Fediverse

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/957811

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199185608729068

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

this has always been the problem i was trying to solve. with atheme, with ircv3, with all of it. how do we provide community plumbing that is usable and scalable?

but IRC failed to evolve fast enough despite all of those efforts, because people didn't understand the real evolutionary threats.

the reality distortion field is a real threat to any free software project: it is very easy to become complacent, because the product is 70% of what is actually needed.

but as the world evolves, that 70% turns into 60% and then 50% and so on, while people resist the concept that product fit and focus are slipping.

everything is Fine™️ because everything is Free™️, and instead of focusing on the real threat (I have been saying that IRC would be eaten by proprietary services since the 2000s), people, thinking that everything is fine, actually, tend to focus on their little kingdoms rather than the big picture.

and so we slipped, and slipped, until eventually, IRC does 20% of what we want, and IRCv3 brings that to maybe 25%, and then when a rich charlatan buys the largest IRC network and ruins it, at least half the people still there who haven't left yet realize that, upon having their reality distortion field shattered, actually 25% of what is needed perhaps isn't the right thing, and they too move their projects to Discord or Slack.

this is a problem, and it needs to be fought, but any such fight needs to write IRC off as a loss and start over. this isn't about "how do we win over the 1990s chatroom user", it's about "how do we win over the 2023 discord user."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199267432776043 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

like, seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it was to try to mold IRC into a competitive product. i tried for a decade. i even worked on this as a full-time SRE for a while (Ustream really needed UnrealIRCd to be rewritten).

we even had some wins, for a while: the decline of IRC's userbase was reversed and it even grew for a while.

but for the most part i had the pleasure of advocating that IRC developers do not do stupid shit, like add spying features (looking at you InspIRCd m_invisible.so).

at the ecosystem level, the strong desire of IRC developers to do stupid shit for short-term gains in users, outpaced the desire to promote the health of the ecosystem, and add new competitive features that end-users would care about.

this is because projects cared far more about admin mindshare than user mindshare, and basically shows how the whole IRC mentality is doomed to failure.

community infrastructure projects have to be community focused, not admin focused. Rob Levin (the founder of freenode) used to derisively refer to the people who didn't get this point as "traditional IRC users."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199317380320492 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

incidentally, the fediverse is in a similar position, where it is threatened by the free software reality distortion field.

Mastodon isn't good enough for the long run. we laugh at BlueSky, but it is a legitimate threat, and it could very easily wind up eating the fediverse. all they have to do is make it more palatable to the mainstream.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199369743497066 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

one last thing. the people who are suggesting FOSS chat alternatives to me.

you miss my point. you're offering me oranges when Discord has offered me an apple.

Discord is not "just a chat platform." I would describe it as an "integrated community management platform."

It combines chat with other forms of community media: forums, for example, and a rich suite of AV capabilities.

this is also a symptom of the free software reality distortion field: the alternatives suggested may be sufficient for some usecases, but that doesn't mean they cover the same niche as the product they are proposed as a replacement to.

it's the concision of experience that has allowed Discord to have such great success in their efforts to eat IRC's userbase.

And here's yet another example of how Elon is eroding the usefulness of Twitter.

One of the useful things about Twitter has been the ability to Tweet at or send a message to companies, and get a response from a staff member.

On the company's end, there are various customer service platforms that handle those customer service requests.

But with Elon now charging $US42,000 per month or more for API access, offering customer service support through Twitter is no longer financially viable:

"On Thursday, Intercom announced that the company would no longer support Twitter Integration due to the recent API pricing changes implemented by Twitter.

"Intercom's clients span many industries and include companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Udemy, and H&R Block using its customer support products and services."

https://mashable.com/article/intercom-drops-twitter

#Twitter #ElonMusk #Elon #Fediverse @fediverse @technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/956291

Features:

• Lightweight, minimal dependencies
• Extensive support of ActivityPub operations, e.g. write public notes, follow users, be followed, reply to the notes of others, admire wonderful content (like or boost), write private messages...
• Multiuser
• Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used (work in progress)
• Simple but effective web interface
• Easily-accessed MUTE button to silence morons
• Tested interoperability with related software
• No database needed
• Totally JavaScript-free
• No cookies either
• Not much bullshit

Fediverse is going mainstream fast. And it is going to be a corporate hellhole if the grassroots initiatives that drove it to its current success are losing their grip on evolution in proper direction: Humane tech that is to the benefit of the people andd society, free culture thriving.

While corporate threads are looming, meanwhile the activated developer community is once again splintering, fragmenting initiatives appearing that dilute attention to focus on common efforts, cohesion, cross-pollination and collaboration. The "herding cats" problem of grassroots movements.

Great opportunity is now. Cohesion means that initiatives remain independent, but take care to coordinate with what is going on elsewhere.

