Fediverse

I don't want to run FediDB, Loops, Sup, Pixelfed, PubKit myself long term, my goal is to establish a solid foundation for these projects and find the right home to allow them to thrive.

This could perhaps be through a non-profit organization I could start, or one that is trusted by the community

Regardless, I don't want to be "in charge" of all these fediverse services, I love building but it's a lot of work to run them and I don't like the notoriety tbh, it's a lot to deal with

The blog Its FOSS has 15,000 followers for its Mastodon account — which they think is causing problems:

When you share a link on Mastodon, a link preview is generated for it, right? With Mastodon being a federated platform (a part of the Fediverse), the request to generate a link preview is not generated by just one Mastodon instance. There are many instances connected to it who also initiate requests for the content almost immediately. And, this "fediverse effect" increases the load on the website's server in a big way.

Sure, some websites may not get overwhelmed with the requests, but Mastodon does generate numerous hits, increasing the load on the server. Especially, if the link reaches a profile with more followers (and a broader network of instances)... We tried it on our Mastodon profile, and every time we shared a link, we were able to successfully make our website unresponsive or slow to load.

It's Foss blog says they found three GitHub issues about the same problem — one from 2017, and two more from 2023. And other blogs also reported the same issue over a year ago — including software developer Michael Nordmeyer and legendary Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.

And back in 2022, security engineer Chris Partridge wrote:

[A] single roughly ~3KB POST to Mastodon caused servers to pull a bit of HTML and... an image. In total, 114.7 MB of data was requested from my site in just under five minutes — making for a traffic amplification of 36704:1. [Not counting the image.]

Its Foss reports Mastodon's official position that the issue has been "moved as a milestone for a future 4.4.0 release. As things stand now, the 4.4.0 release could take a year or more (who knows?)."

They also state their opinion that the issue "should have been prioritized for a faster fix... Don't you think as a community-powered, open-source project, it should be possible to attend to a long-standing bug, as serious as this one?"

Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/428030

Bridge to Bluesky silently launches to significant interest. New features for PeerTube. Increased federation between the forums, WordPress and Lemmy.

From looking at their posts they were able to get enough performance to start caching popular tweets, that doesn't sound that expensive to me. Might get into hosting that soon but putting this out there in the hopes someone else does, I'm happy with my secluded option.

Still, having you all using something being routed thru people who poison results with Israel tweets for teh lulz seems like bad for everyone no?

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.

This is a feature that as far as i know lemmy does not have, so it might be worth it to checkout and support piefed, it will probably be useful if there are certain topics that are really relevant to you and you want to develop in depth knowledge of.

Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic

See the conversions here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4628
and
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/federating-the-content-of-posts-note-articles-and-character-limits/4087

AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.

It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.

#fediverse #mastodon
@fediverse

Last time I checked there was no ~~functioning~~ Mobilizon instance based in North America, so I started one. If you have an event coming up this summer but don't want to use Facebook or some other corporate platform, maybe give Mobilizon a shot?

I'm also open to federating with any existing instances, just shoot me an email and I'll set it up 🫡

"We Need To Rewild The Internet"
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I've read all year.

I often struggle to think of a term for "appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually." Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@fediverse

Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment"

which was about a year ago now, I can't help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of #mastodon in the #fediverse

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that's smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse
#firefish #calckey

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

1/

Is it easy to customize Mastodon front-end or front-page like that ? Any pointers ?

https://mastodon.social/@fsfe/112353096731501600

The EU pilot for the fediverse comes to an end, but the European Commission will stay on the fediverse; Ghost announces that they will support ActivityPub and build a fediverse news reading client, and Mastodon creates a U.S.-based non-profit.

A little thread I wrote on masto after watching this talk by Bret Victor and reflecting on their stated ideals for how computing ought to be designed.

tl;dr paragraph titles :

• Social knowledge network
• Reading vs sharing
• Communal links gardening
• New paradigm

A short description would be appreciated

Related to https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112337323830773758

EU leaving Fediverse (Mastodon & PeerTube) because no one wants to operate the servers

The 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 part is about that, starting with this :

Wish I could say I was surprised by this but, in my experience, at least, it is par for the course.

Here's the reason Article became a second class citizen...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5022

In this issue I raised against Mastodon in 2017 (on a now defunct github account), Mastodon at the time treated Note and Article identically. In particular, it removed all the HTML except for 'a' tags - even from Article. This made federation with the elephant impossible for us. At this time the ActivityPub fediverse consisted of Hubzilla and Mastodon. Period. The specification wasn't even final yet. Hubzilla provides long-form multi-media content, just like a blog. This content was completely destroyed by Mastodon's HTML sanitizer, especially blockquotes, which displayed everything we quoted as original text and mis-attributed.

My proposal to the Mastodon team (which was basically Eugen) was to relax the input sanitisation on the Article type a bit , and Mastodon could have their plaintext Note and we could have our multi-media and the fediverse be one happy family. Regardless of the fact that HTML is specified as the default content-type for all content in ActivityPub.

The response from Eugen was to turn Article into a link, meaning our content wouldn't be shown inline at all - and closing the issue. I believe this is the last time I ever communicated with Eugen and I will never, ever file another issue against Mastodon.

We started using Note instead, so that our messages would federate at all and knowing that Article would have been the most sensible choice.

We also need to strip all the images out of our perfectly renderable content and add them back in as attachments - otherwise they won't be displayed on Mastodon. As it turns out, Mastodon only adds back 4 images and reverses the order. This is less than satisfactory because the source content lets us position text around each image, and it forces anybody with multi-media content to not only perform this unnecessary step, but also to check every attachment on import and see if it was already included in the HTML - or it will be displayed twice.

As far as I'm concerned, Mastodon should be taken to the mountain-top and cast into the volcano. But it appears we're stuck with the infernal thing.

This dating app has many problems yes the fediverse is all about privacy but what about actually knowing enough information to swipe yes or no. For all one knows the person may or may not be single, may or may not have kids may be an evangelical ect ect. All one knows about the person is where they live an a picture that may or may not be real.

I have been given the task of finding a proper platform for building a network of education, medical and other initiatives in my country, that have all the same focus (I am sorry I can't give details yet on the project, but you could probably could get a grasp of the idea if you think in something like a church whose attendants have a lot of different church-related initiatives)

Until this day, there are only isolated, individual projects, but we want a network that connects them all. So I think we will be setting up a fediverse instance for this (Still trying to decide between Pixelfed, Mastodon and Firefish), but, before that, we need to solve a simpler issue: a Calendar of Events. The idea would be that different users can add their events and all these get inside one single calendar (and you can filter by categories, etc.) Would mobilizon be the best fit for this? because at first I was thinking in making a nextcloud install, wich could satisfy the events calendar need and could also give some other services. What do you think? thanks!