log into your account if you're banned, how are you supposed to appeal?

Reddit as a business has a great deal more power than any fediverse instance's mod teams. But ironically, the low ranking admins have less power to make bad decisions. And that's why I've noticed a consistent pattern that Reddit is better at moderating cases that are legally clear-cut, but emotionally controversial. On Lemmy, admins follow their feelings. On Reddit, people may have a lot of feelings, but the proletariat administration intern has had feelings beaten out of them, and they more often end up following the rules.

The way Reddit operates is soulless and horrible and capitalist, but... soul is where hatred comes from. You're less likely to find that in the workings of an unfeeling machine.

I haven't been able to subscribe to any communities hosted on kbin instances. I can see the communities, but they stay at "subscribe pending" and the posts never show up.

I can still see posts and comments from kbin users as long as they're on a Lemmy community, so I know it's not being blocked on my end.

I heard that there was a "temporary outage" regarding federation with kbin.social a while back, so I've been waiting for months for it to start working, but it just never did. I've also tried subscribing to other kbin instances and they haven't worked either...

So has this just always been broken for everybody?
Or is there something I can change on my end to get it working?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2271023

This was born out of a couple of comments I left on peoples posts of them asking for a clear explanation of key fediverse concepts and them saying the explanations made things a lot clearer for them.

There are a lot of people who learn better with long form explanations they can go over as many times as necessary that short explanations or graphics don't really work for.

Its all text, written with real world non techy examples to reach people who might not be technically minded at all. At the moment there's just one article but I aim to fill it out a lot more.

I've only just applied the SSL certificate so if you get a warning that's why but its only markup, styles and 2 js functions to scroll the page and change the mode/theme so there's nothing dodgy going on.

I recently made a new account on lemmy.blahaj.zone, because I’ve been harassed and doxxed on my old account and I wanted a fresh start with a more lighthearted online identity that I could be more open about my gender identity on. I’d heard blahaj zone was good for trans people, so I made my account there. And yeah, autism@lemmy.world removed my post discussing neuronormativism from a queer perspective, but I hoped maybe “the trans instance” would be friendlier to trans people.

A couple days after making my account, I saw someone on Blahaj engaging in the tired old cliche of “I hate politics, there’s no politics on my social media and I want to keep it that way!” Well we’ve all heard the joke that the two races are white and political, the two genders are male and political, and the two sexualities are straight and political. Hatred of politics is a transphobic, sexist, and racist trope. And having sufferred harassment and abuse from people inside the queer community who “hated politics” and saw trans or nonbinary or xenogender identities as political, I knew this kind of speech was going to make bigots feel comfortable saying they also hate politics, and they think us trans people are it.

So, I responded to the transphobia. I started out by attempting to educate them on what politics actually means. But I was interrupted by the Blahaj admin Ada, who told me that politics is “anything I disagree with”, and that indeed politics isn’t welcome on Blahaj. This language was deeply triggering of my past issues dealing with abuse, and I knew from past experience this sort of thing is said by people who are getting ready to say some enbyphobic or racist hate speech. It is especially common for white queer people to talk this way to BIPOC queer people. I tried to reason with Ada, explained the history of the cliche, the trauma it’s caused many trans people, and the consequences this kind of speech will have on the community here, making us all less safe.

Ada wasn’t having it. She minimised my concerns by reducing them to my personal trauma while ignoring my wider concerns for others’ safety, and weaponised my PTSD to paint my opinions as invalid because I am mentally ill. She said she owns Blahaj, and she gets to do whatever she wants with it, and nobody is allowed to express a differing opinion, even one that protects trans people, because that’s politics. At the time I thought her concern was me speaking directly to transphobes and making them feel uncomfortable by calling out their actions, so I said I’d just report it instead, and she banned my account.

This behaviour protects transphobes, WILL lead to trans and BIPOC people being harassed on this instance, attacks and gaslights victims of trauma (my concerns can’t be valid because I have a mental illness), and forces out any trans person with a commitment to safety for the community.

The thread where all this happened: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2143969

This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573

TLDR: Mastodon users are inherently active posters and already understand federation. Also there are MILLIONS of them.

Please consider following if you'd like to get more Lemmy in your Mastodon feed or more Mastodon users in your Lemmy feed!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3823167

And now something certainly no one asked for: a new Marketing Concept for Mastodon! Let’s face it: the bird icon and the whole birdy concept of Twitter was perfect marketing. It just was. Its so effortless, casual and simply fun. And now that Elon Musk gave it away - why not claim it for the Fediverse? The moment is almost too perfect. But for that, we would need a new name, concept, icon, everything. Birds could be a good theme here. Not one, a whole sky of them. Mastodon always was about community after all. And I think it would also provide a more seemless transition from let-down Twitter-users. Marketing works through stories. The story here: Twitter-Bird Larry still lives, he is just chilling in Rio with all these other birds instead of being stuck in his old cage. Its now that he is actually free.

What do you think of this? I mean Mastodon's mammoth is cute but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t include in itself or through an underlying analogy how Mastodon works and feels on a daily basis, which many great product concepts do. For example, Docker: you have the whale with the containers in the icon, now you already kind of know how docker works. That's very good. With the mammoths at Mastodon - no one ever really got what they were standing for, right? Except for being extinct, which is not exactly uplifting to begin with. And they also didn't tell any story.

On the other hand: who doesn’t love free birds? I really like the idea of freely choosing the nest from which you want to participate in the overall bird-conversation. And while freedom is a politically loaded term, it nonetheless marks a key weakness of X as well as Threads: you haven’t the freedom there to change your provider, which can be seen as a basic human action: voice or leave. We are THE Twitter-platform where you are free to choose your provider and actually do the leaving. This is the one thing that isn’t possible of any of the other Twitter-like-platforms. And that's our unique feature.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3764678

Do you think this fediverse-analogy is any good for telling people about the fediverse?

(FYI: I'm not a native speaker so please bear with some potential grammatical errors)

I keep trying to add banners to my communities, but get errors about size limits etc.

help appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3804525

Wow, things have changed since I last posted in /c/fediverse. Here are the top five most active instances based on monthly active users:

• lemmy.world: 19516
• lemm.ee: 3779
• lemmy.ml: 2970
• sh.itjust.works: 2355
• feddit.de: 2293

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3802741

Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing ActivityPub! 🙌

The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send a merge request to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git

In the most expansive version of this vision, anyone running an AP-enabled git instance (with one or more repos) can send MRs to another instance’s repo, without having to sign up there.

For starters this will be GitLab-specific, but that’s already huge for self-hosters of GitLab who currently don’t benefit from the internal interop of the GitLab.com network.

First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’. And yes, they are aware of ForgeFed and will likely make use of that spec for the advanced features of this epic.

Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.

Hugely impactful as a way around GitHub’s moat as the de-facto social network of open source development. I follow hundreds of developers on GitHub, though mainly just to keep track of who I’ve interacted with, effectively adding them to a dev-specific address book.

I have a much harder time keeping track of non-GitHub devs on alt platforms, but if I could follow them on the fediverse that’s actually preferable over GitHub’s proprietary follow list.

Cross-posted to Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/110949168258462158