In queste settimane abbiamo osservato e analizzato l'utilizzo dell'#AltText su #MastodonUno.
Oggi pubblichiamo la guida aggiornata per chiarire aspetti probabilmente non ancora del tutto chiari.
MastodonUno è già (tra le prime 20 istanze Mastodon mondiali) la prima istanza per utilizzo di AltText, ma la percentuale di copertura e soprattutto la qualità di scrittura hanno ancora ampissimi margini di miglioramento. 😉
L’AltText, letteralmente “testo alternativo” e descrittivo dell’immagine, fu concepito e introdotto da Louis Braille, all’interno del suo Codice per non vedenti e ipovedenti, ideato nella prima metà del XIX secolo. Il W3C cominciò da subito a implementarlo fin dalla prima specifica HTML pubblicata nel 1993. Nel corso degli anni l’AltText è stato spesso ignorato e spesso abusato (in ottica SEO).
In questo articolo ci occupiamo solo degli aspetti pratici che devono interessare gli utenti, in particolare su Mastodon.
Perché “in particolare su Mastodon”? Perché ogni piattaforma è creata con una sua “anima”, un suo senso, un suo scopo, che poi evolvono nel tempo; ma occorre tenere presente la natura della piattaforma per non snaturarla con un utilizzo inconsapevole.
Mastodon nasce come piattaforma sociale testuale di microblogging, ovvero è nato come piattaforma orientata ai contenuti testuali brevi.
Non significa ovviamente che non si possono utilizzare immagini o video (lo stesso creatore di Mastodon, appassionato di fotografia, pubblica foto); significa che devono essere utilizzati con maggior attenzione, cura e responsabilità (immagini e video hanno un impatto decisamente maggiore nella gestione delle istanze).
Prima di porsi il problema di come scrivere AltText efficaci, ci si deve chiedere se l’immagine (o video) che stiamo inserendo nel post sia effettivamente necessaria.
Dopo aver stabilito che un’immagine (o video) è effettivamente necessaria, ci sono poche e semplici linee guida a cui attenersi per scrivere AltText efficaci.
1 – Sintetici e contestuali, ma descrittivi.
Una o due frasi, che non solo descrivano l’immagine ma che eventualmente la contestualizzino al post, sono già sufficienti. Se poi si vuole abbondare di dettagli, tanto meglio (le moderne tecnologie assistive non hanno più i limiti delle generazioni precedenti: Mastodon offre fino a 1500 caratteri). Concludere sempre la frase con un punto.
2 – Cosa evitare.
“Immagine di…”, “Foto di…”, “Video di…”. È già lo screen reader a segnalare che è un'immagine o un video.
Assolutamente da evitare il copia/incolla del testo già utilizzato nel post: gli screen reader, anzichè leggere la descrizione effettiva dell'immagine, rileggerebbero il post.
3 – Esempi pratici.
Prima di vedere come inserire l'AltText tramite interfaccia web e app ufficiali Mastodon, sottolineiamo ancora che l'AltText deve descrivere ciò che effettivamente c'è nell'immagine/video, fornendo eventualmente un contesto.
Alcuni esempi.
Se inserisco l'immagine dell'Uomo Vitruviano di Leonardo da Vinci, un buon AltText potrebbe essere:
L'Uomo Vitruviano di Leonardo da Vinci, realizzato intorno al 1490, è un disegno iconico che rappresenta un uomo nudo inscritto in un cerchio e in un quadrato, simboleggiando l'armonia tra il corpo umano e la geometria. Il disegno, eseguito con penna e inchiostro su carta, misura 34,4 x 24,5 cm ed è conservato alle Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia. Le proporzioni dell'uomo sono basate sui canoni di Vitruvio, evidenziando la centralità dell'uomo come misura di tutte le cose. Il volto dell'uomo, con un'espressione concentrata, e le sue braccia e gambe disposte in posizioni sovrapposte, riflettono un rigoroso studio delle proporzioni umane e un profondo legame tra arte e scienza.
Se inserisco la copertina di The Dark Side of the Moon dei Pink Floyd, un buon AltText potrebbe essere:
La copertina di The Dark Side of the Moon dei Pink Floyd presenta un prisma triangolare su uno sfondo nero. La luce bianca entra da sinistra e si scompone in un fascio di colori che esce a destra, rappresentando i colori dell'arcobaleno. Questo design, creato dallo studio Hipgnosis, simboleggia la trasformazione della vita e delle idee, riflettendo il concetto di come l'individuo (il prisma) elabora e restituisce la luce (la vita) in forme diverse. La copertina è diventata un'icona visiva della band e della musica rock in generale.
Se inserisco la copertina del romanzo Musashi di Eiji Yoshikawa, un buon AltText potrebbe essere:
La copertina del libro Musashi di Eiji Yoshikawa presenta un'immagine suggestiva che evoca il tema del samurai e della ricerca del perfezionamento personale. Al centro, si può vedere un guerriero con una katana, che rappresenta Miyamoto Musashi, in una posa che trasmette determinazione e forza. Lo sfondo è caratterizzato da elementi naturali, come montagne e nuvole, che simboleggiano il viaggio interiore e le sfide che affronta. La palette di colori è calda e terrosa, richiamando l'ambientazione storica del Giappone del XVII secolo. Il titolo del libro è in caratteri chiari e prominenti, enfatizzando l'importanza della figura di Musashi nella cultura giapponese. Questa copertina comunica visivamente l'epicità e la profondità del racconto, invitando il lettore a immergersi nella vita di uno dei più leggendari samurai.
Se inserisco una foto paesaggistica, un buon AltText potrebbe essere:
Il Lago di Como mostra un paesaggio sereno e pittoresco, con acque calme che riflettono le montagne circostanti. In primo piano, si possono vedere piccole barche a vela e pedalò che galleggiano dolcemente sul lago, mentre sullo sfondo si ergono le imponenti Alpi, parzialmente coperte da una leggera nebbia. La vegetazione lussureggiante lungo le rive del lago aggiunge un tocco di verde vibrante, mentre il cielo azzurro e luminoso contribuisce a creare un'atmosfera di tranquillità e bellezza naturale.
Gli AltText possono essere ovviamente molto più sintetici, ma non si possono ridurre a “copertina del disco/libro/film”, “titolo dell'opera d'arte” o “Lago di Como”. 😁
Se si inseriscono vignette o meme, oltre a riportare il testo si deve anche descrivere la scena.
Gli AltText devono sempre fornire una descrizione, anche sommaria, del contenuto effettivo dell'immagine/video.
Per degli ottimi esempi di AltText efficaci, la University of South Carolina offre un’ampia casistica, oltre a indicazioni molto dettagliate per chi vuole approfondire.
Per chi invece vuole approfondire gli standard W3C in merito al AltText, può fare riferimento ai relativi tutorial.
Come inserire l'AltText su Mastodon.
Ci riferiamo solo a interfaccia web e app ufficiali per dare un riferimento omogeneo a tutti. Dopo aver compreso i pochi passaggi, sarà più intuitivo replicare anche sulle innumerevoli interfacce e app di terze parti. In generale è sufficiente prestare attenzione all'interfaccia/app utilizzata subito dopo aver inserito l'immagine/video: c'è sempre un'icona o una voce di menu relativa all'inserimento/modifica dell'AltText.
Al momento Mastodon consente di inserite fino a 4 immagini (e quindi 4 AltText) per post e un solo video per post. La dimensione massima per ogni immagine è di 16MB. La dimensione massima per un file video (o file audio) è di 99 MB.
Attenzione alla dimensione dei file inseriti: è sempre buona prassi cercare di comprimere le dimensioni per non impattare eccessivamente sui costi di gestione delle istanze. Nel caso si avessero immagini o video di diversi MB, esistono vari servizi freemium per comprimere al volo le dimensioni; uno dei più efficienti e semplici da utilizzare è XConvert.
Tramite interfaccia web ufficiale Mastodon (sia desktop che mobile).
1) Cliccare sull'icona graffetta (Aggiungi un file immagine, video o audio) per selezionare e inserire l'immagine. 2) cliccare su “modifica” per accedere alla schermata di inserimento del AltText.
3) Inserire il testo alternativo nel campo “Descrizione per ipovedenti” e cliccare su Applica.
Per modificare l'AltText già inserito ripetere il punto 2. Per inserire un'altra immagine ripetere il punto 1.
Utilizzare la funzione OCR di Mastodon (solo via web).
Se si inseriscono immagini che contengono testo, Mastodon (tramite interfaccia web) consente di riconoscerlo (“Rileva il testo dall’immagine”) e scriverlo automaticamente nel campo “Descrizione per ipovedenti” (ci sarà da correggere qualche errore, principalmente accenti).
Tramite App ufficiale Mastodon.
La procedura è valida anche per tutte le app di terze parti che sono fork dell'app ufficiale Android (per esempio Megalodon e Moshidon).
1) dopo aver selezionato e caricato l'immagine/video tappare sull'icona matita (modifica testo alternativo)
2) inserire/modificare il testo alternativo e tornare alla schermata precedente cliccando sulla freccia in alto a sinistra o effettuando uno swipe
Per modificare l'AltText ripetere dal punto 1.
È importante stabilire obiettivi.
Se siete utenti che non hanno mai scritto AltText, semplicemente cominciate, create l’abitudine. Dopo aver cominciato, migliorate. E’ così che evolve una collettività: quando ognuno fa la sua parte.
L’obiettivo minimo di Mastodon Uno è avere sempre la maggioranza delle immagini, inserite quotidianamente, dotate di AltText scritti bene. Solo qualche mese fa si era mediamente sotto il 20%. Oggi siamo mediamente sopra il 50% e puntiamo al 70%.
Tra le prime 20 istanze Mastodon mondiali, Mastodon Uno è la prima per utilizzo di AltText. Vogliamo migliorare ancora, sia quantitativamente (percentuale di AltText inseriti), sia qualitativamente (AltText scritti bene).
La nostra Uno Community gioca sempre un ruolo chiave nel Fediverso italiano. 😉
@steek_hutzee se un'immagine include del testo, sempre meglio riportarlo nel AltText (o riscrivendolo o provando con la funzione "rileva il testo dall'immagine"), insieme alla descrizione dell'immagine. 😉
@liberotoncello controllando velocemente i tuoi ultimi post, gli AltText che inserisci vanno già bene cosi. 😉
Qui ad esempio (mastodon.uno/@liberotoncello/1…) il testo che hai inserito come post dovresti eliminarlo e inserirlo solo come AltText, perché un non vedente è in grado di "leggere" il post ma non è in grado di "leggere" l'immagine in quanto sprovvista di AltText. Lo screen reader gli dirà solo che c'è un'immagine ma non gli dirà nulla di quell'immagine (poi dipende dai dispositivi). 😉
Per favore niente più stelline. Ho fatto il pieno di brodo di stelline. Ora gradirei carne lessa e pollo lesso oppure anche solo il dado per brodo e sarei felice di insaporire le mie minestrine con tante parole.
Non sono così presuntuoso da aspettarmi commenti sapidi ad ogni mio toot però le stelline da sole non hanno alcun sapore.
@liberotoncello si, come scritto nella guida, l'AltText come copia/incolla del post è da evitare: un non vedente si sentirebbe ripetere due volte il post senza avere una descrizione effettiva di ciò che contiene l'immagine. 😉
@Per_sfzio nessuno è MAI stato "ammonito" per scarsa confidenza con le prassi del Fediverso. Al massimo, i moderatori possono dare consigli agli utenti su come aderire meglio alle prassi consolidate nel Fediverso globale o in questa istanza. O correggergli eventuali idee sbagliate.
Si viene "ammoniti" solo se si tengono comportamenti problematici. E si banna solo chi persevera deliberatamente nella pubblicazione di contenuti che violano le regole dell'istanza.
@Per_sfzio se qui dentro hai paura di essere ammonita o espulsa, vuol dire che questa non è l'istanza giusta per te.
Se stare su mastodon.uno ti fa sentire a disagio, dovresti migrare velocemente su mastodon.social, dove nessuno dei moderatori inglesi e tedeschi si accorgerà se un account italiano si disallinea dalle prassi del fediverso
@Per_sfzio allora ti do' un ultimo consiglio: 1) non fare più ironia con me 2) non fare più ironia a proposito delle nostre pratiche di moderazione, perché quella che chiami ironia in realtà è sarcasmo e non ci è gradito.
