@Aatube@maegul@1984@mindlight@maegul
The private key doesn't need to be memorized, it stays saved on the device that the client software is on, allowing the user to integrate mobile device's biometric reader (fingerprint/face/iris/whatever) to confirm identity, or use security key, there are already different ways to implement it that doesn't require pw memorization.
I've got a long unmemorizable string for Firefox sync, Brave, Proton Mail/Pass, it's still more secure than pw memorized
@blag Yeah I think the mechanism is here already, just a matter of presentation. Instead of "following" and seeing posts as combined in the home timeline... we show it as "join" and have a dedicated timeline, where every post / interaction is directed to the group by default without needing to tag it🤔
@ayo I believe kbin's magazines function exactly like this, where each one has it's own separate timeline of microblog posts. Posts can be made directly to a magazine from kbin or collected from elsewhere in the fediverse based on a list of hashtags the magazine's moderator curates.
Does anyone else think that the Fediverse needs its own URL prefix?
Hear me out. There is a “mailto” prefix standard. Email addresses are identified with such a prefix. Each of my devices is individually configured how to handle it. I’ve configured my mobile device to launch a certain app. My desktop device launches my web browser and goes to a certain site. Email apps and sites know how to set this configuration and will usually prompt you at some point.
We should be able to do the same for Fediverse profiles and posts. If I click on a link to a Fediverse profile or post, the local device will know how to launch an app or browser, and in the browser case, know your “default” Fediverse instance. This can provide the same seamless experience as clicking on an email address. (If a person does not have anything configured it could default to a web browser visiting the profile/post instance just as it works today.)
"We urgently need a solution that gives our government officials the power to reach everyone, and more control over the way they connect with the citizens."
"Despite the hurdles, our migration to Mastodon was more than successful and, in retrospect, the right thing to do. Not everyone, but a few of our loyal customers moved over with us - something I will forever be thankful for. Moreover, people’s reception on Mastodon turned out to be warmer than I anticipated. […] That motivated us to keep going."
Just tipped #IceCubesApp for making my #fediverse experience so much better and smoother. @IceCubesApp thank you for creating and maintaining that amazing #opensource application ☺️
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.
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
@thenexusofprivacy@fediverse@fediversenews Simply blocking Threads won't actually accomplish anything, except leave people stuck on Threads. If we want to actually help people, we need to take active actions beyond boycotts. We need to bleed users off of Threads, and we cannot do that if we block them outright.
404's everywhere, "we're working on it" signs everywhere else.
Like sure, not being able to find my response in the pile of thread sounds like Linux problems, but how is this not loading faster and better than reddit?
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
The whole point of the fediverse in general is that there is no single “we”. There are those ActivityPub servers that one federates with and those ActivityPub servers that one does not federate with. Lack of consensus is built into the technology by design.
but I think it’s still important that everyone at least thinks about what they want the fediverse to grow into
To have wants about the social constructs that sit atop the technology is to misunderstand the technology. The technology enables your enemies/people you don’t like/etc. to communicate and benefit in all the ways you do. By design. You cannot exclude from the fediverse, you can only exclude from your server. If you have wants about excluding then you’ve misunderstood the technology.
@rah Maybe I'm not being clear. When I say that "we" means "the fediverse in general", I don't mean that everyone should gather 'round and come to a consensus on what values they should uphold and who should be excluded. This is obviously something that should occur on an instance or individual level, as (A) there are a large variety of different people and instances on the fediverse with different priorities and (B) as you stated, anyone can implement ActivityPub and tap into the fediverse if they want to, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
What I mean is that people should be thinking about what they think instance owners should aim for and form their opinions on the current situation based on that. My goal with this post is to show what I think an "ideal fediverse" looks like and have others share their thoughts. Having thoughts about what's healthy for people on the fediverse and having wants based on that isn't misunderstanding the technology — it's simply expressing preferences.
@gmph postanowił zintegrować Mastodona jako system do skomentowania jego wpisu. Widzę, że komentarze wyświetlają się tylko chronologicznie - bez wątkowania w szeroko omawianym artykule, takim jak ten, gwarantuje to nieczytelny bałagan.
