tag-following / tag-muting?

Repeat after me: anything I write on the internet should be treated as public information. If I want to keep any conversation private, I will not post it in a public website.

https://fediverse.hanbitgaram.com/

410 Gone!
I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far.
We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed.
The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.


I trawled unintentionally.

Can you tell me any successful open source project where the lead developers take a "merge everything with little fuss over quality, principle and overall design" approach?

Maybe PHP? When you think of PHP, do you think "that's a project I'd like to work on"?

Evidence No. 3783 that "social media" and "privacy" do not mix well together.

Let me repeat one more time:

• anything you write online should be considered public.
• There is no "consent-based" fediverse.
• There is no "GDPR protects me from that".
• There is no "security through obscurity".
• There is no "dark corner of the internet".

No matter your morals and ethical values, If you need to have any type of conversation that you think might get you in legal trouble, do not have this conversation in a public forum. Use #matrix if you have to, and even then you'd still need to worry large group chats which may have some undercover agent.

And if you are really concerned about "censorship", then ActivityPub is not for you. Go join forces with the bitcoiners and use #nostr.

we’re avoiding

"We" are a minority share of the market and no one really cares about "us". "We" are irrelevant and we will keep being irrelevant unless we start actual and effective evangelizing for an open web.

This is not just about "avoiding", it's about fighting for culture change.

There is also a lesson in implementing proper tests. During these holidays I started to play a bit more with Rust and went on to look at Lemmy's backend code. Not a single unit test in sight...

The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:

• Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.

• By closing down with Threads, you'll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.

• By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say "hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden."

Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.

I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.

How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

• Does the server support MUC?
• Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
• Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
• Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
• If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

I wrote to about a dozen journalists on Linked who loved to complain about Elon Musk on Twitter. A short paragraph saying about how Mastodon is growing and that the best way to combat Musk power would be by stripping his platform of reputable people.

Zero responses.

Well, it clearly seems that this experiment is failing, but not for any reason I was expecting...

• Fediverser is first and foremost a set of tools to help people migrate away from Reddit. I was not expecting so many "if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit". I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit, or maybe do what I am doing and only using it to spread awareness of the alternatives. I thought that it was understood that the problem with Reddit was on management, not with Reddit users. I thought that people liked the content from their niche subs, and I thought that people were willing to help others to move to a newer alternative, free of Big Tech and centralized corporate control. It doesn't seem to be the case. For all the talk about community and all the people crying against spez, it seems that Slacktivism is still the dominant ideology of social networks.

• Fediverser is very specific about what subreddits are being mirrored and into what communities the content is going to. To talk about "spam" honestly makes very little sense to me, until I realized that there are so many people browsing via "all". I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.

• People were feeling "tricked" into responding. That's on me. My work on two-way communication is going a bit slower than I was hoping for and I thought that marking accounts as bots was enough, but clearly the UX is failing to make this noticeable.

With all that said, I will retire the bots until I deliver on my promise to make two-way communication work and/or I have better tools at fediverser.network to help community promotion.

without labelling them as such

All accounts are marked as bots.

What is the point of this one way mirroring?

The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can "take over" their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.

There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.

I'm also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful... Do you know the "rule" of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)

As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.

I'm not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I'm seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.

It is not perfect, but it has been usable for quite a while. It's clocking already at tens of millions of active users per month, so it's not like all these people are just suffering around and not chatting and talking with their groups.

Also, unlike Reddit, it does not need to have a strong migration from all the long tail of niche communities. There are bridges already, so even if just, e.g, 5% of the discord base moves to it, it will be already enough to jumpstart a significant shift.

Portable ActivityPub objects with server-independent IDs

But blocking the instance at the DNS level does not stop the content from reaching other Russian instances, right? They would have to basically track every server that is federating with them and block like this.

That's the spirit. We don't need to complete obliterate reddit to make it the better alternatives viable. We just need to get a minimal mass of people here to keep momentum growing.

I keep thinking of Taleb's essay where he talks about how effective a intolerant minority can be on affecting change in general behavior.

I think y'all are expecting too much from 2-3 poorly funded developers who are being overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people who grew used to have a "free" product developed by a giant corporation who employs thousands of people and has revenue in the hundreds of millions.

I also think that this constant chasing for the next Messiah is counterproductive. I wish the best of luck for the Sublinks developers, but I also wish they could find a way to work to grow the ecosystem as a whole instead of competing for such a small slice of the Internet.