Se non ti va di farlo o se non hai capito quello che ho detto, scaricati subito i profili che segui da questo link: mastodon.uno/settings/exports/…
In tal modo, quando farai di nuovo ironia su di noi e noi elimineremo il tuo profilo, potrai seguirli di nuovo tutti
Quando crei un nuovo account, non è sufficiente scrivere un messaggio di saluto, ma...
Quando crei un nuovo account #Friendica (ma questo vale anche per un account come Mastodon) e scrivi un messaggio, è molto improbabile che qualcuno lo veda sulla tua istanza ed è ancora meno probabile che venga visto sulle altre istanze.
Infatti se nessuno ti segue, il tuo post comparirà solo nella timeline locale della tua istanza.
Il problema è che all'inizio non c'è mai nessuno che ti segue e, se anche qualcuno dovesse vedere un tuo post con scritto "Ciao a tutti! Che fate di bello?", probabilmente non ti seguirà.
Per aumentare la possibilità di essere seguiti, bisogna innanzitutto seguire alcune semplici regole:
1) Modificare il profilo scegliendo una miniatura interessante, inserendo una descrizione accattivante e aggiungendo l'indirizzo del tuo blog o di un qualche tuo account social (e magari potresti "verificare" il tuo account) 2) Scrivere un messaggio di presentazione con una breve descrizione di te stesso e con l'indicazione dei tuoi interessi e "fissare" questo messaggio sul tuo profilo ossia in cima alla serie di messaggi che vedrà chiunque capiti per caso sul tuo profilo. E ricorda di usare gli hashtag #presentazione e #introduction e no: evita di utilizzare i post con il titolo, perché gli utenti Mastodon non li leggeranno correttamente 3) cercare hashtag e parole chiave per individuare utenti da seguire tra quelli che ti interessano, quelli che hanno interessi a te affini e quelli che potrebbero essere interessati a te 4) seguire i gruppi Friendica (qualcosa di simile ai gruppi Facebook) o le comunità Lemmy (qualcosa di simile ai canali Reddit) di tuo interesse, per incontrare utenti che condividono i tuoi interessi 5) lavorare sulle impostazioni del tuo profilo per rendere pubblico e ricercabile il tuo profilo e aggiungere la bandiera del tuo Paese al tuo profilo 6) usare (non troppi!) hashtag nei post che vuoi che vengano trovati 7) soprattutto, non fermarti a una sola istanza: cerca di entrare in contatto con utenti che si trovano in tante istanze diverse
Quando finalmente qualcuno deciderà di seguirti, allora i tuoi post si vedranno oltre che nella timeline locale della tua istanza, anche nella timeline personale di chi ti segue e nella timeline federata di quelle istanze in cui c'è qualcuno che ti segue.
Infine, se qualcuno decide di ricondividere il tuo post, allora anche i follower di quell'utente vedranno il tuo post.
Ora forse è più chiaro perché, quando crei un nuovo account, non è sufficiente scrivere un messaggio di saluto, ma devi assicurarti che quel messaggio sia visibile. Il Fediverso infatti non è come i social commerciali che ti sottopongono contenuti e ti "organizzano appuntamenti virtuali" all'interno della piattaforma per portarti a incontrare NON quegli utenti che ti interessano, MA qugli utenti che possono attirare di più la tua attenzione per tenerti attaccato alla loro app e al loro social e mungere la maggiore quantità dei tuoi dati comportamentali.
The inflow of Brazilians to Bluesky continues, Firefish dies another death, and more. [share author='Laurens Hof' profile='https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/' avatar='https://poliverso.org/photo/206608119366e42c304ffac007248590-5.jpeg?ts=1734620326' link='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-83/' posted='2024-09-08 18:23:42' guid='08552256-1db60ec771464850-0985b522' message_id='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-83/']Last Week in Fediverse – ep 83
Bluesky and Brazil continues to be a great match, and lots of other smaller news items.
Programming note: I’m switching the release day for this weekly newsletter to a Wednesday. Over the last year and a half I’ve spend my free Sundays writing this, and this is not sustainable in the long term. So look for the next edition to arrive on Wednesday the 18th.
Bluesky and Brazil
Bluesky remains highly popular among Brazilians as an alternative to X, that got banned in the country last week. Bluesky has added 3 million accounts since the ban went into effect just over a week ago. When I reported on it last week Bluesky had added 1 million accounts. Of these new accounts, around 85% are from Brazil. The popularity of Bluesky in Brazil also shows up in both politics and the media: President Lula, his party PT Brazil, the Supreme Court, and House of Representatives all have their accounts validated by using their domain as their handle. The media is also paying attention, one of the most popular news programs in Brazil, Jornal Nacional, showed their Bluesky handle during the show. Some of the biggest newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo and Correio Braziliense covered Bluesky as well.
What stands out to me about both articles is that they do not mention Threads. Threads have not made any data available regarding the impact of the Brazilian ban on X on the platform. While Threads is likely to still get a large number of signups simply due to its massive size, it is not part of the conversation in the way that Bluesky is for Brazil.
The inflow of new people also shows up for the Trust and Safety team. In an update Bluesky’s head of Trust and Safety, Aaron Rodericks, shares that the team normally receives about 20k reports per week, a number that skyrocketed to 270k reports, predominantly in Portugese.
The News
Firefish has died another death. This February, the original creator of Firefish Kainoa transferred ownership to the maintainer naskya, without naskya being informed beforehand. Naskya has been maintaining Firefish alone for the last 7 months, while noting that this them taking over the project as unwillingly. Naskya says that this is unsustainable, putting the project in maintanance mode. IceShrimp provides migration instructions for server admins who want to transfer from Firefish to IceShrimp. I’ve got fond memories of the time period during which Firefish worked well, which is sadly a while ago now. It enabled me to build a community in a way that I’ve found much more difficult to do on Mastodon, and the community that I’ve build during the Firefish period is still one that feels like my closest community on Mastodon.
Truefans is a podcasting app that is building ActivityPub integration. It gives you the possibility to create a fediverse account as well (truefans.social), and activities that you take in the Truefans app (listen/comment/follow) are broadcasted into the fediverse.
Forgejo’s monthly update: “Federation is getting useful. There is now more than preliminary background work, and the first exciting things could be tried out by users. The work is not near the goal yet.”
The SocialCG held their monthly meeting, and decided on two new Task Forces: a task force to update the website activitypub.rocks, and a Trust and Safety Task Force. The goal for the website task force is to make sure that the activitypub.rocks website is a better entry point, as it is badly out of date, with the last post from January 2021. The Trust and Safety team from Threads has already expressed interest in participating in the task force.
Trending topics are a feature that is highly sought after by the Brazilian community, and the community has build two versions themselves: as a browser extension and as a separate site.
Peertube continues to make inroads with livestreaming, especially via the livechat plugin, which got a significant upgrade again.
Bluesky continues the tradition of 3rd party clients implementing features before the official clients does: this time the Skeets app already supports displaying videos, even though the feature is not released yet and only the developers can post (otherwise invisible) videos.
A research paper – An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises – provides a critical analysis of the extend that the fediverse can deliver on the promises of decentralisation. Worth checking out, I also find the framing of ‘techno-romanticism’ as to explain the gap between what is promised and what is actually happening in the fediverse.
The Dutch coalition of public organisations PublicSpaces is starting PeerTube Spaces to promote the usage of Peertube as as suitable alternative for public organisations.
The (unofficial) atprotocol.dev community held a talk with the creator of event planner Smoke Signal, the video recording is available here. The recording from the previous talk, by the creator of frontpage.fyi is available as well. This Thursday is the next event, ‘From Feeds to Labelers with Ændra Rininsland’
Researchers can link their social profiles with their @ORCID_Org accounts, bringing their scientific contributions directly into the #fediverse 🌐 The "Professional Profile" feature displays key details such as topics, employment history, educational background, peer review counts, and the whole publications list... 💡 What other data sources do you think would be valuable to include? 🔥 We’re eager to explore this further and hear your ideas next week at @fediforum @open_science
Considered hooking up to @crossref and @opencitations as well? Either for per-article citation stats or to notify account owners when something interesting happens. 🙂
@fresseng It would be interesting to explore how organizations could link their accounts to @ResearchOrgs, so that we can automatically retrieve scientific data about the org from their APIs and display it on their profile as a starting point. I’ve added it to next week’s agenda for a brainstorming session with the network. Thanks for the suggestion ✌️ @fediforum @open_science
Enabling third-party integrations in Bonfire is a breeze. ✨ Scientists can choose to enable @OpenAlex widgets in their Extensions settings to display relevant data about their work and research topics directly on their profiles. We've prototyped an initial extension and are excited to explore more advanced use cases with our network, pushing the boundaries of integrating open and #FAIR data into the #fediverse. Join us at the #Fediforum to discuss this and much more! @open_science
Reti decentralizzate come strumento per combattere la disinformazione e la censura: le reti federali e libere, collaborative e aperte
(CONTENUTO AD ACCESSO LIMITATO)
Analisi delle opportunità e i limiti delle reti decentralizzate come risorsa per superare i problemi dei social tradizionali e della resilienza di queste reti come strumento per combattere la disinformazione e la censura
The presence of disinformation and hate speech has multiplied on several centralised social networks. Since its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter (renamed X) has taken controversial measures to increase profits, at the cost of degrading the cont…
Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks
(LIMITED ACCESS CONTENT)
Analysis of the opportunities and limits of decentralized networks as a resource to overcome the problems of traditional social networks and the resilience of these networks as a tool to fight disinformation and censorship
The presence of disinformation and hate speech has multiplied on several centralised social networks. Since its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter (renamed X) has taken controversial measures to increase profits, at the cost of degrading the cont…
I'm almost finished fixing Account Migrations in @pixelfed ✨
If you're worried you lost (pixelfed) followers during a migration, don't fret!
Once I ship this, and pixelfed instances update, you simply need to redo the migration from your old account (it won't break anything, but is limited to once per 7 days in Mastodon)
And you're Pixelfed followers will be migrated to your new account!
🔥 "Content Labeling" is a feature that allows moderators (or those w/ permissions) to add context to potentially misleading or unclear posts by attaching labels and linking reliable sources. It aims to reduce misinformation and promote informed discussions. Moderators can choose predefined labels (or create custom ones), add notes and reference links to guide readers. More about the work in progress here: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/cont… #Fediforum @open_science --- Read more: indieweb.social/@bonfire/11308…
To better understand the workflow involved in building Bonfire extension from scratch, we implemented a design pattern from the Prosocial Design Network: label misleading content; add links to reliable, related content.
🔥 Next week we'll be presenting and discussing the Open Science Network initiative at #fediforum alongside a growing network of academics and open science activists 🧬
Together, we'll explore how we can build open and federated digital spaces that are co-designed and governed by scientific communities.
Join us to explore how we can create digital spaces that foster collaboration, ensure data ownership, and push the boundaries of open science practices in federated environments.
The Open Science Network demo at #Fediforum will focus on three key questions:
- What features are missing in federated spaces to effectively access scientific content and news as in the first wave of #ScienceTwitter? - Which open data sources should be aggregated to merge a scientist's social and professional presence in a single meaningful profile? - What are the missing features to enhance scientific discussion, collaboration and production in a federated environment? @open_science 1/2
In upcoming posts, we’ll share features we'll be demoing next week to spark public discussion and foster coordination within the broader federated scholarly community. 2/2 @open_science
Guida galattica per X-stoppisti finiti su mastodon – La nuova versione della guida di informapirata “Probabilmente quasi tutto quello sapete su Mastodon è…
🔥 Next week we'll be presenting and discussing the Open Science Network initiative at #fediforum alongside a growing network of academics and open science activists 🧬
Together, we'll explore how we can build open and federated digital spaces that are co-designed and governed by scientific communities.
Join us to explore how we can create digital spaces that foster collaboration, ensure data ownership, and push the boundaries of open science practices in federated environments.