A, i testuję, czy wpis z /kbin pojawi się pod artykułem
I've been thinking a bit about this post regarding #Mastodon's responsibility to be compatible with the #threadiverse (#ActivityPub thread aggregators like #Lemmy & #Kbin). Right now, a thread from Lemmy or Kbin usually federates to Mastodon with truncated text and a link to the actual thread. However, many want Mastodon to be more compatible with threads so that the people over on Mastodon interact with the threadiverse more.
I was initially in agreement as a Kbin user. But having given it some thought, I think this is an unwise approach that'll only serve to overcomplicate platforms on the #fediverse. Yes, people on Mastodon should promote other parts of the fediverse (and vice versa), but complete interoperability shouldn't be expected of every platform.
As much as many would like it, you can't have long-form video from PeerTube, images from Pixelfed, threads from Kbin, blogs from Writefreely, etc. all neatly fit in a microblog feed. These are different formats made for different platforms, and the people making them are expecting them to be interacted with in completely different ways. When someone makes a thread in a Lemmy community, they're probably expecting that the people who are going to see and interact with the thread are people that want to see threads and are thus on a Lemmy instance (or another thread aggregator). If someone from Mastodon were to interact with it as if it were a microblog post, there'd be a big mismatch. People interact with microblogs differently than they do with threads — that's why they're separate to begin with. You don't see everyone on Twitter also wanting to use to Reddit because people who want microblogs don't necessarily want Reddit-style threads, and vice versa.
The other option, then, is to separate these different formats into different feeds or otherwise make them clearly distinct from one another. Kbin does this by separating threads and microblog posts into two tabs. While you can view both in the "All Content" tab if you'd like, they're styled differently enough that it's very clear when you're looking at a thread and when you're looking at a microblog post. This distinction lets users treat threads like threads and microblog posts like microblog posts, which is really helpful since the two formats serve different purposes and have different audiences. This option — clear distinction — is a great way to solve the conundrum I've been talking about… if your platform is meant for viewing all these different kinds of content to begin with.
And that's what it really comes down to imo. Mastodon is a platform for microblogging. Most people go to Mastodon because they want a Twitter alternative, not a Twitter alternative that's also an Instagram alternative and a Reddit alternative and a YouTube alternative. Even if you put these different content types in separate tabs, it would inevitably make things seem more confusing and thus raise the barrier of entry. Add a Videos tab to Mastodon to view stuff on PeerTube, and people are inevitably going to go, "Wait, what's this? Is this like YouTube? I thought this was just a Twitter alternative! This all seems too complicated," even if you tell them to ignore it.
It's probably best to leave Mastodon as it is: a microblogging platform that has some limited federation with other formats. The way Kbin threads currently display on Mastodon is fine. In fact, when I post a Kbin thread, I'm expecting it to be viewed via a thread aggregator. If people on Mastodon were part of the target audience, I would've made a microblog post.
Now, if you want to make something that lets you view everything on the fediverse via different tabs, feel free. As aforementioned, Kbin supports both threads and microblogs, though it comes with some challenges (e.g., trying to fit magazine-less microblog posts into Kbin's magazine system). However, this doesn't mean every platform on the fediverse needs to seamlessly incorporate everything else. I'd love people on Mastodon to promote and even try out Lemmy & Kbin more, but that doesn't mean Mastodon needs to also become a thread aggregator.
This isn't a hurdle because people typically aren't going to the fediverse with the idea of "I want a single app for all my social media." That's not how social media works outside the fediverse, so it's not really going to be a surprise that the Twitter replacement is a Twitter replacement and not one for 5 other platforms. If someone really wants to view Reddit-style threads, they're straight up better of making an account on a different platform (just like they would make a different account for Reddit) because Mastodon is a microblogging site.
Even the best attempt to incorporate all these different types of content into Mastodon is going to further complicate the platform and make more people dismiss Mastodon as too complicated of a Twitter alternative. This isn't a situation where there's no harm at best. And the potential benefit? Lemmy comments having the occasional Mastodon user?
Mastodon itself is a good enough introduction to ActivityPub without needing to make it support other things. It shows how people on different servers can share & interact with a pool of media through the same protocol. When people learn about other platforms on the fediverse, they can go check those out. Just promoting the platforms will do the job fine without complicating people's entry into the fediverse.