Fediverse

Signups opened this week for Loops, a short-form looping video app from the creator of Instagram alternative Pixelfed, reports TechCrunch.

It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

By which I mean in terms of usage, development, or stability. Also along those lines, which English-speaking instances would you recommend?

Interested as Misskey & forks have some feature edges over Mastodon in my opinion, but it's somewhat harder to find discussion/info about them.

It looks like they have some kind of whitelist set up, limiting federation to the big instances, which seems like a strange thing for one of the small instances to do.

Radiofreefedi.net is a super cool internet radio with a couple stations that plays music from fediverse artists, along with a "words" station that plays non-music stuff like podcasts or other kinds of spoken programming

I've really enjoyed it and only learned about it cause someone here on lemmy mentioned it in passing, I thought I'd share so other folks know about it as well :)

They don't want to get the "First Game of the Fediverse" title.

I've been rewriting Lemmy Federate for the last 3 days and finally finished it. While there are no changes on the frontend, many things have changed behind the scenes.

Mbin support

After several requests, I have added Mbin support to Lemmy Federate. It is currently in experimental state. I may improve it in the coming days.

Currently, Lemmy-Mbin connection is off by default. You can enable it by activating the "cross software" option in the instance settings.

Federation mode option

I added this option for small/single user instances. If you select federation mode as seed only in the instance settings, your instance will not follow other instance communities, but other instances will follow your communities.

Although I am not a fan of this option, I think it will work for instances like under 100 users.

Lemmy Federate

source code

Here’s example settings page:

As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.

However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.

All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.

It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.

Hope this helps!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17792698. I had posted here last week asking for suggestions, and incorporated some of them -- for example, the last section mentions the proof-of-concept Faircamp integration into Hubzilla.

Including:

• DAIR-tube, the PeerTube page of Dr. Timnit Gebru's Distributed AI ResearchCenter
• The Website League, an island network that's taking a very different approach
• GoToSocial v 0.17, continuing their focus on safety and privacy with interaction controls.
• Piefed and the Threadiverse
• Bonfire's new Mosaic service along with their work on Open Science Network and prosocial design
• Letterbook
• Bluesky and the ATmosphere's continued momentum

The post has more info on all of these and more ... there really is a lot going on.

Hello everyone,

Basically title. At the moment I use the "hide post" feature when I see this kind of posts in generic communities (e.g. [email protected] ), but I was curious to see if anyone had another option, such as maybe a tampermonkey script?

Thank you for your help.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27020356

We are officially finished with The Book. Now onto something that matters.

Today is an exploratory session to explore the lemmy codebase, see how well it's documented for contribution, and make a targets for contribution.

If anyones following along this week is dedicated to familiarizing ourselves with the codebase. Pull it down, set up our dev environment, run the code. After that pick a directory and attempt to explain a few functions to a duck. If a duck is not present find a google search result for the term "duck" will suffice.

As always, a stream will be available at the following link of myself doing this for around 2 hours starting one hour after this post is made. https://www.twitch.tv/deerfromsmoke

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/20878811

Since I wasn't satisfied with the way syndicated interactions were displayed on my blog, I built something myself with #javascript. What do you think of the idea and implementation?

Here's what I think. Bear with me, I'll come around to the moderation aspect.

The Old Internet

A social network lives or dies on the social contract between its participants. The technology really isn't important at all, as long as it's marginally functional.

The old-school internet had a strong social contract. There are little remnants surviving, that seem hilarious and naive in the modern day, but for the most part the modern internet has been taken over by commercial villains to such an extreme degree that a lot of the norms that held it together during the golden age are just forgotten by now.