Guida galattica per X-stoppisti finiti su mastodon – La nuova versione della guida di informapirata “Probabilmente quasi tutto quello sapete su Mastodon è…
@RaccoonForFriendica nuova versione 0.1.0-alpha19 appena rilasciata! Nuove funzioni: supporto sperimentale ai messaggi diretti, uno degli aspetti più interessanti e forse meno conosciuti di questa piattaforma. Come sempre, se qualcuno ha voglia di provare e di darmi feedback, tenendo conto che è pur sempre un'alpha, contattatemi su Matrix, oppure mandate direttamente un DM su Friendica ora che si può 🚀😉🦝 #friendica #friendicadev #androidapp #androiddev #fediverseapp #opensource #kotlin #kmp #compose #livefasteattrash
Meglio utilizzare la 0.1.0-alpha20 in cui ho apportato alcune correzioni, specialmente per evitare di inviare erroneamente dei messaggi destinati a un account che non si segue.
Il prossimo obiettivo, per chi se lo stesse chiedendo, è la gestione della media gallery (creazione, modifica e cancellazione di foto e album) con possibilità di inserire nei post come allegato un'immagine già presente nella gallery. Vediamo nel weekend quanto tempo riesco a trovare 😉
@Kagi HQ è l'interessantissimo progetto per un motore di ricerca a pagamento, senza traccianti e con un'accuratezza nell'individuazione dei risultati tale da escludere tutto lo spam di Google.
Chi crede che i costi di #Kagi siano troppo elevati, dovrebbe riflettere su un piccolo dettaglio: se Google lascia fare "gratis" tutte quelle ricerche, chi paga quei costi? La risposta potrebbe sembrare semplice: "gli inserzionisti".
Eppure questa sarebbe una risposta incompleta: come dire che la pioggia è causata dalle nuvole!
In realtà quei costi li pagano gli utenti, facendosi mungere e lasciando che Google estragga il loro "valore", un po' come nella human farm di Matrix...
In ogni caso siamo davvero contenti che un servizio come quello di Kagi, efficace e rispettoso della privacy degli utenti, sia approdato qui nel #Fediverso
Hello, Fediverse! We're Kagi, and we're on a mission to create a friendlier, more human-centric internet that has the users' best interest in mind.
Our core product is a search engine that is ad-free, tracking-free, and fully supported by our users. We've worked hard to deliver a high-quality, fast, and reliable search experience without compromising user privacy: kagi.com/
@MuhammaPy perché non a tutti piace il fatto che DuckDuckGo utilizza, principalmente, i risultati di Bing. Ultimamente sto usando la ricerca di Brave (che pare essere indipendente) e in italiano è migliorata moltissimo.
@MuhammadPython perché onestamente con duckduck go non si riesce a trovare mai una mazza... 😅
Ci sono diversi servizi che integrano motori di ricerca esistenti e in alcuni casi aggiungono un proprio sistema, ma un aspetto importante di Kagi è che le ricerche mostrano davvero quello che hai chiesto. Sembra banale, ma oggi non lo è più tanto perché quando fai una ricerca su un qualsiasi motore di ricerca o carichi una vagonata di letame da cui spulciare quello che ti serve, oppure trovi pochi risultati rilevanti.
@Oblomov mah, è tutto il pomeriggio che la mia timeline (gente che seguo) è lentissima, e quasi solo con post in inglese, e visto che contabo sta avendo problemi grossini mi chiedevo se ci fosse correlazione
se provo ad andare via web su puntarella.party o livellosegreto.it sembrano funzionare. Forse è solo il rientro dalle ferie che ha stroncato i fedinauti italiani 8-D
@Oblomov uhm, ho provato ad aprire cisti ed era lentissimo (ma potrebbe essere un mio problema), ma su mastodon.cisti.org/public/loca… vedo pochissimi post recenti, il che potrebbe spiegare alcune cose
@rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua @Oblomov quindi eri tu che avevi da fare oggi pomeriggio, e a me non arrivavano più messaggi? è stata un'ipotesi che ho fatto, in effetti 😁
@Elena ``of Valhalla'' io sono un po' prevenuto, ma secondo me è tutta la monnezza che arriva da newsmast.community (che secondo me al momento è molto peggio di quanto temevo potsse essere Threads)
Da quello che ho letto il problema è sull'infrastruttura OpenStack, non so in quale datacenter. redsnake.io è su Oracle Cloud a Montreal, in Canada. bologna.one è su OVH, ma non credo usi OpenStack (dico bene @victorvandort ?)
@chiaraepoi Confermo. L'infrastruttura è nostra, OVH fornisce i server bare metal e la connettività. E i server fisici stanno in due datacenter diversi (Gravelines e Roubaix)
@𝔅𝔯𝔬𝔫𝔰𝔬𝔫 𝔖𝔢𝔤𝔯𝔢𝔱𝔬 🦋 @Oblomov beh, credo che tra M1 e le istanze anarchiche non ci siano grandi punti in comune (tranne eventualmente essere per caso nello stesso datacenter, ovviamente)
Maybe. I know canada has two little vps in there anyhow 😉 Munich was fine and nuremberg is back up for me on both vps. Fortunately, the email for one of my domains is hosted by zoho (free/old acct) in north america, so I got my boss' email telling me I had the day off! 😀
Not terrible - my job drives me out to the tree farm, so I would just have been hanging around my front door reading or picking fruit for a half hour before cluing in that no one was coming. However, it was nice to know 2 hours in advance of that, so I could plan other things for the day, which is going very well, so far 😀
In effetti non c'e' molto da stare allegri - grazie @nilocram per la segnalazione - Approfitto per segnalare su Domani un articolo sui consumi energetici dell'IA e un bell'articolo di Federico Guerrini sul personal digital twin.
Nonostante i buoni propositi, l’obiettivo di raggiungere la sostenibilità ambientale è sempre più lontano: la colpa è tutta dell’intelligenza ... Scopri di più!
Reply Collections have not yet really reached the centre of the #Fediverse. Among other things, moderation aspects play a role here (see FEP-7458 or FEP-5624). But in principle, they offer a wonderful opportunity to maintain consistency in discussion threads in the Fediverse.
Smaller instances in particular often lack reactions to content published in the Fediverse. In principle, this is not a bad thing. Nevertheless, it makes sense for both servers and clients to be able to retrieve a complete comment tree in some scenarios (possibly at the request of a user).
To this end, we have submitted a first draft in a pull request to the Upstream #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress. In this case, we benefit from the already existing comment management of the WordPress core and only list approved comments in the replies collection.
Bluesky experiences a massive new wave of signups from Brazil, Premium feeds with sub.club, and much more. [share author='Laurens Hof' profile='https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/' avatar='https://poliverso.org/photo/206608119366e42c304ffac007248590-5.jpeg?ts=1734620326' link='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/' posted='2024-09-01 18:04:28' guid='08552256-1db60dc7714646e3-cb23b587' message_id='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/']Last Week in Fediverse – ep 82
1 million new accounts on Bluesky as Brazil bans X, and premium feeds with Sub.club, and much much more.
Brazil bans X, and a signup wave to Bluesky
The Brazilian supreme court has banned the use of X in an ongoing legal fight with Elon Musk. The ban follows after a long trajectory of legal issues between the Brazilian government and Musk’s X. In April 2024, the Brazilian court ordered X to block certain X accounts that were allegedly related to the 2023 coup attempt, which Musk refused to do. In that same time period, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened an account on Bluesky, and there was already an inflow of a Brazilian community into Bluesky. Now, the legal fight has further escalated over X’s refusal to appoint a legal representative in the country, and Musk’s continuing refusal to comply with Brazil’s laws and regulation has resulted in the supreme court banning the use of X in the country altogether.
The ban on X has caused a massive signup wave to Bluesky, with over 1 million new accounts created in just three days, of which the large majority are from Brazil. The user statistics shot up even more than that, suggesting that there are a lot of people with an existing account logging back in as well.
The new inflow of people to Bluesky is having some significant effects on the network, as well as on the state of decentralised social networks more broadly:
President Lula is putting actual focus on Bluesky. In one of his final posts on X, Luala listed in non-alphabetical order all other platforms that he is active on, and placed Bluesky at the top of the list. Posts by Lula that are placed on Bluesky (134k followers) as well as on Threads (2.4m followers) get more than 5 times as much likes on Bluesky. Today, Lula explicitly asked people on Bluesky what they thought about the platform, in a post that got over 30k likes and counting. It is hard to imagine that the Brazilian government is not paying attention to this all, and is looking which platform(s) the Brazilian community is moving towards in the wake of the ban on X.
Brazilians are a very active community on the internet (see Orkut), and bring with them their own unique culture to Bluesky. The current decentralised social networks are heavily focused on US politics, judged by top posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky, and beyond shitposts and memes there is surprisingly little space for mainstream pop culture and sports. The Brazilian community does seem to bring a large number of pop culture and sports to Bluesky, significantly diversifying the topics of discussion, and in turn, creating more space for other people who are interested in that in the future. The activity of Brazilians on microblogging can also be seen in the like counts on popular posts of Bluesky: before this week, the most popular posts of any given day usually got around 3k likes, this has sprung up to 30k to 50k likes. Brazilians are so chatty in fact, that currently 81% of the posts on the network are in Portugese, and the amount of accounts of people who post on a given day has gone up from a third to over 50%.
The Bluesky engineers have build a very robust infrastructure system, and the platform has largely cruised along fine without issues, even when faced with a 15x increase in traffic. This all without having to add any new servers. For third party developers, such as the Skyfeed developer, this increase in traffic did came with downtime and more hardware requirements however. It shows the complications of engineering an open system, while the Bluesky team itself was prepared with their core infrastructure, third party infrastructure, on which a large number of custom feeds rely, was significantly less prepared for the massive increase in traffic.
In contrast, the ban on X in Brazil has made little impact on Mastodon, with 3.5k new signups from Brazil on Mastodon.social. I’d estimate that this week has seen 10k new accounts above average, with 15k new accounts the previous week and 25k in this week. That places Mastodon two orders of magnitude behind Bluesky in signups from Brazil. There are a variety of reasons for this, which deserve their own analysis, this newsletter is long enough as it is. One thing I do want to point out is within fediverse community there are two sub communities that each have their own goals and ideas about the fediverse and growth. Some people responded with the news that most Brazilians went to Bluesky with type of response that indicated that they appreciate the small, quiet and cozy community that the fediverse currently provides, and a distrust of the growth-at-all-costs model for social networks. For other people however, their goal of the fediverse is to build a global network that everyone is a part of and everyone uses (‘Big Fedi’), a view of the fediverse that is also represented in the latest episode of the Waveform podcast (see news below). And if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.
The News
Sub.club is a new way to monetise feeds on the fediverse, with the goal of bringing the creator economy to the fediverse. It gives people the ability to create premium feeds that people can only access via a subscription. People can follow this feed from any Mastodon account (work on other fediverse platforms is ongoing). Sub.club handles the payment processes and infrastructure, for which they charge 6% of the subscription fee (compared to 8-12% Patreon charges). Sub.club also makes it possible for other apps to integrate, both IceCubes and Mammoth have this option. Bart Decrem, who is one of the people behind Sub.club, is also the co-founder of the Mastodon app Mammoth. Sub.club also explicitly positions itself as a way for server admins to fund their server. Most server admins rely on donations by their users, often via services like Patreon, Ko-fi, Open Collective or other third party options. By integration payments directly into the fediverse, Sub.club hopes that the barrier for donations will be lower, and more server admins can be financially sustainable.
Newsmast has build a new version of groups software for the fediverse, and the first group is dedicated to the Harris campaign. There are few types of groups available that integrate with Mastodon, such as with Friendica or a.gup.pe. These groups function virtually identical to hashtags, by boosting out posts where the group account is tagged in to everyone who follows the group account. As there is no moderation in these types of group accounts, it allows anyone to hijack the group account. A group account dedicated to a political campaign is especially vulnerable to this. On Mastodon a volunteer Harris Campaign group used a Friendica group for campaign organising, but the limited moderation tools (blocking a user from following the group) that are available are not working, which allowed blocked users to still get their posts boosted by the group account. Newsmast’s version of Groups gives (working) moderation tools, and only boosts top level comments and not replies, to cut down on the noise. For now, the new Group is only available to the Harris Campaign group for testing, but it will come later to Mastodon servers that run the upcoming Patchwork plugin.