To put it all together: If the largest issue with Lemmy is tooling for moderation and proper instance management, I'd be more than willing to refocus my work on Fediverser into it. But I have to say that I can not put any more effort into it without getting proper compensation for anything. As much as I'm hopeful to see the Fediverse grow and for the downfall of Big Tech, I know that we will need more (a lot more) than just a handful of people working on this as side-job while thousands of other just keep watching and repeating "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"

If you go through the comments, you will see that the devs talk about an issue with the logic in the for loop, which "may be stopping before it should". Writing a couple of test cases that check whether this is true or not should be trivial.

I'd expect at the very least some type of regression tests to be implemented for every bug that makes into production, to avoid cases like this one where the developers spend weeks figuring out whether their patches even fix the bug in the first place.

I know you said it is a brain dump, but your follow up still seems mostly an emotional reaction to how the devs responded rather than a reasoning synthesis process.

E.g, your "Where Fediverse Software Differs", it seems like you want to pay off the set up you've placed in the previous paragraph (about the difficulty of being an open source developer), but this payoff never comes and instead you end up the argument with "The feature requests valid, and the devs responded like dicks".

Even if we take "the feature request was valid" for granted, it does not follow that the devs must act on it right away. If the Lemmy devs acknowledged the issue and said "You are absolutely right and we strongly advise anyone hosting an instance in the EU if they are worried about GDPR", then what? Do you think that whoever wrote the "perfectly valid feature request" should still be pushing for making it a higher priority? On what grounds?

Also:

The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor: community building, moderation (...)

shouldn't ever be used as an excuse to justify free labor from developers. This is not Self-Loathing and Display of Low Self-Steem Olympics. Anyone that comes to me with a "I'm not gaining anything from my work" argument will promptly receive "The fact that you can not establish boundaries and are martyring yourself is not my problem" as a response.

The fact that developers of FOSS software project are able to tell users "If you want something done, you need to give us the resources or do it yourself" should be lauded, not criticized or be seen as "dicks".

If instance owners are dealing with bad users "and not getting paid for it", they can do two things: close down the instance, or put proper boundaries and tell what they are willing and not willing to do for free. Alternatively, they can do what I do and make the relationship explicitly transactional: I'm more than willing to work a lot to solve my customer's problems, but this is only after they actually paid me for it. The fact that I only accept paying customers makes my instance noticeably easier to manage. Even if I'm charging way less than what some people would donate to their favorite instance, the fact that all the users from the instances are paying make for an excellent filter.

The common denominator is relatively simple to understand: good optics of a project leads to more users, leads to more communities, leads to people building all kinds of apps and tools for those communities, leads to more people being willing to donate to a project.

This "donation-based" approach needs to change. Mastodon has no problems with "optics", and its "Founder and CEO" is reportedly making 30000€ as yearly salary. This is ridiculously low. This is less than what an intern makes at Facebook. The three Lemmy devs are sharing less than 4k€/month. You can make more money by working part-time on Uber Eats. To think that this is enough to claim "they are making some money" is frankly absurd.

If society in general is so tired of exploitative Big Tech, society needs to give a strong signal that it's willing to pay for the alternative. If we don't want to have the most brilliant minds of our generation working on how to optimize the amount of ads that you get to see online, then we need to show that those building better solutions can be properly rewarded. It's not up to the developers to try to build out everything perfectly and then go around begging for people for breadcrumbs and their seal of approval.

To sum up: I'm not saying that developers need to be worshipped because they can do what others can't. I'm also not saying that the Lemmy devs were right in how they communicate with its users, but I am saying that they are absolutely right in establishing their priorities and not let their work be dictated by someone that is not putting any Skin on The Game.

Should federation between servers be opt-in?

Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?

This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it's more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.

This is 100% on Mastodon to fix.

Reddit's appeal was never in the popular subs, but in the long tail. Forget about the dozen subreddits with million+ subscribers, what made it interesting is the thousands of subs with a few hundred active users.

You just described (my service, paid hosting) Communick.

Sign up at the main "portal", choose your plan and your username will be the same on all services that you activate. You get your mastodon account as @your.username@communick.com, your Matrix id is @yourusername:communick.com, and your Lemmy account is @your.username@communick.news. Authentication is unified - except for Lemmy, which does not provide an easy way for SSO.

n8n.io works pretty great for individuals and small teams, open source and self-hostable.

public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating

And all of that can be circumvented by pulling the data via the RSS feeds or plain old scraping.

Authorized fetch and domain blocks may be effective to stop drive-by trolls, but do nothing to stop anyone with a minimal amount of resources and interest in scraping data from a social network.

The reality is simple: all information that you put on the web should be considered as publicly available. Those that want or need absolute privacy should not use information in the fediverse and resort only to provably secure communication protocols.

That's not what I mean.