👉 You can help! Avoid a CorporaVerse where you are exploited and milked. Bring attention to the opportunity and participate in the related initiatives to help bring them closer together. You might also boost my related toot.

i guess these are posts from the closed beta at https://staging.bsky.app/ which has maybe ~10k users now (they said >4k a while ago, and then apparently they invited 5k from their waiting list yesterday).

permalinks to posts there are currently not accessible without logging in, but i guess since this site exists there must be some API from which posts can be accessed without a login.

I don't have many fedi accounts, but looking at public Mastodon feeds it is very common to see people requesting others to add alt-text to their media and getting a lot of boosts/etc.

Is there any reason (beyond a very mild convenience) for some Mastodon instances not to require alt-text on media? It seems like something a lot of admins would want to do, given their general audience, and naively I'd say it's very easy to implement.

@fediverse I’ve come to learn my federated timeline is only those followed by others on my instance. Is there a way I can explore the entire fediverse?

Have an idea for a workshop or a talk or something? Get in touch.

Sorry, gotta divulge that this was an April Fools. It is the opposite.. we want to get more cohesion and collab in The Grassroots Fediverse as a counterbalance to mainstreaming and corporate takeover forces.

Quoting the toot sent out by the blog:

In this blog post I sum up and review the experiences gained from last Stream. Check out the VOD If you like this content and would love to send me some treats you can Subscribe on my GitHub Sponsor Page or checkout all the other pages via Linktree If you would like to have me as a coworker or consultant I am available for hire! #fedihire

is Twitter's pricing high enough to stop troll farms and bots?

Let's crunch some numbers.

Twitter Blue costs $8 per month * 12 months = $96 per account per year.

For comparison, Mailchimp's standard package costs $20 per month * 12 months = $240 per account per year.

So it's still cheaper than sending email spam.

But wait! What about setting up a bot farm of 1000 accounts?

1000 * $96 = $96,000 per year for 1,000 blue checkmark Twitter bots.

The median salary for a marketing job in New York is $75,002 (Source: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=marketing&location=new+york)

Any foreign government, business, political campaign, or organisation that can afford the salaries of two marketing staff can easily afford to run 1,000 blue ticked Twitter bots.

I don't think that's high enough to stop anyone serious about spamming, let alone a government-run disinformation campaign.

But it is enough to stop a lot of legitimate users from using the service.

#Twitter #TwitterMigration #Mastodon #Fediverse #Elon #ElonMusk @fediverse @technology

Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.

The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.

"Twitter does have a different standard for celebrities – including Musk himself. For months, the platform has maintained a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility alongside Elon Musk, according to documents obtained by Platformer."

With the rise of the Fediverse driven by Elon Musk's continued efforts to make Twitter unpleasant for the majority of people, it has been interesting and exciting to see increased interest in forms of Social Media outside the corporate hegemony dominated by Twitter and Facebook over the last decade.

Truthfully, for a lot of us who had been on Twitter pre-2012 or so, Mastadon, with it's user-curated stream of content, feels more like a return to something that was lost instead of something new. There is an excitement about Mastadon, it's underlying protocol ActivityPub, and the collection of inter-operable apps and servers that make up what we're now calling the Fediverse.

And I'm glad for it.

I'll elaborate on my thoughts further in my reply below, but I'm keen to hear what everyone thinks of this concept

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/903143

This video site is worth checking out, if you haven't already. Share videos of what's working, and what isn't, in your community.

Fediverse hot takes:

1. The only true client is the browser.

2. Microblogging be damned.

3. it’s the instances/servers that are federated, not the users (ie us) … and damn that too.

@fediverse

#fediverse

🚨 ActivityPub Client and C2S Support

If you read that and you have any influence in the development of Fediverse projects please make sure the CORS headers for the following endpoints are set to \*.

* /.well-known/webfinger (needed to fetch account information)
* /.well-known/nodeinfo (needed to get information what sofware the instance runs)
* The outbox endpoint to get posts and all referenced endpoints to be able to access public content from web

/cc @fediforum @fediverse @fediversenews

I want to announce a new version of the activitypub-federation crate. Over the last weeks I worked on major improvements to the usability and documentation. It now includes an extensive guide on getting started to implement federation from scratch, and also an example project which can directly be deployed to a server and federate with projects like Mastodon.

The library takes care of basic functionality like HTTP Signatures, activity sending, and fetching data from other servers. Application developers can focus on the main logic, and treat federation as another form of API. There is no restriction to the content being federated: you can implement a microblogging platform, link aggregator, video hosting site or any other type of social media. The goal is to encapsulate all basic functionality, so that developers can easily implement federation without any prior knowledge.

Using this library can help to share core Activitypub logic between different projects, so that the same code doesn’t have to be implemented and maintained separately by each project. This way improvements can benefit everyone. It also encourages the use of effective patterns to make Rust and Activitypub work together. All of this has been proven to work in Lemmy which uses this library and is the biggest Activitypub project written in Rust.

https://docs.rs/activitypub_federation