Bluesky added quite a number of new anti-toxicity features in their most recent app update. Bluesky has added quote posting controls, allowing people to set on a per-post basis if people can quote the post or not. There is also the option to remove quotes after the fact as well: if you’ve allowed quote posts on a post you’ve made, but someone made a quote post that you do not feel comfortable with, you have the possibility to detach your post. Another update is the possibility to hide replies on your posts. Bluesky already hides comments under a ‘show more’ button if the comment is labeled by a labeler you subscribe to. You now have the option to do so on all comments that are made on your posts, and the hidden comment will be hidden for everyone. Finally, Bluesky has changed how replies are shown in the Following feed, which is an active subject of discussion. I appreciate the comments made by Bluesky engineer Dan Abramov here, who notes there are two different ways of using Bluesky, who each prioritise comments in conflicting ways. As new communities grow on Bluesky, prioritising their (conflicting) needs becomes more difficult, and I’m curious to see how this further plays out.
The WVFRM (Waveform) podcast of popular tech YouTuber MKBHD has a special show about the fediverse, ‘Protocol Wars – The Fediverse Explained!’. It is partially a discussion podcast, partial explainer, and partial interview with many people within the community. They talk with Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Bluesky’s Jay Graber, Threads’s Adam Mosseri, and quite some more people. It is worth noting for a variety of reason. The show is quite a good introduction, that talks to many of the most relevant names within the community. MKBHD is one of the biggest names in the tech creator scene, and many people are paying attention to what he and his team is talking about. Furthermore, I found the framing as ‘protocol wars’ interesting, as the popularity of Bluesky in Brazil as an X replacement indicates that there is indeed a race between platforms to be build on top of the new dominant protocol.
Darnell Clayton has a very interesting blog post, in which he discovers that there is a discrepancy in follower count for Threads accounts that have turned on fediverse sharing. Clayton notes that the follower count shown in the Threads app is lower than the one shown in a fediverse client, for both Mastodon and Flipboard. He speculates that this difference is the number of fediverse accounts that follow a Threads account. It should be noted that this is speculation and has not been confirmed, but if this is true, it would give us a helpful indication of how many fediverse accounts are using the connection with Threads. While we’re talking about Threads accounts, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko confirmed that the mastodon.social server has made a connection with 15.269 Threads accounts who have turned on fediverse sharing.
Ghost’s latest update on their work on implementing ActivityPub: “With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond.”
Dhaaga is a multiplatform fediverse client that adds unique client-side functionalities.
Lotide, a experimental link-aggregator fediverse platform, ceases development.
A custom QR code generator, which some pretty examples of custom QR codes for your fediverse profile.
Custom decentralised badges on atproto with badges.blue, a new work in process by the create of atproto event planner Smoke Signal.
Buongiorno a tutti! Grazie a molti di voi, Poliversity è diventata la sesta istanza mastodon italiana con più utenti attivi, benché il numero complessivo di utenti sia poco più alto.
Per evitare la presenza di bot, utenti inattivi o che non ricordano più di essersi iscritti provvediamo a una pulizia periodica degli account inattivi.
"Vogliamo utenti veri e pubblicazioni vere: utenti che neanche si presentano, saranno eliminati; il crossposting da twitter è deprecato. Le pubblicazioni automatizzate sono accettate solo se presidiate. Gli utenti non attivi da più di sei mesi potranno essere eliminati senza preavviso"
Poliverso è la più grande istanza italiana di Friendica. I fondi raccolti verranno utilizzati per finanziare la manutenzione di poliverso.org (friendica), di poliversity.it …
@kathsone no, perché il fediverso è pieno di bot, di crawler, di profili duplicati e io non spendo soldi per tenere in piedi un server di bot.
Inoltre gli utenti che non si connettono da più di sei mesi quasi sicuramente si sono dimenticati di avere un account che probabilmente hanno aperto con un'email secondaria che non guardano mai.
Eliminare il loro account, dopo un paio di tentativi di contattarli, è un bene anche per loro, per i loro dati personali e per me che li gestisco!
Apprezzo in particolare (mi è piaciuto fin da quando richiesi l'iscrizione) l'obbligo di presentazione. All'epoca era un'istanza specializzata, richiesi un'eccezione per il mio curriculum non perfettamente centrato. @kathsone @fediverso
@Trames Mi fa piacere che sia stato apprezzato, considerando anche che poi alla fine la presentazione del proprio profilo costituisce anche un vantaggio per sé stessi e per il proprio ingresso nel fediverso perché aiuta a farsi conoscere e contestualizza la propria presenza all'interno del social
È possibile iscriversi a Poliversity o in generale ad un'altra istanza di Mastodon mantenendo il proprio "account" @mastodon.social? Ho già un altro "account" @mastodon.uno. Non so se ho usato la terminologia corretta. Scusa. Sto cercando di capire come funziona Mastodon ma ho qualche difficoltà. Grazie.
@robertanegrelli puoi certamente iscriverti a tutte le istanze che preferisci. Tieni conto però che iscrivendoti a due istanze con lo stesso software, o differenzi in maniera significativa i due account, usando per esempio in un caso la lingua italiana e nell'altro la lingua inglese, oppure alla fine tenderai a usare solo uno dei due account
@robertanegrelli In alternativa, puoi migrare uno dei tuoi account su un account nuovo.
Un'altra possibilità è provare un account aggiuntivo basato su un software diverso come per esempio Friendica. In questo caso potresti provare a iscriverti dall'istanza poliverso.org
La guida di Informapirata a Friendica, dedicata a tutti coloro che dal Fediverso vogliono ottenere tutto il possibile.
Un Mastodon con gli steroidi e attualmente l’unica alternativa a Facebook di tutto il Fediverso. Con mille pregi e, soprattutto, mille difetti. E mai nessuno che ci spieghi come utilizzarlo. Almeno finora…
Per il Sostegno del Fediverso (messaggio lungo di 2000 caratteri) Ciao a tutti! Vorrei ricordarvi l'importanza del fediverso e di sostenere la vostra istanza: Il fediverso è fatto da migliaia di istanze, la maggior parte delle istanze è gestita da volontari appassionati e il loro funzionamento è finanziato principalmente attraverso donazioni o a spese personali degli amministratori. I social media commerciali sono sostenuti da pubblicità personalizzate, in quanto grazie alla raccolta dati e altre pratiche commerciali, sanno tutto su di noi e i nostri interessi. il fediverso, al contrario, è libero da pubblicità e non ti spia, ma gestirlo comporta costi reali. È fondamentale riconoscere l'impegno e le risorse necessarie per mantenere attive queste piattaforme.
Vorrei esprimere la mia gratitudine a coloro che già stanno sostenendo la propria istanza. Il vostro contributo è importantissimo e fa la differenza. A chi invece non ha la possibilità di contribuire economicamente, voglio sottolineare che questi spazi sono aperti a tutti, indipendentemente dalla capacità di sostenerli finanziariamente.
Per coloro che possono permetterselo, vi invito a considerare la possibilità di fare una donazione alla vostra istanza. Se trovate valore nella piattaforma e desiderate vederla migliorare, il vostro supporto può essere un modo significativo per contribuire. Le istruzioni per effettuare una donazione sono disponibili nella pagina della vostra istanza, quindi non esitate a dare un'occhiata.
Infine, un ringraziamento speciale a tutti coloro che sostengono Pixelfed.uno, Mastodon.uno, Peertube.uno e tutti gli altri servizi etici dei @devol@mastodon.uno. Il vostro supporto è fondamentale per continuare a offrire un ambiente positivo, lontano dall'odio e dalla tossicità dei social e un ambiente più inclusivo nel fediverso. Grazie a tutti per il vostro impegno e la vostra partecipazione: ko-fi.com/devol
The Fediverse is owned by the people and communities that use it. A basic server costs $5 a month all inclusive, anyone can make one. It's ad-free, made by volunteers, funded by donations, servers are independent.
BlueSky is a for-profit corporation funded by VC money. Its technical structure makes servers dependent on expensive corporate-run relays. BlueSky's business setup is eerily reminiscent of Ello: waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-dea…
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
I’d started using Ello when it first became a rumor. I got an early invite and was happy with it. Some time after they started getting more users they asked the “community” what they wanted to focus on and art was the general consensus. I thought it was just fine as a general social network, but as art became the dominant matter, I moved on since writing wasn’t a part of the art scene on Ello. Oh well.
it’s kind of ingenious that they’re offloading the costs of hosting and to lesser extent moderation onto the individual users while still reaping the benefits of a centralized feed.
Yeah, the PDS idea is neat, but what people are really using are the relays, indexers, labelers, and the apps. I can't believe how much personal data people are offering up when they subscribe to or create those custom feeds.
If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable. Eventually VC-owned networks enshittify because the VCs want to see a return on their investment, and we end up with another Twitter/X or Meta/Facebook situation. Once they stop growing users, they start trying to squeeze more money out of each user etc etc, or else sell the company to someone awful.
The entire point of the Fediverse is to do things differently, to have slow sustainable growth so that enshittification doesn't happen.
@askans Bluesky’s a drag, but you’re mad at it for the wrong reasons. Most users don’t care about this stuff. All these Brazilians are only leaving Twitter now bc it’s being shut down. Consider why they’re not flooding into Mastodon.
You don't really need to be mad at anyone to believe that the ingredients of Bsky likely constitute a fatal flaw.
For now, I rank it as the least worst SV social media, and for people who don't care about what may be unique selling points for Fedi, it has the cleanest history.
I'm not mad at anyone, I'm concerned about history repeating itself if we keep using social networks that have dangerous structural and governance problems.
Most people don't care about this stuff directly, but they do care about the practical effects. Brazilians are having to leave Twitter because it is a centralised network with bad governance, for example.
that is a fair point, even though looking back, those types of social networks have quite a long shelf life. My sympathy for the Fediverse is very high, also for FOSS, still the "other" models are much bigger. I do not see it changing.
Seeing federation with many flavors becoming a new business model is more than interesting.
This is a false dilemma: you can have commercial alternatives that are neither VC-owned nor "community owned", and you can have plenty of profit-based service providers that will be completely happy to serve a large-but-limited number of customers.
Give me 10-15k paying customers, and I will be able to run communick forever, even taking some of the profits to reinvest into development of the underlying projects. None of the "community owned" instances can do that.
There is a world of difference between making a sustainable stable profit and taking VC money.
If you receive enough money to keep a business going, that's great. You have built a sustainable business. 👍
If you take VC money to run a business at a loss in pursuit of growth, you will eventually have to start enshittifying in order to keep the VCs happy because they're partial owners of your business now. They don't just want profit, they want growth of profit.
If you look at the Ello article linked in the original post, it goes into detail about the problems of accepting VC money.
BlueSky isn't just for-profit, it's taken VC money and will therefore have to provide VCs perpetually growing profits. This will eventually become impossible unless they enshittify.
VC money is incredibly corrosive to the online world and real life world, because it demands that everything grows all the time, it's impossible to just stay at a steady state.
Any kind of ownership model is possible on the Fediverse because it is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to start a server, including individuals, non-profits, for-profits.
BlueSky is different. It has been designed to depend on corporate-owned feeds that have a much higher barrier to entry. In an interview, BS mentioned they might have ads in the future. Combined with their VC ownership, these are all the ingredients for another Meta/Facebook or Twitter/X.
I am responding to your "If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable" statement. This is the meme that needs to die.
I'd actually think it's the opposite: aside from instances that require payment from all members, I'm yet to see any service that can call itself sustainable.
I'd mean continuing to operate over a long period without exploiting users ("enshittifying"). There are plenty of instances that have done this, some of them date back to 2016 or before.
VC-backed services tend to demand growth within such a time frame. Continuing to exist in a stable state is incompatible with VC ownership.
What about the other side of the equation? How many instances disappeared due to moderator and admin burn out?
How many instances were created by enthusiastic people who were simply not able to manage it properly and shut their instances down when got their first wave of spam? How long do you think regular folks will be willing to keep hopping around because they picked an instance ran by amateurs?
That's a totally fair point, maybe the biggest challenge for the Fediverse. I just don't think that VC is the answer to it.
