KDE will participate Google Summer of Code 2024 with many new projects
From frameworks to translations, from Krita to KStars, GSoC recruits will work on improving performance, boosting interoperability, and adding features to a long list of KDE projects.
I still don't think that participation of any free project in the #GSoC is a Good Idea. After all this is a cheap recruitment opportunity for the #GAFAM and drains the source of #freesoftware hackers for all non-monopolists. YMMV
Many KDE recruits have gone on to become valued KDE developers. Aleix Pol, current president of KDE, for example. Aleix started out developing KALgebra, but then went on to do a GSoC in which he worked on Kdevelop. Never worked for Google.
We’re delighted to announce the first maintenance release of the 24.02 series, tackling regressions, bugs, and crashes. A big thank you to everyone who reported issues during this transition – keep up the great work!
Why on earth doesn't Firefox on android properly support navigate.share, IE it won't send across the text property and if you don't put a URL in there it just sends blank, even though the .canShare returns true. You can see various bugs raised and closed about this, a major reason to make people not use the browser and I just can't see why? @firefox#FireFox#JavaScript
Hey video-makers! 🎥 This week, we stumbled upon community member @pocketvj crafting cinematic magic with #Kdenlive on a smartphone powered by @postmarketOS and @begasus explored editing on #HaikuOS! ✨ Tell us where do you use Kdenlive. Send your screenshot! 💻🖥️🌌
Вчера пытался перейти на Яндекс Браузер - не смог, к вечеру вернулся на @firefox.
А все из-за рекламы, которую Яндекс активно продвигает даже платным пользователям и заблочить её ни какими средствами не получается (половину плагинов удаляющих рекламу установить не возможно, приложение Adguard спокойно рекламу от Яндекс пропускает).
In times where it takes seconds to throw ur post into a translator at 0 costs and copy paste ur message below in english there is hardly any reason for not doing it.
I use english too so people understand me or I go to the german communities.
But now that the message has been translated in the comments it really shouln't be any problem at all :)
The View Transitions API doesn’t currently enable cross-document view transitions, but this is planned for a future level of the spec and is actively being worked on.
I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
@me Pretty much had the same problem, some people I've told about it have tried it and given up saying there's too much crap to figure out, what's an instance, how do I pick one, how do I find people to follow etc. I started the process of learning Mastodon in case any of my students wanted to try it, ended up liking it pretty well myself though agree I do miss following writers and companies and so on who aren't on here.
I wrote this blog post to inform the people I know who aren't as tech savvy or otherwise don't put any thought into their choice of browser. Another goal is to help get enough awareness on the topic and make sure it fails.
The contours of the fediverse as the open social web, in a vision that goes beyond decentralised microblogging, are starting to become more visible, with more bridges, connections and other types of media getting pulled into the fediverse. It also raises the question of expectations and boundaries, with different visions of the fediverse arising: that of a highly interconnected space, or with many more insular communities and groups that are loosely connected.
WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferleexplains:
“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”
This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.
Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.
Podcasting news
Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.
In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.
Bluesky has 3 million accounts
Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suber estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.
Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.
Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.
In other news
Another write-up of the meeting that Meta held last December to discuss the fediverse, by Tom Coates. It contains some more details about the planned roadmap, and how the integration is planned to happen in separate steps. What strikes me is that both this report, and the notes by Johannes Ernst, mention that they feel they have not gotten a clear answer to the most important question: ‘Why is Meta doing this?’. Tom Coates writes: “I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find [Meta’s explanation] enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it”. And Johannes Ernst: “Personally I believe this question needs a better answer than has been given publicly so far”.
An OpenAccess article in Cell Press for researchers that are considering to switch their research from X to Mastodon, by Robert W. Gehl and Roel Roscam Abbing. It describes key differences between the fediverse and X, and how Mastodon is quite different from X and Twitter from the perspective of researchers. It focuses on the expectations of privacy that people in the fediverse have, and one of the main recommendations for researchers is to shift from studying individuals to studying instances.
ActivityPods, the project to combine ActivityPub with the Solid protocol to create data ‘pods’, has been updated to version 1.5. With the new version it becomes easier to invite new people to your network, as well as better organisation of your contacts. ActivityPods tries to solve the problem that currently in the fediverse, you need to have a separate account for every fediverse service. With ActivityPods, applications can connect to your own Pod, so that your data and connections all live in one place.
The new link aggregator PieFed ‘emphasise trust, safety and happiness‘, and as part of that they have added extra notifications for commenting on posts made on servers with higher standards of moderation, such as Beehaw.org.
Fediseer, the project that provides a public space to crowd-source approval and disapproval of instances, has added a ‘rebuttals’ feature. Creator db0 noticed that instances were issuing ‘counter-censures’ (a censure is a negative judgement from one instance to another for any reason) just to reply to the original censure. Rebuttals provide an outlet for instances to explain their perspective or reasoning.
Bridgy Fed, the bridging project to connect the indieweb, fediverse (and Bluesky and Nostr in the near future) has expanded support for non-indie websites as well. Similar to RSS-Parrot, you can now follow websites and their RSS-feeds directly in your fediverse account.
This has been (and still is) a very special week. The past 7 days have been emotionally (and, to a lesser extent, work-wise) very challenging. And even when I'm tired, I realize that, in my opinion, I have the best job in the world. Because working with open-source tools provides everyone with the same opportunities, in the most open and free manner possible. Few fields offer the same conditions, and I feel like I belong to a great group, a group of passionate and constructive people, without any distinctions of any kind.
The Podcast Index has an ActivityPub implementation, and now I can follow some of my more irreverent non-techie podcasts directly on the fediverse. So cool! Hopefully they'll add a Follow button soon...but in the meantime:
Find your podcast on the site
Grab the numeric value at the end of the url
Search for the podcast with this name {numericValue}@ap.podcastindex.org
La leggenda del coccodrillo al mercato della Vucciria di Palermo.
Tra le tante leggende palermitane, non mancano le storie legate a fatti misteriosi, intriganti e suggestivi, come quella del coccodrillo che divorava i bambini che giocavano vicino alle fontane del mercato della Vucciria a Palermo.