I mean that Ramus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) by his own account was never worried about big architectural thinking or consistent design, and it shows. PHP3 is just a pile of functionality thrown together, and it wasn't until PHP 4 or 5 (depending on who you ask) that things started to get cleaned up.

Some counterpoints:

• I like the idea of a system where users get a share of the revenue from the ad networks, which then can be used to support other content creators or businesses online. I think that if most of the web worked like this, we wouldn't have people being treated as eyeballs and we would still have the power to vote with our wallets to choose who is actually worth of our attention. Is there any other browser or company doing anything like that?

• People keep talking about Firefox as if it's a paragon of virtue, but casually forget that they are only alive because they are completely dependent on Google to survive and are nothing more than "controlled opposition" nowadays. They also have done a ton user-hostile shit like sponsored links in the frontpage and completely crippled pocket, and let's not forget that current Mozilla execs are raking in millions while laying off people and disbanding key projects.

• The crypto part keeps called a scam, but their system has been working perfectly fine and it has always been liquid enough for me at the exchanges. Is their BAT token needed? Certainly not, and I would be fine if the 3-8 euros worth of BAT I receive every month (depending on my mobile usage and on their success as an network) were sent to me directly via SEPA. But can anyone realistically say that there is any efficient worldwide way to distribute payouts? For every dollar you sent to someone via Patreon (or Ko-Fi, or any alternative), how much do they get to keep? With the Brave creators program, all of the $15/month that I send to the different people get to them.

All in all, I will stop using Brave in a heartbeat if there is anyone else providing any alternative with a slight chance to fight Surveillance Capitalism. None of the Chromium or Mozilla forks are doing that.

AGPL has a clause that basically says "network access counts as distribution". If you make modifications to a AGPL code which users can connect to, users should be able to have access to the source code with your changes.

Corollary: when content creators start trying to maximize reach instead of relevance or quality, it's time to stop watching them.

If not, why?

How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe's suite?

If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?

I agree in theory, but in practice my experience with Matrix has been infinitely better than with XMPP:

• There is no decent client for all major platforms on XMPP. Conversations is "good" on Android, but what is its equivalent on iOS? On the desktop, Pidgin/Adium were ok if you wanted just to chat, but audio/video required a lot of work.
• No decent web-based client for XMPP.
• Setting up e2ee is a pain.
• Setting up MUC is a pain.
• To this day I did not manage to set up video chat on my XMPP server, or at least I never found someone on a different server that managed to connect with mine.

Matrix may be technically complex, but at least it has managed to keep its ecosystem together. Whenever I've faced an issue with my server, all I needed to do was upgrade synapse. The "millions of users" in XMPP are mostly all on their own silos, while I am yet to have an issue where I want to chat with someone on Matrix but couldn't because their client/server was not compatible with mine.

When us older folks say "Anything you put on the public internet should be considered public and recorded forever", it's because of that.

There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?

This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.

You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We'll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.

Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?

Ooh, just this week I started toying with a fork of takahe to see if it could be extended beyond microblogging. Some questions:

1. Where have you found a proper documentation of Lemmy's API? All I found on their website was the documentation of the Javascript SDK. If you have something like a Swagger/OpenAPI description of the API, it would help immensely.
2. Why the mix of Java and Go?
3. You mention a new API. Is there any chance that Sublinks could be developed as a more "strict" ActivityPub-compliance system? For example: would it be possible to architect the new features in a way that it only relies on the actor outbox/inbox?

A bit more difficult question: the reason that I was looking at Takahe is because it's the only AP server (that I know of) which supports multiple domains being served from the same instance. For someone providing "managed hosting" like me, it would save me a lot on resources to have one single server for multiple customers instead of having to spawn a new Mastodon server for every one that wants to have their own domain. Is there any "killer feature" on Sublinks planned that you'd say could warrant yet-another tool? Why not contribute to Lemmy instead? Or, if the devs are more experienced with Go, why extend/contribute to GoToSocial?

One can certainly argue it's not "open source" so much as "source available".

That's the whole argument. It can be a very nice and useful product, but just don't say "it's open source"

Arstechnica is doing blogspam now? This is just a repost from https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870.

Also, for the sake of diversity, maybe it would be better to have these conversations outside of /c/technology? The original article has been posted on !climate@slrpnk.net and !humanscale@communick.news, both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic...

missing piece is the replies, which Lemmy devs have no interest

If you look in one of the duplicate issues, nutomic says "no one has implemented it yet. Would definitely accept a PR to add it though.", so it's not a matter of "no interest", it is a matter of lacking manpower for it.

This person literally IS trying to just be able to start charging money for someone else’s code.

That happens all the time, never has been a problem, and it should not ever be.