VC tends to turn a service to crap while the VC people walk away with the money and don't care what happens to the service itself. They just wanted the money all along.
Again, doing things for money is not the problem and it is not something that only "evil VCs" do.
I don't expect to get food on my table out of goodwill of a "community-focused" farmer. I don't expect electric power in my home out of the community. Why should I expect social media services to be provided out of "community"?
If developers still go to VCs for funding projects, it's because "the community" is not valuing their work.
Ideally we need this to be publicly funded, and a lot of Fediverse development has been, but obviously not enough. This also doesn't cover the running of servers.
I agree we have a funding crisis for developers, but VC money is not the answer because it causes developers' work to be used to do horrible things further down the line.
Please, "public-funded" is just a masturbatory idea that only appeals to people who never created anything. Or worse, armchair analysts who refuse to put any Skin in the Game.
The bureaucracy alone would grind innovation to a halt, and if you think that corporate-controlled communication networks are bad, imagine if they were controlled by politicians.
You are stuck in the VC-community duality and refusing to acknowledge an alternative that does not require infinite growth, but does require more than feel-good promises of support.
Let me try a different approach... If VCs are not acceptable, what would be best:
- commercial providers like communick, or omg.lol, or mastodon.green (all charging 20-30 USD per year?) from all members?
- donation-based instances that historically never get to 2% of the user base to contribute?
@Liberapay thanks for the hint, good to see solutions popping up. I never came across these solutions on a Mastodon account or similar, have I overseen it?
Okay, this is just a silly coincidence: I just searched *yesterday* to find out whether Ello and Diaspora still existed (after having forgotten about them for 5+ years)
If you've been happy after having left twitter, why should you be happy to be connected to another product of Jack Dorsey, who sold a manipulative corporate medium to another manipulator, to fund his next manipulative project?
@RenewedRebecca @ArenaCops I don't know what were the terms of the later investment round, but a few months ago Jay asked about who owns the company said "me and the team", which implies that at least outside investors don't have any controlling share
I've experienced data loss and corporate manipulation enough to be thankful I put the effort in to pitch my own instance this time. It will be well worth it.
that's a minimum of R$28 per month in a country where average monthly wages are like R$ 2979 (IBGE 2023), so even a small amount to Americans and Europeans can actually be a significant amount to others based on income and exchange rates.
And a lot of fediverse servers cost waaaay more than $5 / mo to operate.
@oblomov ypu still have the moderation, learning about trust and safety, understanding community management, covering costs for your community, understanding harms and how to deal with them, legal compliance, financials, etc etc.
A lot of work goes into running any instance that's more than a few people, and anything less and you're suffering through all that alone.
@jannem @thisismissem you don't mention elest.io on your site, which I think is also very good. They have services like Mastodon, PixelFed, and sharkey. Not to mention many more.
@jannem @thisismissem Technical and financial burden is one thing, are we educating people about the legal burdens as well? Are people being made aware of the need to register a DMCA agent if in the US, even if merely a single-person instance? Not to mention the additional moderation and legal responsibilities for a multi-user or open sign-up instance?
Yeah, that's fair comment, and in my site's guide (growyourown.services/making-yo…) have tried to emphasise there may be legal requirements in many countries especially if you're running a public server, that people should get legal advice for their jurisdiction about this topic. Also encourage people to start out on a private single user server, not a public one.
(But this isn't any easier on BlueSky or anywhere else though.)
I disagree. vivaldi.social, bbc.social, and me.dm are all part of the fediverse despite being run by corporations. Flipboard, Wordpress, Ghost, and Discourse are all part of the fediverse,
There's plenty of historical precedent for this too -- Evan Prodromou's StatusNet (which evolved into GnuSocial, the basis of the early fediverse) took VC funding in 2009. Diaspora joined YCombinator for a while. etc etc etc
Yeah, those examples you give aren't really the same thing.
On BlueSky there aren't just corporate servers, but the infrastructure itself is designed to be run by corporations. You are forced to pipe your content via corporations, in effect.
On the Fediverse, you can completely ignore or even block corporate servers, there's no need to have anything to do with them. Every server is totally independent, and connect to each other directly.
@oblomov agreed that if any of these corporate-run servers controlled the entire network that would be a different thing, but they don't, and neither does Bluesky. Flipboard controls Flipboard, Wordpress controls Wordpress.com. viviadi controls vivaldi.social. Bluesky controls bsky.social. Why do you see that as different?
@FediTips I'm suggesting that Bluesky is one of those indendent servers. People on other fediverse instances can ignore it or block it; people on Bluesky can ignore people elsewhere in the fediverse. How does that as different from people on Flipboard or Wordpress.com who are also forced to pipe their content via the corporations that run them?
And in terms of the infrastructure itself being designed to run by corporations, that's exactly why StatusNet got funding, and it was clearly considered part of the fediverse.
you either have no understanding of how BS operates or are intentionally misrepresenting the situation. The Fediverse is built on top of ActivityPub, which is a W3C standard. No corporation controls the network. BlueSky has complete control of the AT protocol, which is what it uses for federation.
The Fediverse is defined by independent interoperable projects. The AT network is defined by what BlueSky decides.
@thenexusofprivacy BTW trying to insist that BS is a Fediverse server is a misrepresentation. BlueSky does not “speak” ActivityPub in any shape and form. The only reason why limited communication can happen between the Fediverse and BlueSky is because some third parties have set up a bridge: that doesn't make BS part of the Fediverse any more than Twitter because of the servers bridging Twitter to Fedi
First of all I strongly disagree with the idea of equating the fediverse with ActivityPub. The fediverse existed before ActiivityPub, and has always supported multiple protocols Yes, AP's been dominant ever since Mastodon did embrace-extend-extinguish thing and replaced OStatus with AP in 2017, but history didn't end at that point.
But, even taking the AP-centric view of the fediverse, I think Bluesky qualifies as a fediverse instance. Diaspora, Flipboard, Wordpress ... none of them are built on top of AP internally, but they're all considered part of the fediverse. And yes, any instance running any software can unilaterally cut themselves off from the rest of the fediverse, either by turning off all federation or making a change at the software level (disabling a bridge or plugin, changing to a new protocol). Until that happens, though, they're part of the fediverse.
But maybe we're just viewing things differently in general, so let's calibrate:
do you think Diaspora is part of the fediverse?
what about Wordpress?
Flipboard?
Threads?
For me the answer is yes to all. (On the last one, I think the fediverse would have been better off collectively blocking Threads just like they did Gab ... but that didn't happen.). But, maybe we also see those differently!
@thenexusofprivacy I do not consider Diaspora part of the Fediverse, and AFAIK it has never been considered part of the Fediverse, even in the OStatus days. WordPress is not part of the Fediverse as such. The WordPress installations that have an enabled ActivityPub plugin are.
@thenexusofprivacy Flipboard and Threads AFAIK do not implement full bidirectional federation, and until they do they cannot be considered part of the Fediverse proper, even though they're working to join (whether this is good or bad is an entirely different matter and OT for this discussion).
BlueSky isn't part of the Fediverse *at all* because it doesn't support ActivityPub in any shape or form (and no, the bridge doesn't count any more than the Twitter bridges do).
@thenexusofprivacy What the platform uses internally is not particularly important. The degree of support for ActivityPub they strive for (and thus the effort to interoperate with the rest of the Fediverse) is.
Friendica and Hubzilla are examples of platform that are part of the Fediverse despite having their own protocols (DFRN, Zot), because they also support ActivityPub, aiming for full interoperability.
@thenexusofprivacy BlueSky has no intention to interoperate with the rest of the Fediverse. It's entirely focused on its own protocol, of which they maintain complete control, with no intention to also support ActivityPub. Hence they cannot be considered part of the Fediverse.
Thanks for the clarification, I think I understand your position now -- your criteria is full bidiretional federation currently implemented, support of ActivityPub, and not using a bridge. Is that an accurate summary?
On Diaspora, btw, opinions differ. Wikipedia, fediverse.party, and fediverse.observer all include it as part of the fedvierse; FediDB did until sometime last year (when joindiaspora shut down). But others don't see it that way.
Diaspora cannot communicate with most of the Fediverse due to lacking ActivityPub compatibility. That doesn't mean Diaspora is a bad network, it just means it's separate.
My own take is that it gets a bit difficult for new people if we use the same name ("Fediverse") for two separate incompatible networks.
It is possible to be on both though if you use Friendica.
BlueSky is its own network, it isn't part of the Fediverse.
Flipboard is a website which is part of the Fediverse, no one is forced to use it or have anything to do with it. Some publications choose to have accounts there, but they aren't forced to.
WordPress is a bit more complicated as there are two things: wordpress.com and the WordPress software. The software is free open source, anyone can install it on their own servers, they don't have to use wordpress.com.
Thanks for the response ... I guess we just see it differently. To me, both Bluesky, and Flipboard are all their own social media sites. Nobody is forced to use them or have anything do do with them. Some publications choose to have accounts there but aren't forced to. Reasnable minds differ, I guess!
@oblomov @thenexusofprivacy I agree with your analysis. Could you explain further how the BlueSky infrastructure was designed to be managed by corporations, since the AT protocol is theoretically "open"?
@skarnio @thenexusofprivacy the AT protocol is only open in the sense that others can implement it and not get sued for doing so. The protocol itself is defined by BS (and in fact, more by their implementation than any document they put out).
The AT protocol created for BlueSky depends on "relays", which are expensive to run, which in effect means corporations would run them. BS servers cannot work without being connected to these relays, so BS is effectively forcing everyone to be connected to corporations.
@oblomov @thenexusofprivacy I know, but Relays help a lot. In any case, this information that the AT protocol restricts the federation to relays is what I really want to conform to. Thanks!
These are some informal notes on setting up a full-network atproto Relay, using the bigsky relay software developed by Bluesky. This is the same software we run ourselves at https://bsky.network.
no, a self-hosted PDS is not the closest comparison to a self-hosted instance, because a self-hosted ActivityPub server is sufficient to fully join the network, a self-hosted PDS in atproto is *not*, which is exactly the point me and @FediTips have been making. atproto is designed to depend on corporate (= expensive) relays to work. A PDS alone is useless.
@oblomov @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy other products build on atproto, such as event planner smokesignal.events, skip the relay altogether and do not use the relay at all. I am not 100% sure but I think linkaggregator Frontpage.fyi skips the relay as well. So not, it is not designed to be dependent on that, it is an optimalisation part for Bluesky.
While PDSs (write access to the network) are indeed cheap, read access definitely is not, especially since the cost scales with total network activity for each reader with the current PDS and Relay features.
Not saying that it's a bad protocol per se, because there is clear demand for global indexing and singleton frontends and ActivityPub is bad at those aspects, but the protocol economics are completely prohibitive for most indie participants in terms of providing unenshittified end user access.
@skarnio @laurenshof @thenexusofprivacy there are several protocols that do things similarly, most famously SSB, that turned 10 a couple of months ago.
I've just started experimenting with hosting my own GoToSocial instance (hiiii!!!!) and it's great ... but hashtags and search only include posts from people I follow, and the federated feed is almost empty, so there's essentially no access to global conversations. So it's not a comparison.
(Although I also don't think hosting your own PDS is really an equivalent of your own instance either. There isn't really an equivalent of anything but flagship instances (a combination of AppView, Relay, and PDS) in the AT architecture.)
Yikes. I made the parent reply on my self-hosted GtS instance an hour ago ... I didn't get a notification on this account, which I thought was weird, but whatever. But then I looked at the thread and realized that the post hadn't federated here. What's with that? So just now I did a search here to see if I could find the GtS post ... and it did. At which point the notifiation showed up here as well.
wtf. Who knows if it's an AP "by design" issue, or some kind of bug, or what.
@thenexusofprivacy @nexus @laurenshof @skarnio IME this is usually due to software bugs. I've also had delayed notifications. The most ridiculous one was just yesterday, for an update to a post that happened years ago.
@nexus @laurenshof @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy search and hashtags only happen in content known to the server, and this is actually not that different in AP vs AT: the only difference is that AT has these huge relays —the effect is not that different compared to running a hashtag search on a large Fedi server like m.s,v except that AT basically requires that.
