I've been doing a bit of housekeeping on my #GhostIO #blog. You can now find all my essays for #TheFutureIsFederated (and subscribe to receive future articles) on this page:
This week I'm planning to publish part 2 in my mini series about the values of the #Fediverse. Thank you for all your input and advice about #AltText so far.
The Future is Federated is a series of essays about the Fediverse with the goal of introducing it to people not familiar with it... and showing interoperability between projects for more advanced users.
Can you please join me in giving a warm welcome to @laurenlopes?
Lauren and I interacted on Threads, where she stumbled upon some of my posts from #TheFutureIsFederated and became curious about the #Fediverse (please Lauren correct me if I'm wrong).
It's always a pleasant surprise to see my articles from #TheFutureIsFederated shared by other people on #Lemmy.
I typically click on the post and wade into the comment section with hands over my eyes, expecting burning critiques, but I am invariably surprised by the smart and civil discourse.
Thanks to @Grimpen now I have two new books on my "to read" list: - "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond - "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen
Over the past couple of days I shared toots on Mastodon about the possibility of creating t-shirts and sweatshirts with a message in Latin that promotes the Fediverse. This was in reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance at Meta Connect, where he proudly displayed a custom made black sweatshirt with the message, in Latin, “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (either Zuck or nothing). The phrase is inspired by Caesar, the Roman emperor, who had once said “aut Caesar aut nihil” (either Cesar or nothing). The sweatshirt and its message made headline news around the world; the Guardian wrote this great piece: “Zuckerberg Augustus: Meta’s emperor rebrands in new clothes”.
After exchanging messages about this with people on the Fediverse (@oblomov@sociale.network in primis, who wrote a great blog post in Italian about this) I would like to put that idea on pause and offer an apology.
@oblomov@sociale.network‘s post made me realize that the phrase is imperialistic and it makes me feel nauseous to associate something dictatorial and authoritarian to the Fediverse. It just feels wrong. Absolutely wrong. In the heat of the moment it had felt like a good idea: a gentle but trollish pushbackto the founder of Meta and his brazen ambition for total world domination. But upon further reflection it feels icky to attach such a sentence to the Fediverse.
I’ve been having a great back-and-forth with Oblomov and other Italians in the Fediverse (fun fact: in many Italian high schools you typically study Latin for five years) about alternative, positive phrases in Latin that could promote the Fediverse. My gut feeling right now is to go with something like “the future is federated” or “federation is the future” – inspired by the title of my newsletter about all things Fediverse. As Oblomov smartly remarked, all the best Latin phrases have already been taken (“E Pluribus Unum” by the United States and “Unus Pro Omnibus, Omnes Pro Uno” by Switzerland).
I’d love to hear your ideas and come up with something in Latin, pro Fediverse. Why Latin? Because it still gives me pleasure to be a gentle troll towards a certain imperialistic entrepreneur. And I love wearing my values.
Years ago I had created and sold my own t-shirts and sweatshirts promoting the visibility of female filmmakers; ampersand t-shirts with their names were always great conversation starters. I had also created a line of t-shirts with the message “this is what a film director looks like” or “this is what an entrepreneur looks like” that women bought and proudly wore. This had made me so happy and I’d like to do something similar to promote the Fediverse. The small earnings the t-shirts would make (typically $1-2 per item) could be donated to Fediverse servers I use – I could split them evenly between mastodon.social, pixelfed.social and poliverso.org (the Friendica server I am on). These are just some ideas… I would love to hear what you think about this.
With everything I have been learning about #AltText, #CamelCase and screen readers, I am deeply embarrassed and sorry about my previous Mastodon display name.
All the emojis (pencil, sparkle, camera) and TWO asterism symbols (before/after my name) could have caused problems for people who use screen readers.
I'm so so sorry, I didn't know. I removed everything and I'm only keeping one asterism symbol after my name
Two months ago I managed to successfully federate this site, giving it #ActivityPub superpowers (if you are confused about what this means, I wrote about it for on my Ghost blog The Future is Federated).
This feat was the absolute highlight of my summer and I’d love to make it a habit to write more on here – inspired by Andy Piper‘s #100DaysToOffload (I couldn’t possibly write daily, but maybe weekly).
What does this have to do with “carpe diem” (seizing the day)?
Well, earlier this month I learned an important lesson: if I ever have a project idea – especially about a domain name to register – I should not procrastinate but immediately take action.
In late August I started looking up available URLs for potential future Fediverse projects / self-hosted one-person instances. I thought: for my birthday, I will gift myself two domain names – elena.video and elena.social. They were both available and seemed perfect for the purposes of hosting my own Peertube server… and/or something else.
Well well well my birthday came and went and on September 18th I checked and saw that elena.video had been registered by someone in Russia on September 12th 2024!!!
At least I bought/registered elena.social.
Maybe one day in the not so distant future I will learn how to self-host a Fediverse project and use that as its URL / username. For now, elena.social is redirecting to the “Links” page of this site, listing my social media profiles. I just updated that page to reflect my views and some of the powerful points I shared in my Ghost blog post: “My favorite social networks are all part of the real Fediverse (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed); I rarely use platforms owned by Meta & co. for reasons I outlined in this blog post (TL;DR: behavior modification and illusion of connection for purposes of surveillance capitalism).”
I’m excited but still, I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am (to this day!) for not registering elena.video when I saw it was available.
The Fediverse has a different value system than commercial social media: striving for genuine connections, protecting privacy and championing accessibility
Please do not think that my interest in the #Fediverse has waned because I haven’t published a new piece for #TheFutureIsFederated in 2 weeks.
I’ve been writing an EPIC post about the values of the Fediverse - a love letter to it, really - that has ballooned to 12 min reading time (and I only covered 2/3 of the points I wanted to make).
