Fediverse

Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon... There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation... A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.

But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.

And if your hobby is tech, that's fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don't embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.

We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!

Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it's... barely there. You're not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that's not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There's a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.

This is the "content" people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.

There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.

ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.

Title ^ I'd like to explore Peertube but I don't know where to start.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has shared a transcript from the owner of Burisma that directly refutes the Biden bribery allegations.

I discovered yesterday evening that Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances. Specifically, a 403 'access denied' is returned when the user agent contains "kbinBot" anywhere in the string. This has been causing a cascade of failures with federation for many server owners, flooding the message queue with transport errors.

This doesn't appear to be a mistake; it has been done very deliberately, only on Lemmy.ml. Lemmy.world and other large instances do not exhibit the same behavior. It also isn't a side effect of the bug introduced in Lemmy 0.18. You can observe by sending the following in a terminal

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.world/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "kbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test                                
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "notKbinBot v0.1" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 403
[...]

> curl -I --user-agent "placeholder-user-agent" https://lemmy.ml/u/test
HTTP/2 200
[...]

Additional evidence of this not being a Lemmy 0.18 bug:

• This occurs when making web requests to any location on the Lemmy.ml webserver, not just ActivityPub endpoints.

• Go to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and pick an instance running 0.18.0. Perform the above commands, replacing the URL for Lemmy.ml with that particular instance's address.

If this continues, my instance may need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. This is especially problematic because Lemmy.ml continues to federate information outbound to other kbin instances while refusing to allow inbound communication from them.

Spoofing the user agent is less than ideal, and doesn't respect Lemmy.ml's potential wish to not be contacted by /kbin instances. I don't post this to create division between communities, but I do hope that I can draw awareness to what's going on here. Defederating /kbin instances entirely would even be better than arbitrarily denying access one-way. This said, we should all attempt to maintain a good-faith interpretation until otherwise indicated by the Lemmy developers. It's possibel that this is a firewall misconfiguration or some other webserver-related bug.

Relevant comment from me (#354 - [BUG] Critical errors/failed messages during messenger:consume)

Edits:

• Yes, people have already tried reaching out to the Lemmy instance admins in their Matrix room with no answer.

• Someone has posed a question on Lemmy.ml about the block here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1563840

I'm changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:

Of course, it's possible to work with companies you don't trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don't trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is ... risky. There's a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as "prudently defensive" in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: "block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block." Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:

We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though

Previously, I'd thought "some block, some federate" would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:

My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:

1. Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse

2. Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta

Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.

People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.

But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.

Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.

And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.

Everyone who’s into the fediverse concept should read this article.

New research from my team on the #TwitterMigration: This is our 3rd quarterly update on which platforms are growing, new entries such as #BlueSky, #Substack Notes, #Nostr & all public data on Meta's #project92 Includes latest on the #RedditMigration, New polling, new posting data & more. Welcome any notes or feedback & boosts! Get it here: https://is.gd/5PJQH7 cc: @spreadmastodon @fediversereport @fediversenews

Attached: 2 images I'm not kidding, @pixelfed has silently shipped Live streaming support over a year ago. I don't think it's ready for prime time yet, that's why I haven't advertised it that much. I'm working to ship this within the next month 🚀 https://docs.pixelfed.org/running-pixelfed/optional-features/livestreaming/

Daniel Supernault (@dansup)

Rather than try to act like a link aggregator where people submit links to articles and images and that submission comes with a comment thread specific to the fediverse instance in which it was submitted, what if each news site, image host, blog, whatever was itself the instance and the reddit-style instances federate with those. Someone submits an article to /m/news and the comments link goes to the instance associated with that article. Submission is the act of 'bridging' the article's instance to yours. Everyone sees the same comment thread and it's tied to the article itself. Comment on the article via kbin and everyone sees your comment. Perhaps the user can also see what other communities/instances where the article has been posted, and perhaps comments could be filtered by user instance.

Could also have instances have separate comment sections that don't go the main one for communities that prefer to have insulated discussion (the discord effect, where you can share a link with friends and be assured that everyone can chat about it in an isolated environment), like "forking" the article.

I can see several benefits (and a few potential issues) with this, but it seemed like an interesting idea at least.

Obviously the biggest issue with this is getting the content sources on-board with acting like a federated server. But then again, tons of major sites use various third-party tech for comments on articles...

I had been having trouble getting meaningful results from the fediverse on Google, and after seeing this post, it seems I'm not the only one. So, I created a site that helps search the fediverse in your search engine of choice (it currently supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Dogpile).

Due to query limitations with most search engines, it currently only searches the top 15 lemmy/kbin instances, but I've tested it and it seems to provide access to a good chunk of fediverse content. The exception is Google, which should be far more reliable overall as well as providing the ability to search Mastodon and PeerTube.

If you have contributions or ideas for improvement, feel free to check out the project here or shoot me a message. Hope this helps people! :)

https://fedi-search.com/

Edit: Update in progress including improved search queries and support for Mastodon/PeerTube (Google only, unfortunately)

Edit 2: Update is live, along with a dedicated domain name. If the website doesn't look any different for you, try Ctrl+F5 or clearing site data - it seems some browsers are caching the old page.

As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those...

TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people's websites.

For years, people have posted their anecdotal or technical useful information on reddit because it was the most popular centralised but community-based website. So much that, this created the "<search query> + reddit" phenomenon.

We shouldn't have put all of our eggs in one basket: with the slow and painful downfall of the centralised network, we suddenly realised that most of our cumulative knowledge has been hosted on someone else's website of which owners don't give a damn about its users.

reddit is a link aggregator, it was meant to be used to discover other websites but in time, it turned into the website. This was a massive problem. Now that we've got the threadiverse, it makes me worry that we'll repeat the same mistake all over again.

Normally, I would've posted this on my blog and link it here but for years we've gotten accustomed to not "self-promote". This behaviour caused all traffic and engagement to stay in one place. There was nothing wrong with self-publishing; we left, spammers stayed.

Yes, there will always be that person with a bloated Wordpress blog with articles that sound like it was written by AI but, honestly, it's easy to block a domain, we've got the tools. We can fight off the spam and find gems on the internet.

The threadiverse is a beautiful thing, but accessing information shouldn't depend on it. Thanks for reading my blog post.

Did you ever wanna have a username but it was taken? Us early adopters to the fediverse can now freely choose nice, untaken usernames!

Let that sink in. We have the luxury and freedom to nearly choose any username we want. without having to add unnecessary underscores or numbers.

Thats nice.

I do love the fediverse but man...what I wouldn't do to live in the fetaverse

Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances

Alguém aqui fala português?

It seems like the "official" Lemmy instance, lemmy.ml, is currently experiencing some technical difficulties. It's been going up and down all morning and it isn't federating new posts.

Seems like they were right when the warned users to signup on other instances, that's why is important to remind people that you invite or you know are thinking to signup to do so on another instance.

While kbin.social has been the primary choice so far, there are other reliable options out there too. One of this instances is fedia.io, Additionally, you can explore more options on the instance listing at kbin.pub.

By spreading out the load among many instances, we can ensure that we don't face disruptions like the one we're experiencing right now.

I'd also like to know your opinions about this.

I know about PixelFed, but I'm not interested in photo sharing social media style. I just want something that works like Imgur when you upload your images as private. Maybe PixelFed has that option?

I hope this is the correct kind of post and the right place to ask, thanks in advance.