Well, even large fedi instances dont have access to the whole network. In general though I agree that there's a parallel to the way AT gives power to large Relays and AppViews and how AP gives power to large instances.
Relays seem like they'll be a lot cheaper to scale than instances, but it's early days so we shall see. There's a lot of experitmentation going on with smaller AppViews leveraging large Relays, again though it's hard to know how it'll work out in practice.
On the other hand when Threads looked at it they decided AP was a better target to exploit than AT, so I wouldn't assume that AP's more resistant to centralization than AT.
It's not so much that AP is more resistant as much as AT is essentially designed with it in mind. Yes, you can have a heavy centralized AP-based network, and you can have AT networks isolated from the BS one, but that's not what either of those is designed and intended for.
There's also the question of who is in charge. BS is run by a for-profit funded by VC money, this is a really dangerous combination. VC money almost always leads to enshittification in the long term, because VC-owned companies run out of any other way to grow profits.
Agreed that Bluesky shouldn't be trusted, they're VC-funded and are likely to go the exploitative and/or enshittification route once there's revenue pressure. In terms of the original question as to whether or not they should be considered part of the fediverse, that puts them in the same category as Wordpress and Flipboard. It's intellectually consistent to say none of them are; it's not intellectually consistent to say Wordpress and Flipboard are but Bluesky isn't for this reason. (Although other reasons for excluding them might be intellectually consistent, for example the Diaspora analogy -- I don't particularly agree with it, but it hangs together, it's just a different conclusion that flows from a different view of whether bridges not implemented by a platform count)
And @oblomov you're right that AP wasn't specifically designed for giving an advantage to large instances. I once asked Evan what scalability analysis had been done as part of the standardization process and he said "none!" Still, it's an obvious consequence of the protocol, nothing's been done to address that over the years, and Threads decided it's a good match for them. So I don't see as much of a difference on that front as you do.
I tried BlueSky a few months after I was on Mastodon and didn't like it. It was a wayyy different feel and community. Maybe it's more old Twitter-like? But I also wasn't on Twitter.
How do I exclude content from USA users, to prioritize regional connection? My fellow Australians are outnumbered by british users 3:1 and americans 10:1. I guess the same issue applies to other english speaking communities such as Argentina, South Africa, Colombia, Kerala, Kenya, Singapore etc.
There's no regional filter, as there is no location information collected about users.
However, some servers include an optional visibility setting that makes posts only visible to other people on the same server. So, if you were on a regional server with such a setting, that would be somewhat like a regional filter?
Another alternative is to post to groups that are dedicated to particular regions. More about groups here: fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on…
I recall friend feed, we shots, and other online photosites that closed down, sad but the server bills need to be paid and financial support was hard to find ...
VC money is not financial support, it's giving ownership to people who want constant financial growth. That's what the article about Ello goes into depth about.
That's why so much of the internet is enshittifying, the constant chasing of growth (not just profit but ever-increasing profit) at the expense of users' privacy and safety.
Yes, but that's because they've got money from VCs to play with so they can build up market share.
Eventually the VCs will demand something in return, and that's when the enshittification begins. That's why I linked to the article about Ello, it goes into detail about this, from Ello's birth to death.
If we want to break out of this cycle, we need to stop using social networks that depend on VC money.
p.s. Some misunderstanding of what is required to start a Fediverse server. You don't need to install software or do anything technical to create a Fedi server.
There are many managed hosting companies that do all tech stuff for you behind the scenes, including updates and maintenance. Using managed hosting is about as difficult as setting up an email account.
I run a website at growyourown.services to encourage more non-technical people to try managed hosting.
However, for those who are technically capable and also poor, you can save a lot of costs by doing it yourself. I would remind ppl throwing figures out on the interwebs that we don't know what currency they are using.
it would be beneficial if many such vendors wound exist. If it is priced correctly, demand could be high, especially if alternatives to the fediverse are becoming more annoying/worse. Just think about Twitter blue or however that is called now. People/bots already pay for that. People could be convinced that their own fedi server service would be more beneficial than this blue mark.
p.p.s. Another significant difference between the Fediverse and BlueSky:
- The official BlueSky app collects personal data.
- Most Fediverse apps (including the official Mastodon app) do not collect any personal data.
If BlueSky is already collecting personal data now, what do you think will happen a few years down the line when they're pushing for more profit growth?
i feel like that mastodon one is a little misleading re user content. The mobile apps may not but that That’s literally all the servers do: collect, store, and share people’s content.
Collecting is where a piece of data is taken without explicit consent. A user deciding to post something themselves using visibility settings they've decided is pretty much the opposite?
The core idea of privacy policies is to give users more control over what data is shared about them. If they're the only ones controlling the sharing, that means they have full control.
I dunno. "Contact info" is pretty common. Lots of reasonable reasons to ask for name or email addy, and it's almost always done with consent and needs to be called out in those data sheets even if it IS fully consensual .
If you click on "details", it turns out that the "contact info" on BlueSky means your phone number. Phone numbers are used by data brokers to discover people's identity across multiple data sets. That's why Facebook, Twitter etc started suddenly pushing people so hard to give their phone numbers, because it opens the door for a surveillance bonanza.
Once you give a corporation your phone number, they can usually find out your real name, postal address etc etc.
right, i fully agree about the data collection bad, BUT i was more getting at 2 things:
1. the mastodon disclaimer is misleading because mastodon servers do collect user content even if the mobile app technically doesn't. it just passes it on to the server. That's prolly true of the bluesky one too.
2. consent doesn't effect the requirement to have the label.
Yes, mastodon is radically better, but it doesn't collect nothing. it just collects nothing you don't want it to.
Data collection isn't the same thing at all as a user choosing to post something. If you say they are the same thing, it is just giving cover for privacy-invading services to claim they are the same as privacy-respectful services.
The only thing a Fediverse server knows about you is:
-Whatever email you used to sign up with (it can be throwaway or an alias)
-Whatever IP address you're using (which is true for any internet service)
yup. not arguing any of these points. just that the label on the mastodon app is misleading. The blue-sky app probably just funnels all the 💩 up to the servers like the mastodon apps do. By that logic neither collects anything, but they BOTH do.
WHAT they collect & what makes it acceptable or not it is a separate discussion.
The Mastodon app isn't sending any data back to its makers.
The BlueSky app IS sending data back to its makers.
That's why their labels are so different.
If I use the Mastodon app with a server that isn't mastodon.social or mastodon.online, then the makers of the app never hear anything about me. What the servers collect is separate from what apps collect because on a federated network you aren't necessarily using the app on a server that the app makers have any connection to.
@masukomi In the most literal sense any method that involves a user's data ending up in your possesion is collection. Far from providing cover it makes a hard line. When someone posts on your server they are explicitly requesting that data collection under the terms as set when they joined.
That all this is counted as collection means there are hard limits on what you can do with the data and you can demand that all data they have on you be deleted.
@masukomi This is absolutely true, but I'm talking about why GDPR doesn't allow sneakarounds for when a user submlits data rather than it being requested.
It's also possible that even though no data is being collected by the app-makers, it will be treated as a data processor on behalf of whatever servers it connects to. This would mean that it comes under 'sharing with third parties' or similar.
Blue Sky is constantly reminding you of their data scraping when they ask for permission for more permanent access to your photos every new day you post or save an image, so at least they are somewhat open in that regard.
I wish I visited Blue Sky more- I’m sorry I think they are failing despite having the most old school Twitter attitude and appearance. But people opt in to the more invasive meta ecosystem, because, numbers. Fedi can be a bit too preachy, controlling, in own ways.
Well yeah, but Meta is a lot further down the path of enshittification. This is the kind of thing we can expect to see in BlueSky's future, they've already taken the first steps.
In case this week hasn't made it super clear: people, in general, are willing to trade some data & privacy for not getting brigaded with racist/anti-trans/sexist/ableist crap.
I've mostly enjoyed using Mastodon, but I have many friends here & elsewhere who deal with & talk about the crummy user safety experience Masodon provides for huge swaths of users in minority/disenfranchised/vulnerable populations.
Their friends & colleagues are hearing loud and clear.
I agree Mastodon isn't doing what it should about safety, but Mastodon isn't the only platform on the Fediverse. There are others which have placed a much higher priority on user safety.
I'm particularly following @gotosocial which lets users decide who and how others can interact with their posts, and includes support for allowlist federation where all servers are blocked by default.
Once GoToSocial enters beta (which they've been saying is imminent) I'll be promoting it a lot more.
It's not a choice between Mastodon and VC-backed corporate networks. There are other options which avoid the dangers of VC corporate and also give users better safety features.
The danger of VC-backed for-profit networks is absolutely horrific:
If you follow any of the #GoToSocial developers you've probably seen this going around already, but 0.17.0 of #GoToSocial will be the first release that includes interaction policies, aka reply-controls.
In the first iteration of this feature, you'll be able to configure your account so that new posts created by you will have an interaction policy set on them, which determines whether your instance drops or accepts replies, likes, and boosts of your posts, depending on the visibility of the post, and whether or not an account trying to interact with you is in your followers/following list.
So for example, you will be able to create Public posts that can only be replied to by your followers and people you follow, or unlisted posts that nobody can reply to or like, etc.
GoToSocial interaction policies will be a superset of other reply control proposals created elsewhere (and already implemented by softwares like Pixelfed and Peertube), so your GoToSocial instance should recognize interaction restrictions set not only by other GoToSocial instances, but by Pixelfed and Peertube as well.
If you're interested in reading about how this will work on a protocol level, you can take a look at the documentation here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…
Please note that this feature is not 100% finished yet, and may be subject to change before release. We're aware of where the headaches and difficulties are, so please don't reply to this post griping about them; we already know (and this instance is still running on 0.16.0 so no interaction policies yet).
I'm not a big fan of VC-backed networks and understand the risks and problems. For many folks, though, the problems they and their friends experience are visible and visceral and truly affect them personally, while the problems introduced by VC-backed platforms don't directly affect their daily health and well-being, even if overall they are horrible.
I look forward to reading more about the other platforms and tools you're talking about here!
that's all true. But since people don't care if a social media platform is owned by a fascist and one of the richest people on the planet, who supports one of the biggest threats to the planet, a far-right movement, what would stop the majority of users from going to an alternative that has the problems pointed out?
People will stay where their peers are. No matter what's involved. This is a good example of how many people will stand up if they see themselves in a table surrounded by nazis.
Very interesting article. When Ello came out and me and a work colleague got invited, we did not have a doubt. It seemed really nice to us at first and got engaged with some users as an underground alternative with high hopes and a creative focus.
Then came the fake users contacting with scam links, then those obscure news about its direction and finally the design contest ads... We got suspicious and just stopped using it. We made our posts backup "manually" 😮💨 but it was a letdown.
Going for "higher numbers" is exactly the problem, because it isn't happening sustainably or ethically.
If growth happens, it has to be sustainable and ethical, otherwise you're just stealing money from exploited people in the future.
Once you take VC money, going for higher numbers has to happen forever, even if it means exploiting your users and doing really immoral stuff. It's short term money for long term disaster.
What is the point of growing an alternative if it ends up as bad as the thing it's replacing? What has that achieved? What difference has it made?
The Fediverse is trying to do things differently in the hope of making something more ethical and sustainable in the long term. At the moment, no one else seems to be doing this?
@jose8 I see it possibly growing and then going down the path that all commercial ventures go - the one away from user freedoms and towards capitalist agendas
The reason it's so cheap is the economy of scale from a managed hosting company providing hosting for many different instances.
Part of the reason I run my accounts is to encourage more non-technical people to get involved in running their own internet presences, whether it's a website or social media instance or whatever.
It's not as difficult or expensive as people think, it's never been cheaper or easier.
@jose8 I love the growyourown.services concept. I have been expanding and improving my own self-hosted services for years for next to nothing (low power focus, on demand services, solar power, etc). I have stepped away from most of the major providers this way and only hold minor accounts as needed for access to certain services.
If the Ello story is typical (which I think), then the Fediverse should not try to out-compete BlueSky by growing faster than it: It must only survive. Sooner or later, any profit-oriented social media will go down.
True of so many things in real life unfortunately 😞
Hopefully there is some steady state possible, where you receive enough money to cover costs without wrecking the place trying to pursue ever-higher profits.