• Web robots used to grab robots.txt, parse a file format that wasn't totally simple, and figure out what rules they needed to obey while crawling the site, and then they would obey them. Against all conceivable logic, this is still mostly true on the modern web.
• People used to type their email addresses in when they logged in over anonymous FTP, not because anything at all would happen if they didn't, but because it was polite to let the server operator know what was going on when you used their resources.
• April 1st used to be a huge holiday on the internet. Nothing could be trusted to work like normal. Everything was lies, but they were so cunningly crafted that a significant number of people would be taken in. People participated, both users and operators. It was like art. It was great days.

Basically, it was fun, and it was safe. That combination is harder to do than it sounds. It was a creative and comfortable place.

Starting with eternal September, and up until today, it's different. The modern internet would be unrecognizable and tragic to anyone who was around back then.

Read this:

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.

Now contrast that, the nature of the September internet and how little everyone could believe how unpleasant it was, and how it got fixed again every year after a short time, with the modern internet. It's been September for so long that the idea of an internet without annoying people on it, where everyone's mostly on the same page and just enjoying the interaction, or that we could "fix" the annoying people by them just learning how to behave, is comical. Tragic comedy, but comedy.

I think one core thing that made the difference is: It used to be a privilege to be on the internet. You couldn't just do it. You either had a tech job which was a rare and exotic thing, or you were a student. If you weren't one of those things, you weren't on the internet. End of story.

The great democratization was a great thing. Myspace and Napster were great. It's good that anybody can be on the internet. And there's no going back anyway. We've got what we've got.

But I think a key thing that was lost is that it was ours. In Douglas Adams's words, "One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'.

That used to be true, in a time now long gone. Now "they" have come to the internet. Among other roles, "they" run your service, and they don't give a fuck what you think. They want to make money off you, they want to mine your data, they're going to choose what you will and won't experience, and their priorities are not your priorities.

What This Means For Federated Community Internet

I think the federated social media that is coming now is a great thing. It's fantastic. It's back to the old architecture, partially. But, I think it has unintentionally imitated some of the design patterns that exist on the current "they" internet. Among them:

• You don't control your experience. That is designed and curated for you by "they." You can configure it, but you have to turn in a formal request if you want to make changes outside the parameters, and since you're requesting someone spend significant effort on you who doesn't know you from a can of paint, the answer is probably no.

• Anyone can join. It's free, the more the merrier, and if they turn out to be toxic, then the other peons, or some volunteer moderators if it gets bad beyond a certain point, will have to put up with it.

I think this social-contract-free internet is a vastly reduced experience compared with what could be. One of the features of it being "ours" is that we have a shared responsibility to make it good.

Here's how I see the social contract on the modern social internet, according to the model that most federated social media has adopted:

• Anyone can join. You can be as big a pain in the ass as you like, to anyone at all.

• The moderators are forced to deal with you. They come to expect rudeness, dishonesty, greed, anger and deliberate destruction. They have to, for no particular reward at all, deal with it all and keep things on an even keel. Anyone they ban gets to make a new account and have another go. Have fun!

• Site admins and developers at least get their $500/month from kofi, or whatever, which I am sure is nice. But, in comparison to the vital nature of their role and how difficult it is to do at scale, they get nothing. They have to be missionaries going into the wilderness and expecting to give of themselves to the world.

It's understandable to me for that arrangement to produce some social interactions that are chaotic, toxic and pointless.

Most social contracts don't work that way. Someone in a "moderator" type of role would get respect, sometimes they would get paid, there would be a standard of shared conduct that everyone involved wanted to see from everyone else involved. It's the difference between the meditator in a social clique who helps when there is trouble, versus HR, who doesn't really give a fuck what your problems are, and is just there for their 8 hours.

I think this is the root of the "mods are assholes" issue. It's not that the mods are power tripping. It's that they are placed in a role that will lead inevitably to toxic behavior, unless someone turns out to be a solid gold saint, which few of us are.

I think that because there's no code of conduct from the users above the bare legal minimum, it's easy for a moderator to get jaded by the absolutely unending stream of assholes they have to deal with, and start to look at the nature of the whole thing as a toxic jungle of racism and lies. Because why would they not? That's what it is, in part, and they interact with that part every day.

