Sean Tilley @lemmy.world I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.
I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/
I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.
It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.
Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.
They kind of fucked up everything in approaching this by not talking to the community and collecting feedback, making dumb assumptions in how the integration was supposed to work, leaking private posts, running everything through their AI system, and neglecting to represent the remote content as having came from anywhere else.
The other thing is that Maven's whole concept is training an AI over and over again on the platform's posts. Ostensibly, this could mean that a lot of Fediverse content ended up in the training data.
A social network founded by a former OpenAI employee was caught importing public posts from Mastodon...and ran AI analysis to add tags to them.
Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
I'm like 99% sure that this is just WordPress with BuddyPress extensions. I could be wrong! But, if that's the case, it's likely all open source already. It might be interesting to see if they can get it working with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress!
The dedicated Trust and Safety organization launched their community platform for moderation support last week. Here's what it does.
IFTAS, the Trust and Safety organization for the #Fediverse, launched a new community portal full of guides, resources, discussion groups, and tools for community moderators and instance admins. We take a look at what it does.
TIDAL Embraces Nostr, CashApp May Follow
TIDAL is embracing Nostr, and may be a signal that other companies under Block's umbrella might make similar moves. It's only a small demo at this point, but it demonstrates the company's first commitment.
It's time to listen and vote in this year's edition of the Fediverse's favorite annual music contest, FediVision!
FediVision is an annual music competition in the spirit of Eurovision. This year probably had the biggest turnout ever: 72 entries from a variety of artists and musicians, and you can listen to all of them!
With Mastodon founding a US-based 501c3, the question has come up: who are the board members? What do they do? And why were they chosen?
We dug into Mastodon's new US-based non-profit entity, and checked out who their board members are, and what they've accomplished in the past.
I mostly meant the old system where all options were just a bunch of floating neon text. It was...functional, I guess, but the new system is so much better from a controller perspective. It's not perfect yet, things like elevator buttons are still in a weird spot, but most things are a lot easier to deal with.
One edge case that I really want to see the team nail down is crash loops. In the EPTU build of 3.23, we noticed situations where recovery effectively acted like a rewind feature, but didn't actually prevent the cause of a crash from happening.
Having to experience a handful of the same crashes during a single play session is pretty painful.
Honestly? I'm loving it. The biggest improvement for me was getting rid of those awful PIT menus that were ugly and sometimes hard to use. The new system is way more usable, and I'm tweaking the mappings on my controller to see what feels the most usable.
The improvement to EVA is also phenomenally good. You move a bit faster, there's more precision, and traversal between EVA and ship is much smoother. As a salvager that gets in and out to scavenge cargo holds, this is a big deal to me.
The character customizer is also really fun to use, and feels pretty intuitive to use. There's still work to be done in explaining what all of these vertices do, but I think the customization is a lot more flexible.
Some pretty nasty bugs emerged in 3.23 and 3.23.1, but it seems like the team is making pretty good progress on improvements? So, there's that.
I can't tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅
As far as the "global square" part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you're right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.
However, there's nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it's definitely not impossible.
It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.
I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.
You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!
Bridgy Fed's integration between Bluesky and the Fediverse is now in public beta, and you can try it for yourself!
Bridgy Fed's Bluesky integration is now in beta, and makes it possible to connect your account from the Fediverse to Bluesky, and vice versa.
There's still some quirks, and every bridged account has to opt in to it, but it's a promising moment for people that want to communicate across networks.
Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.
It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.
The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.
Thank you for these insights!
Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.
It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.
In recent weeks, people unhappy with Mastodon project talked about forking the project in a different direction. It's harder than it looks.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
It's an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:
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Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.
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We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.
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Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.
I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.
An increasing amount of Fediverse platforms support Live Streaming. We wrote a short guide to help you get started!
The Fediverse has, not one, but two different streaming platforms readily available to people. They both work a bit differently...but, both of them work great with OBS Studio. We dive in to how to set each up.
Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin
Today, we sit down with Matthias Pfefferle of Automattic, the developer behind the ActivityPub integration for WordPress!
We sat down with Matthias Pfefferle to talk about his journey in developing an ActivityPub integration for WordPress, along with the challenges of implementing a protocol for a platform that everybody customizes in a wide variety of ways.
We also check in on how development is going, and what’s in store for the future!
There's an effort on the network to connect the Fediverse's federation powers to Solid's data storage and access capabilities.
ActivityPods is a wild project that's bringing the architecture and data capabilities of Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Protocol to the Fediverse. We dig in to what it is, how it works, and what's currently possible with the framework.
Ghost, a major publishing platform, follows in the footsteps of WordPress. Both platforms may be able to follow each other soon.
Ghost is a huge publishing platform, and a sizeable rival to Substack. By adopting ActivityPub, they are opening up to an entirely new audience, and harnessing the power of the Fediverse.
Emissary has some really wild tricks up its sleeve, and allows you to build whatever kind of interface or app experience you want.
Emissary is a revolutionary next-gen Web platform that lets you tinker with every little bit of it. It works with the Fediverse, is built on IndieWeb principles, and looks incredible.
The developer of Pixelfed unveils his newest project, a long-awaited suite of tools designed to help people building for the Fediverse.
PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project's lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.
Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging
This week, we sit down with Manton Reece, an IndieWeb developer who built his own federated microblogging and publishing platform.
We sat down and interviewed Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.Blog. Micro.Blog is an IndieWeb platform with microblogging capabilities that marries a social experience with a more traditional personal website / blogging concept. It federates via ActivityPub, and has been a part of the Fediverse since 2018.
Yeah, I don't have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.
There may be a "minimum threshold" for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I'll readily admit that this is conjecture.
Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.
"Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!"
Literally just saw this in my feed: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-sues-truth-social-co-founders-says-not-entitled-stock-shares-rcna146106
Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh
Reflecting on some of the hurdles for procuring a Fediverse instance for the US Government. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, but is it worthwhile?
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: "Why didn't the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?"
Here's some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don't consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.
Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven't tried anything else.
Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @[email protected] directly?
Joe Biden's official account is now connected to the Fediverse, thanks to Threads. We'll see if anything comes of it.
Both President Biden and the White House have enabled the Fediverse integration on Threads.
Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: “Block Threads to Remain Listed”
A community index of servers added a new rule recently, that requires every participant to defederate from Threads. Some admins are unhappy.
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
Decentered Podcast: Interview with creator of Blacksky
This week, we talked to Rudy Fraser, creator and operator of the Blacksky feed. It's a dedicated community stream for black voices on Bluesky's platform.
This ended up being such a great interview. I know some people will shrug it off, because it’s Bluesky and not Mastodon, but Rudy’s a super smart dude and an amazing guest, and he shed a lot of light on building a community space for black people on an emergent platform. There’s so much good info coming from this man!
We're attending the Fediverse's most popular unconference, and providing updates of the talks, along with commentary!
We’re trying something new: live coverage of the #FediForum March 2024 Event! It’s a first-ever experiment for us, come check out our coverage!
ActivityPub has fostered a social web for millions of people. To grow, some developers believe it needs improvement. These are their efforts.
ActivityPub has remained the dominant Fediverse protocol over the past few years. In that time, many bright ideas have come on how to improve the spec. Here's where those efforts are today.