Fediverse

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.

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

> 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

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

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.

"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

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

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.

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?

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 🫡

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

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!

Mastodon establishes non-profit in the US, while Germany revokes their nonprofit status

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/

@fediverse

> We’re excited to announce the Board of Directors governing this newly formed entity: > >Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org > >Karien Bezuidenhout is an advocate for openness and supporter of social entrepreneurs. > >Amir Ghavi leads Fried Frank’s core technology practices as the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice > >Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of Mastodon since 2020. > >Biz Stone is an entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media platforms.

EU :

> Our commitment to the fediverse is here to stay. > > We are working on a solution to ensure our continued presence on your feeds, taking full advantage of Mastodon's identity portability. > > And we are even growing the team behind our Mastodon presence, increasing efforts to engage with your comments on our posts. > > We are fully committed to being a real part of the conversation in the fediverse. > > Interested in our next steps? Follow us as we take on this new chapter.

/me : 🤔

> Unfortunately, despite our efforts to find a new home for EU Voice and EU Video in other EUIs, we have been unable to secure new ownership to maintain the servers and sustain operations at the high standards that EUIs and our users deserve”.

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!

cross-posted from: https://mediaformat.org/wordress-activitypub/article-working-group/

> 📣 This is a callout proposing a working group to improve Article interop in Mastodon, and across fediverse servers & apps > > 📣 This is a callout proposing a working group to improve Article interop in Mastodon, and across fediverse servers & apps > > Follow @article\_interop@lemmy.ml to join the discussion > > 🔃 Share for reach cc: @article@a.gup.pe > > \#Article #ActivityPub #Wordpress #Plume #WriteFreely #Known > > \#activitypub #Article #Known #Plume #wordpress #WriteFreely

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10963743

> > In response to Bray’s toot, Evan Prodromou — one of the creators of ActivityPub, who is currently writing an O’Reilly book about the protocol — noted that this “is also the argument for using the ActivityPub API.” He described the API as “an open, extensible API that can handle any kind of activity type — not just short text.” > > > > This gets to the nub of the issue. The fact that I can’t use my Mastodon identity to, for example, sign up to Pixelfed is not actually an ActivityPub issue — it’s because the two applications, Mastodon and Pixelfed, each require you to create an account on their respective products. What Prodromou is suggesting is that, technically, you can use the ActivityPub API for account access.

> Das Fediverse wächst weiter: Über das zugrundeliegende Protokoll ActivityPub soll in diesem Jahr auch die Blogging- und Newsletter-Plattform Ghost föderieren.

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.

> Today, open source publishing platform Ghost announced that it will soon join the Fediverse with ActivityPub integration baked-in to its feature suite. The announcement includes a handy explanation of what ActivityPub is, the benefits that provides to publishers on Ghost, and a deep dive into where these features will be found in the near future

They’re not done yet. Just announcing (and the verge reporting on it).

Their announcement (here) is quite forceful though, interestingly. The article described it as a manifesto.

See also a recent post here about their survey on integrating activity pub: https://lemmy.ml/post/14734757

Looks like it's really happening!

"This idea has been at the top of the list for a long time, so this week we’re starting work to look into the possibility of adding ActivityPub support to Ghost. Because there are lots of different potential ways this could be built, the team is curious to hear more detail about how you imagine this working… If you have a moment spare, could you fill out this 2-minute, 3 question survey to tell us what you’d like to see?" posted by John O’Nolan, CEO and Founder of Ghost

> Forum federation, Ghosts, Event Planners and the source code of Truth Social.

cross-posted from: https://azorius.net/g/azorius/p/G44w3jl9Rv76x4Q3bk-meta-groups >I've implemented basic support for composite groups (groups of groups). (Formerly named meta groups.) There's a lot of redundancy because of the federated nature of the azoriverse, with similar groups duplicated across multiple servers. Composite groups are a solution, by presenting users with a (somewhat transparent) single group that collects all of the posts. > > I've created two groups, metaprog and technoscience, for demo and testing. > > This is still preliminary, so federation doesn't quite work yet, but eventually the goal would be that you can follow a composite group, and it will forward activities. Instead of having to individually chase down every new programming group that gets created, you could delegate that the metaprog admin (me) to keep the group list updated. > > Some basic federation is now working. I think it probably won't work from Lemmy, ironically, but azorius, honk and mastodon, etc. should be able to follow these groups. (Don't follow from azorius until after updating.)