A better arrangement is an understanding which involves the users agreeing to something beyond the minimum in order to participate. Something to make them aware that they are requesting a privilege when they log in, that their participation in the system can make it either better or worse, and they recognize and respect their role in making a nice place.

• Having to write a few sentences about why you want to join, and having the instance admin say yes or no, is actually a nice start. It's some symbolic reframing, right at the start of the thing, that says, "Hey, this is my place. Do you want to come in?" but holds you at the door until we have a little conversation about it.

• Old-school BBSs used to have an upload/download ratio. They dealt with the same type of problem by having software-enforced limits on what resources you were allowed to consume, and making you give back to earn that privilege. I think that's great. There's not an obvious translation of that into the Lemmy interaction model, but if something like that could be achieved, I think it would be really good.

It's not that we need people to upload files or post a certain level of content. It is that consuming all these volunteered resources, including the eyeballs of others if you want to say something that is self-serving instead of in service to others, is a privilege, and that requirement reframes the entire situation into something which I think is more wholesome and appropriate, and nice to be a part of.

What To Do?

I don't really have an answer here. I am simply describing the problem, and its impacts on moderation and social interaction, and how similar problems have been dealt with in the past.

Sorry for the abrupt ending, but I really don't have much more to say.

What do you think?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/[email protected] where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

I'm looking for answers from instance admins, if you're a regular user, you can still answer but it's more helpful for me to get answers directly from admins.

If a user on [instance A] asked another instance (Instance B) to remove their federated account and federated content copies from instance B (likely also banning it so content doesn't continue to flow) would the user on Instance A be in trouble with their instance admin for asking for such a thing.

Obviously it depends on the instance's rules but that's part of why I'm asking the question, to get answers from instance admins on this.

On one hand I can see how it would since, since it hurts interoperability and can create tension between instances, but on the other hand a user has the right to be in specific places or not be in those places, that probably extends to not wanting to be federated into an instance they find objectionable (assuming it is for good reasons).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207

It's a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix -- no need to read that unless you're into definitional struggles.

H5 unstable

It appears that something is causing unsheduled reboots on host H5. The cause is being investigated... Date Created: 2024-10-21 07:07:56 (an hour ago)

I'm seeing a lot of users on my preferred instance with <1yr old accounts, that have thousands of posts and comments. Whether these accounts are people with nothing better to do than post mindlessly 24/7, or are bots pushing some narrative, it doesn't make a difference, I'd rather not see what they're posting, because chances are, it's hogwash. It would be nice to be able to filter out these highly active accounts, based on a set variable of max posts per day, and/or comments per day. Any account that exceeds that variable is filtered out, and any account below it is allowed.

Does anyone have insight on whether or not this sort of filtering is possible to achieve on Lemmy? Is anyone else interested in having this sort of functionality?

Edit: I'm not trying to throw shade on active users. I appreciate active users. I'm looking to block users with AI image generated profile photos and have on average 10+ posts per day and 20+ comments per day. Those accounts seem suspicious to me.

Hello everyone! 🎉

I’ve created an RSS Feed Bot that automates sharing news in Lemmy and Fediverse channels, helping to keep Fediverse users better informed. The bot is written in Python3 and can easily run via Docker Compose.

Hope you find it useful! 🚀

#Lemmy #Fediverse #RSS #Python #Docker #Automation #OpenSource

Just found out about this and thought it was neat. For those of you that don't know, a Lemmy instance won't automatically federate everything everywhere all at once. It'll federate only what local users are subscribed to. So someone made a tool that will let you increase visibility of smaller communities that might not be synced to every instance.

Looks like it's opt-in, and instances can avoid using it. Some do because it's a lot of server cost for stuff they don't care about.

I've created a few communities, and wondered why I was immediately getting ~30 subscribers, and this is probably why