@faduda You don't need to be a lawyer: GDPR is written in plain English (plain a-lot-of-languages, actually).
The legal definition is found in Article 4: "Definitions".
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
> an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as […] an online identifier […]
If I sign up on a server and choose the username i9024jinsiujfiosjfioesj, and I never use that username anywhere else, how can that be used to identify me?
I really don't think it's wise to start saying that this is in the same class as real names or addresses or phone numbers, which obviously make it easy to identify someone.
It lets apps which do collect all kinds of dubious unnecessary info claim "well all apps collect personal data" and try to normalise it.
I think the biggest turn off with bluesky is the smuggy people of Twitter have made camp there. Almost all I see there is people telling.me how Important they are or this is way Twitter use to be. Twitter while had some good points before musk was still not the best place it was a marketing machine dream. People wanna look back with rose colored glasses. But it was getting bad before musk bought it. The pompous just were too self involved to notice
Farming out fediverse systems to some corporation is still supporting a corporation.
Beamship is running on a laptop with 1TB hard drive and 4MB RAM. Fiber ISP connections are practically everywhere. Our ISP blocks serving anything so, we bounce across a VPN.
MicroShit just bought GitHub and I have no doubt will decide all the programs on it is their property now.
All these corporations are using AI bots to steal everything. Gmail included.
Meta ha annunciato che gli utenti di Threads potranno vedere le risposte dal fediverso su altri post oltre al proprio. Inoltre, i post originati tramite l'API di #Threads, come quelli creati tramite app di terze parti e servizi di pianificazione, saranno ora distribuiti al Fediverso
I recenti eventi, e anche nuove proposte di legge sempre pronte ad essere ritirate fuori, ci stanno sempre di più obbligando a riflettere su quali sistemi di messaggistica istantanea sono considerabili sicuri per l'uso comune.
Vediamo quindi in questo post, una lista di app che ritengo sufficientemente sicure secondo la mia personale valutazione, che sarà comunque basata sui dati che potete trovare qui.
E' la più famosa app di messaggistica che vedrete in questo elenco, e per una buona ragione: è la più facile da usare ed offre una sicurezza decisamente rispettabile.
Lavora con la stessa strategia di WhatsApp e Telegram per quanto riguarda la gestione dei contatti, legando l'utenza al numero di telefono, e rendendo quindi la ricerca dei contatti facile e automatizzata, visto che può appoggiarsi sulla rubrica dell'utente.
Ha una solida crittografia end-to-end, e questo la rende estremamente sicura, ma ha due principali punti negativi: lavora con librerie closed, e quindi difficilmente verificabili da terzi, ed ha una architettura centralizzata, e quindi è poco resistente ad eventuali attacchi di inibizione del servizio. (Un governo diversamente democratico non ha difficoltà a impedire ai suoi cittadini di usare Signal, che risulta già essere bloccata in molti paesi)
Questa app è basata sul protocollo Matrix, e sfrutta quindi una rete federata. L'utente può scegliere a che server iscriversi, e visto che i server comunicano tra di loro, poi è possibile per l'utente comunicare anche con utenti di altri server (esattamente come fanno le e-mail). Questo rende la rete più resistente ai tentativi di blocco, in quanto è necessario bloccare tutti i server della rete, e non soltanto uno, e anche in questo caso estremo, ne possono nascere di nuovi.
Dispone della crittografia end-to-end (come tutte le app in questa lista) con un buon protocollo, anche se migliorabile, in questo senso Signal è messa meglio.
Ogni utente ha un suo indirizzo, legato al nome utente e al server a cui è iscritto, ed è possibile registrarlo ad un server di identità che lo lega ad un indirizzo e-mail o ad un numero di cellulare, in modo da essere trovati più facilmente dagli altri utenti.
Anche questa app sfrutta una rete federata, basata sul protocollo XMPP.
E' concettualmente simile a Element, per il suo funzionamento, tranne che cambia il tipo di protocollo utilizzato e che dispone di un protocollo di crittografia end-to-end migliore.
Come per Element, ogni utente ha un indirizzo che serve per aggiungerlo ai contatti, ma a differenza di Element non ho trovato la gestione tramite server di identità che lo associno a e-mail o cellulare, quindi per aggiungere un utente è necessario conoscere il suo indirizzo.
Questa app sfrutta una rete peer-to-peer il che la rende estremamente resistente ai vari tentativi di blocco, in quanto ogni utente che partecipa alla rete contribuisce a mantenerla in funziona, senza l'utilizzo di server che possono essere un bersaglio.
La crittografia end-to-end è buona, anche se migliorabile, da però notare che su questa app non sono noti controlli da parte di esperti di sicurezza che validino l'effettiva resistenza del protocollo usato.
L'aggiunta degli utenti anche in questo caso necessita di conoscere il suo ID.
Questa app è forse la più particolare, ma purtroppo è anche quella ad oggi più acerba e difficile da utilizzare.
L'idea alla base di questa app è quella di creare una rete peer-to-peer ma basandosi su diversi mezzi di comunicazione: se le persone che comunicano sono a portata di Bluetooth allora i messaggi passeranno da li, altrimenti se sono connessi alla stessa rete Wi-Fi l'app sfrutterà questa connessione per consegnare il messaggio. In mancanza di un contatto diretto, può sfruttare altri utenti che possano fare da intermediario per la consegna del messaggio (che sarà comunque cifrato e quindi non leggibile da terzi). Infine, se si dispone di una rete internet, può sfruttare la rete TOR per consegnare i messaggi in modo anonimo.
In generale questa è l'app più resistente ai tentativi di blocco, ed è infatti stata pensata appositamente per lavorare in paesi che applicano una censura stringente, infatti anche la crittografia end-to-end è estremamente robusta.
Di contro, l'aggiunta dei contatti prevede uno scambio di link, serve quindi essere in contatto con l'altra persona in un altro modo, e l'aggiunta avviene solo quando entrambe le persone inseriscono il link dell'altra.
🎉Qualche minuto fa l'istanza poliverso.org è tornata online e l'aggiornamento sembra essere andato a buon fine! 🎊
🕥 Come avevamo anticipato, proprio in considerazione del fatto che le modifiche al DB di questo aggiornamento sono particolarmente significative, si è trattato del processo di aggiornamento più lungo e impegnativo da quando è stata creata questa istanza! 😱
🙄 Per qualche ora il server sarà ancora rallentato, Anche perché abbiamo 40.000 processi in coda che devono essere riassorbiti dopo le cinque ore di stop... 🤷🏽♂️
La seconda notizia è che domani mattina provvederemo a un aggiornamento sia di Poliverso, sia della nostra istanza mastodon Poliversity.
Se l'aggiornamento di mastodon sarà molto breve, dal momento che si tratta di una semplice correzione di alcuni bug, L'aggiornamento del server Friendica potrebbe essere molto più impegnativo.
Poliverso è la più grande istanza italiana di Friendica. I fondi raccolti verranno utilizzati per finanziare la manutenzione di poliverso.org (friendica), di poliversity.it …
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2024.08. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains several fixes for security issues reported by apexrabbit, Devilx86 and ponlayookm – Thank you for the reports! We strongly recommend all Friendica admins to update their installations to this stable release.
The highlights of Friendica 2024.08 are
the usage of system resources and performance has been improved in various parts of Friendica,
added monitoring endpoints for e.g. Zabbix and Grafana,
added shortened display of links (default 30 characters, admins can define the length in the config file via the display_link_length)
Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.
What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumbler and BlueSky.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2024.08 release would be cd friendicagit pullbin/composer.phar install --no-devcd addongit pull If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
Using the Archive Files
Due to problems with the build pipeline we cannot provide archive files at the moment that contain all dependencies as usual. We will update this documents as soon as possible.
Do not use the archive files provided by github as they do not contain the dependencies.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script bin/console dbstructure update from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days during which the site might not be accessible.
Known Issues
At the time of writing this, none
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
🇬🇧 Hello everyone! This is my first post from my new Friendica instance (@poliverso.org) after this weekend's account migration.
I'm having such a positive experience - compared to my previous instance - that I'm inspired to write a new post about it for my blog The Future is Federated.
The biggest lesson I learned is that when you encounter federation problems, the issue may be with the instance (and not the software).
I love Friendica and Poliverso.org! Special thanks to the latter for making my Friendica experience so much more enjoyable (everything just works).
🇮🇹 Ciao a tutti! Questo è il primo post dalla mia nuova istanza Friendica (@poliverso.org) dopo aver effettuato la migrazione del mio account questo weekend.
La mia esperienza è così positiva - rispetto all'istanza precedente - che scriverò un nuovo articolo su questo argomento per il mio blog The Future is Federated (in inglese, e quando avrò tempo farò anche la traduzione in italiano).
La lezione più importante che ho imparato è che quando si riscontrano problemi di federazione / interoperabilità, la causa potrebbe essere l'istanza (e non il software).
Viva Friendica e Poliverso.org! Un ringraziamento speciale a quest'ultimo per aver reso la mia esperienza su Friendica molto più piacevole (funziona tutto perfettamente).
Dopo l'interessante progetto ActivityPub Academy vogliamo segnalare a tutti i nostri follower questo browser on-line che consente di fare il debug sui profili del #Fediverso
Il progetto è stato realizzato e segnalato da @John Spurlock e costituisce un nuovo e affascinante modo per comprendere meglio come funzionano i profili delle Fediverso
Questo tipo di progetti è davvero appassionante anche se ancora in una fase iniziale.
A major report on governance on the fediverse, conversations about public or private votes on the content-aggregator side of the fediverse, ⁂ as a symbol for the fediverse and more.
Needle is an #elixir library that we have developed to provide universal foreign keys, shared data fields, and virtual & configurable schemas for Ecto.
When using a relational DB (such an Ecto schema with a Postgres table), usually a foreign key field has to be pre-defined with a reference pointing to a specific field in a specific table.
Needle is one of several libraries we're releasing. Beyond creating extensions for Bonfire (like misinformation labeling or metadata extraction for scientific publications), we often need to build foundational functionality. We package these into reusable libraries for the wider Elixir ecosystem.
When using a relational DB (such an Ecto schema with a Postgres table), usually a foreign key field has to be pre-defined with a reference pointing to a specific field in a specific table.
A simple example would be a blogging app, which might have a post table with author field that references the user table.
A social network, by contrast, usually requires a graph of objects, meaning objects need to be able to refer to other objects by their ID without knowing their type.
A simple example would be likes, you might have a likes table with liked_post_id field that references the post table.
But what if you don’t just have posts that can be liked, but also videos, images, polls, etc, each with their own table, but probably do not want to have to add liked_video_id, liked_image_id, ad infinitum?
We needed the flexibility to have a foreign key that can reference any referenceable object. We call our system Needle.
Besides regular schemas with universal foreign keys (Pointable), Needle provides Virtual for schemas that don’t have any fields on their own, and Mixin for storing common fields that can be re-used by multiple Pointables or Virtuals (eg. if you have multiple types that all have a name/description/body, they can share those and optionally the associated changesets and other logic).
Needle also comes with two other homegrown libraries: needle_ulid which provides a ULID datatype for Ecto (using ex_ulid) and related helpers, and exto which enables extending Ecto schema definitions in config (especially useful for adding Mixin associations to different schemas)… --- 📣 🏴☠️ Camp! expedition: We have some open bounties to improve bonfire performance : Read more: indieweb.social/@bonfire/11294… Repository: github.com/bonfire-networks/bo… #ecto #myElixirStatus #elixir 6/6
🎯 Calling all Elixir developers to take on a bounty and get compensated for contributing to the commons! Help us overcome key technical challenges and move closer to the Bonfire v1.0 release.
Overview Querying feed is quite slow, which is likely a combination of issues spanning database structure and querying best practices, debugging and improving how our boundaries system impacts how ...
@RaccoonForFriendica utenti di Friendica, per chi fosse interessato ho pubblicato una nuova versione del client per Android cui sto lavorando (nel tempo libero), maggiori dettagli qui.
Fatemi sapere cosa ne pensate, ogni feedback è ben accetto, tenete conto che è ancora in alpha, quindi ci sono parecchie cose da fare/rivedere, non aspettatevi in assoluto la perfezione ma qualcosa di perfettibile!
