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Sean Tilley

@ deadsuperhero @lemmy.world

Posts
79
Comments
123
Joined
2 yr. ago

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

  • WeDistribute is conducting a poll for instance admins.

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  • Yeah, I kind of screwed up. In hindsight, I should have just made the question accept a text answer, rather than a multiple-choice one.

  • Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork

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  • I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/

    I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.

    It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • Pretty much everybody.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • They kind of fucked up everything in approaching this by not talking to the community and collecting feedback, making dumb assumptions in how the integration was supposed to work, leaking private posts, running everything through their AI system, and neglecting to represent the remote content as having came from anywhere else.

    The other thing is that Maven's whole concept is training an AI over and over again on the platform's posts. Ostensibly, this could mean that a lot of Fediverse content ended up in the training data.

  • IFTAS Launches Moderator Resource Portal

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  • I'm like 99% sure that this is just WordPress with BuddyPress extensions. I could be wrong! But, if that's the case, it's likely all open source already. It might be interesting to see if they can get it working with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress!

  • You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!

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  • I can't tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅

    As far as the "global square" part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you're right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.

    However, there's nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it's definitely not impossible.

  • You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!

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  • It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

    I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

  • The Trouble with Forking Mastodon

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  • Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

    It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

    The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

  • The Trouble with Forking Mastodon

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  • Thank you for these insights!

    Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

    It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

  • Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! | itsfoss.com

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  • It's an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:

    1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.
    2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.
    3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.

    I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.

  • Substack Competitor Ghost Announces ActivityPub Integration

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  • It's the WordPress competitor.

  • Fediverse webradios?

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  • Radio Free Fedi is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

  • Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server?

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  • Yeah, I don't have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

    There may be a "minimum threshold" for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I'll readily admit that this is conjecture.

  • Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server?

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  • Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.

    "Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!"

  • Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server?

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  • Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server?

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  • Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

  • You Can Now Follow President Biden on the Fediverse

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  • Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven't tried anything else.

    Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

  • What are some of the more novel forms of fediverse software?

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  • Basically, it's the second half of ActivityPub that's for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

    What's cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says "whatever, that's valid."

    It could be brilliant for prototyping.