Can we maybe not have AI solve human problems though. Not even Meta with all its scale and data can get this right. I've seen people wrongly banned from Instagram and Facebook so many times.
È stata rilasciata la prima beta della prossima versione di #Mastodon, la 4.3.
È la classica release che non porta novità eclatanti ma aggiunge e migliora talmente tante piccole cose in diversi ambiti da renderla una versione corposa e importante.
Al rilascio finale descriveremo gli aspetti più rilevanti per gli utenti (come abbiamo fatto per la 4.2).
Un'anticipazione per il nostro @amministratore: la possibilità di personalizzare favicon e logo di #MastodonUno. 😁
WarningThis is a pre-release! This has not been as widely tested as regular releases, although it is still tested on mastodon.social and some other servers. If you update to this release, you will ...
@jordanlund Yes, it would be appropriate to file an issue with the Mastodon staff, but I haven't had time to do so yet. If someone could do it before me, that would be great...
@yessikg I understand that this bug might seem like a deliberately hostile action against the threadverse, but the reality is that ActivityPub is objectively a shithole 🤣 and with every good step forward, there is the risk of stepping on a shit!
These problems could simply arise from the fact that Mastodon is starting to really work on the management of Activitypub groups. It is therefore appropriate to report any incompatibilities to the Mastodon staff, so that they can correct their roadmap
@kopper [they/them] rightly mastodon cannot and should not aim for full compatibility with Lemmy and Piefed.
In fact, Lemmy has some unique features (such as the intentionally limited management of crossposting) that cannot be managed.
However, it would be appropriate and above all ethical, for Mastodon groups to be compatible with Friendica groups, Gup groups and Mbin magazines.
This would allow mastodon users to continue using the Activity pub groups of other platforms, including Lemmy.
I remember in fact that even WordPress (which at the moment, represents the most important novelty of the Fediverse) is perfectly able to publish on the Lemmy communities and on the Friendica groups!
iirc mastodon was implementing smithereen's flavor of groups. no idea if they ended up changing course or anything (not following masto dev tok closely) but the way they work is fundamentally different from how Lemmy and compatible groups work
These problems could simply arise from the fact that Mastodon is starting to really work on the management of Activitypub groups.
And re-invent the wheel once more, preferably in a proprietary way that's as incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse as possible but sold to the Mastodon users as the Fediverse gold standard.
It is therefore appropriate to report any incompatibilities to the Mastodon staff, so that they can claim the other side is broken unless the other side has rock-solid proof that it's actually Mastodon that's doing it wrong.
@Poliverso - notizie dal fediverso oh my I picked the right week to do more Fediverse interoperability tests between content aggregators and the rest of the Fediverse /s 🙃
Il numero di questa settimana di #TheFutureisFederated, in apparenza, è più di nicchia del solito, incentrato sugli aggregatori di contenuti nel Fediverso (ovvero piattaforme come Reddit, ma federate).
An exploration of Fediverse content aggregators as an alternative to Reddit, with a twist: the magic of ActivityPub, allowing communication with other Fediverse projects
Ieri sono passata su una nuova instance di Friendica - la vostra! - e da allora non ho più problemi di federazione tra Lemmy e Friendica. Pubblicherò un nuovo post su questo tema la settimana prossima. Complimenti a poliverso.org che funziona benissimo... e la lezione che ho imparato è che a volte i problemi non dipendono dal software ma dalle istanze
In the next few days I will submit an issue to the fork developer
PS: version 4.3.0-alpha.5+glitch is a beautiful fork with its ability to implement markdown. If it solved this problem with Lemmy I could almost think of using it in my poliversity.it instance
by chance, did you try this test on a non-glitch instance that is running more recent nightly builds of vanilla mastodon (such as mastodon.social itself)? @mods @kathsone @informapirata@mastodon.uno @informapirata
I ran a test on mastodon. Social to lemmy and it didn't work, either, which leads me to think that if it's working on older mastodon releases, the issue is likely something that will appear in the upcoming 4.3.0 mastodon release, and specific to glitch. @informapirata@tech.lgbt @mods @kathsone @informapirata
@Rimu The responses work fine. The problem occurs when a mastodon user residing on an instance with the latest Mastodon version or a glitched version, mentions a community on a Lemmy instance with release 0.19.5
Example Infosec.exchange or Mastodon.social => lemmy.ml or feddit.it ❌ mastodon.uno => lemmy.ml or feddit.it ✅ Mastodon.social => lemmy.world ✅
Un vecchio amico che se ne va: dopo 27 anni di attività chiude AnandTech
"Il sito dedicato agli appassionati di hardware è stato una presenza influente nel giornalismo tecnologico grazie alle sue approfondite recensioni e analisi dei componenti."
A British migration wave to Bluesky, Flipboards expands their fediverse integration, and more. [share author='Laurens Hof' profile='https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/' avatar='https://poliverso.org/photo/206608119366e42c304ffac007248590-5.jpeg?ts=1734620326' link='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-80/' posted='2024-08-18 14:46:52' guid='08552256-1db60fc771464a1d-24e5efb6' message_id='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-80/']Last Week in Fediverse – ep 80
A British migration wave from X to Bluesky, Flipboard expands their fediverse integration, and more.
The News
Bluesky has seen a new migration wave away from X towards Bluesky, which consists predominantly of people from the UK. The move comes as Labour MPs begin quitting X, as The Guardian reports, as Musk feuds with the UK government over recent riots in the UK, per Reuters. Quite a few MPs have signed up for Bluesky, here is a starter pack with all MPs that are on Bluesky. In the UK press issues with X have become a subject of conversation again. It is clear that in the perspective of the UK press there are two alternatives to X, either Threads or Bluesky. Mastodon mostly does not get mentioned at all, and neither has Mastodon experienced any meaningful change in signup numbers during this period. The FORbetter newsletter takes a look at Google trends data which also shows that it is all Threads and Bluesky, with Mastodon missing the boat. What is also notable about this Bluesky migration wave is that it is spread out quite far in time, and less spiky. Previous waves (such as when an Indonesian community or the BTS ARMY joined Bluesky) tend to have a very big spike at the beginning which then quickly dies down: in this case, an increase started almost two weeks ago, which plateaued a week later with multiple days staying at the same level. This all indicates a more steady and consistent interest from the UK in Bluesky.
Flipboard has expanded their fediverse integration, and with the latest update you can follow people from the rest of the fediverse in the Flipboard app. Flipboard is now getting close to full two-way federation, as some accounts can also like and reply to other fediverse posts with their Flipboard account. Some more reporting by WeDistribute and The Verge on the feature. Flipboard is heavily leaning on federated Threads accounts for the new feature: 80% of the accounts that were recommended to me by Flipboard are Threads accounts. On the flip side, Flipboard does not seem to be particularly focused on Bluesky, with no (bridged) accounts recommended, and the account for Bluesky board member Mike Masnick is his Mastodon account, and not his more active Bluesky account.
An observation about Bluesky: one thing that interests me about Bluesky is how some of the experimental new features that are implemented find traction not in their original intended use case, but get repurposed by the community for another goal instead. Third party labeling is implemented by Bluesky as a way to do community labeling, but as good moderation is hard to do (and the most prominent labelers have called it quits). Instead, a different use case for labeling is emerging: self-labeling: setting your pronouns, country flags, or your fursona. Another emergent use case is for starter packs, which have gotten low usage during regular periods (with more use during migration sign-up waves), which seem to be more used as a Follow-Friday list.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits. Andy Piper, Mastodons Developer Relations Lead, writes a personal blog post on the series as well.
Piefed’s monthly development update, with an indication that the software is almost ready for an official 1.0 release.
Ghost’s weekly update says that they are still working on having the posts show up on Mastodon reliably.
Dhaaga is a cross-platform app for both Mastodon and Misskey.
Altmetric is a product to track academic research being discussed online, and they announced that they are working on adding Bluesky support.
Bluesky engineer Brian Newbold wrote an update on the current state of atproto and how much progress is made regarding reaching the goals and values of atproto.
A research paper that looks at the impact of Bluesky’s opening to the public on the community.
A new app directory dedicated to ActivityPub platforms, clients, and tools for easy browsing and discovery.
A new blog series by the mod team of the hachyderm.io server to explain Mastodon moderation tooling.
Hubzilla, Streams and Friendica creator Mike Mcgirvin continues his tradition of forking his own projects; with Forte being a new fork of his Streams project. Not much is known yet about what makes Forte different than Streams.
‘5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people’.
Pipilo is a fediverse iOS app with a timeline that scrolls horizontal instead of vertical.
A first federated instance of NodeBB that is not run by NodeBB themselves, and the difficulty of explaining the concept to people outside of the fediverse.
A presentation by Robert W. Gehl on how ActivityPub became a standard.
Siamo molto felici di annunciare la disponibilità della nuova versione stabile di Friendica "Yellow Archangel" 2024.08. Oltre a diversi miglioramenti e nuove funzionalità, questa versione contiene diverse correzioni per problemi di sicurezza segnalati da apexrabbit, Devilx86 e ponlayookm – Consigliamo vivamente a tutti gli amministratori di Friendica di aggiornare le proprie installazioni a questa versione stabile.
I punti salienti di Friendica 2024.08 sono
- l'utilizzo delle risorse di sistema e le prestazioni sono state migliorate in varie parti di Friendica, - aggiunti endpoint di monitoraggio per esempio Zabbix e Grafana, - aggiunta visualizzazione abbreviata dei link (predefinita 30 caratteri, gli amministratori possono definire la lunghezza nel file di configurazione tramite display_link_length)
Si noti che con questa versione la versione minima di PHP per Friendica è stata aumentata a PHP 7.4.
Per i dettagli, consultare il file CHANGELOG nel repository
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2024.08. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains several fixes for security issues reported by apexrabbit, Devilx86 and ponlayookm – Thank you for the reports! We strongly recommend all Friendica admins to update their installations to this stable release.
The highlights of Friendica 2024.08 are
the usage of system resources and performance has been improved in various parts of Friendica,
added monitoring endpoints for e.g. Zabbix and Grafana,
added shortened display of links (default 30 characters, admins can define the length in the config file via the display_link_length)
Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.
What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumbler and BlueSky.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2024.08 release would be cd friendica git pull bin/composer.phar install --no-dev cd addon git pull If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
Using the Archive Files
Due to problems with the build pipeline we cannot provide archive files at the moment that contain all dependencies as usual. We will update this documents as soon as possible.
Do not use the archive files provided by github as they do not contain the dependencies.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script bin/console dbstructure update from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.
Known Issues
At the time of writing this, none
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2024.08. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains several fixes for security issues reported by apexrabbit, Devilx86 and ponlayookm – Thank you for the reports! We strongly recommend all Friendica admins to update their installations to this stable release.
The highlights of Friendica 2024.08 are
the usage of system resources and performance has been improved in various parts of Friendica,
added monitoring endpoints for e.g. Zabbix and Grafana,
added shortened display of links (default 30 characters, admins can define the length in the config file via the display_link_length)
Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.
What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumbler and BlueSky.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2024.08 release would be cd friendica git pull bin/composer.phar install --no-dev cd addon git pull If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
Using the Archive Files
Due to problems with the build pipeline we cannot provide archive files at the moment that contain all dependencies as usual. We will update this documents as soon as possible.
Do not use the archive files provided by github as they do not contain the dependencies.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script bin/console dbstructure update from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.
Known Issues
At the time of writing this, none
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
As a note, I upgraded a test server with a very small database size and it was stuck with a white screen for several minutes. No idea how long that is going to be on a larger db. Anyway, it does come back automatically, so no need to worry if anyone encounters this. The error in the log was:
Call to undefined method Friendica\App::getLoggedInUserNickname()
which seems to go away after the server comes back.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.
Al Kath
in reply to francal • • •Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂ likes this.
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Al Kath
in reply to Al Kath • • •Ma @schestowitz è proprio il suo profilo? Mi sta venendo qualche dubbio...
@francal @fediverso
Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂
in reply to Al Kath • •@Al Kath non credo... Sulla sua pagina web non c'è traccia di questo nuovo account
@francal @Dr. Roy Schestowitz (希特勒)
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