I’ll split the post in 2 parts… and may publish something this afternoon. Thank you for everything, I think you may enjoy this new piece ❤️
I'm preparing a new article for #TheFutureIsFederated about the values of the Fediverse & FOSS communities (vs. Big Tech platforms).
Something that I LOVE about the #Fediverse is the encouragement to use #AltText in pics... for accessibility / people with visual impairements / ppl using screenreaders.
I see you can add #Alttext to images posted on #Threads but where do you read those descriptions?
I've been researching for the past week Threadiverse projects (Lemmy at first, then PieFed and now Mbin) with the goal of testing out their interoperability with the rest of the Fediverse.
Apologies in advance if this is the third post you see from me - this one is my first in Mbin.
I wonder if you have any insights regarding the differences between the 3 - advantages/disadvantages and opinions on your favorite project?
I'm also interested to see if Mbin manages to federate mentions (unlike Lemmy and PieFed who falls short). So for the purposes of this test, I'm mentioning: - my Mastodon account @_elena@mastodon.social - my Friendica account @elena@opensocial.space - and my Lemmy account @elena@lemmy.world to see if anything happens
On my end, I've been getting an education re: decentralized messaging apps, #E2EE and censorship over the last week.
I incured the ires of #Meta for using a bridge to access my #Instagram inbox. The same issue has been reported a lot over the past 3 days in the #Beeper subreddit.
At the end of the day, I'm happy I moved to #Signal in 2020 and I'm very curious and eager to learn as much as possible about #Matrix.
My BFF is an expat living in the Middle East and I find a lot of stuff about messaging and censorship absolutely fascinating. Like: did you know that Signal is blocked in a certain Middle Eastern country where the use of VPNs is illegal? But 99% of people there use Whatsapp to communicate? Even if Meta says Whatsapp communications are E2EE? Fascinating right? 🤔
There is so much to discuss about this, so I enlisted the help of a Matrix expert. I will most likely publish a piece about this for #TheFutureIsFederated next week.
Wishing everyone an amazing week! (And I'm using Friendica to write about this for its amazing post formatting and to bypass character limits).
Greatly enjoying the first #MatrixConf, from the POV of a non-technical person. (Well, maybe more technical than the average person, but still, not a developer).
I’m getting flashbacks to when I was a teen and I went to a study abroad program in L.A. for two weeks to improve my English. I couldn’t understand 80% of what locals would say to me, but I got the *gist* of it.
My two-week full immersion in #Matrix (to write about it for #TheFutureIsFederated) could not have been better timed 🤗
This is the last week of summer break for me & my family; my child will be back in pre-school in Paris next week.
We are doing a mini vacay on #LakeComo (nothing fancy, my family is from there). But this means I may not be able to publish a new post for #TheFutureIsFederated this week. We'll see.
Spoiler alert: I'll do more #interoperability tests now that I'm on a new #Friendica instance, including with my federated Wordpress blog 🤗
The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell: Lemmy, PieFed & Mbin sono al centro del quarto numero della newsletter di @Elena Rossini ✏️✨📸 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).@Che [share author='Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂' profile='https://poliverso.org/profile/notizie' avatar='https://poliverso.org/photo/681738843665a7dc465b237105770229-5.png?ts=1705499815' link='https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-5966-c758-311d-c8f061047009' posted='2024-08-22 15:24:33' guid='0477a01e-5966-c758-311d-c8f061047009' message_id='https://poliverso.org/objects/0477a01e-5966-c758-311d-c8f061047009']
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).
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
An exploration of Fediverse content aggregators as an alternative to Reddit, with a twist: the magic of ActivityPub, allowing communication with other Fediverse projects
It’s a really warm day today in Northern Italy (33°C / 91° F).
My toddler is refusing to nap, so I encouraged her to play with LEGOs instead.
And this is what I’m up to 😵💫(yes, compared to yesterday, today I introduced color-coding) 😅
Hope you’re all having a lovely day, wherever you are 🌞
P.S.: bravissimo to @dansup: I just realized that Pixelfed comment mentions from the #Fediverse’s content aggregators show up in #Pixelfed. How cool! 🤩
Me 2 weeks ago: oh I will just do a post about #Lemmy interoperability with the rest of the #Fediverse for my blog series #TheFutureIsFederated. How hard can it be? I already federated my Wordpress blog and figured out #Friendica.
Me today: I now have accounts on #Lemmy PLUS #PieFed AND #Mbin because my initial federation tests had mixed results. Reading my notes makes me go 😵💫😅
Despite all this I still LOVE the #Fediverse and I’m in awe of #Mastodon’s interoperability (it comes out shining)
I've been running lots of #interoperability tests between #Lemmy #PieFed #Mbin and the rest of the #Fediverse and I've been learning so many interesting things! I cannot wait to write about all this for #TheFutureIsFederated. (For the record these are content aggregators, the Fedi’s answer to #Reddit).
I may have to resort to hand-written graphs because some of the stuff is a bit convoluted 😅
Hallelujah!!! 🥳 After a week of testing out #Threadiverse interoperability I finally managed to find how to make mentions work.
For the purposes of my test, I created a new post with a mention to my #Mastodon account in #Lemmy, #PieFed and #Mbin and these are my results: ❌ Lemmy ❌ PieFed ✅ Mbin
I've been researching for the past week Threadiverse projects (Lemmy at first, then PieFed and now Mbin) with the goal of **testing out their interoperability with the rest of the Fediverse**....
I made it back to Italy after spending 2 weeks in Brittany.
I'll be testing out #Lemmy & #PieFed interoperability with the rest of the #Fediverse over the next week, to write about it for a new issue of #TheFutureIsFederated.
Things are off to a rough start: - mentions don't work in posts but only in comments?!? - hashtags don't work either?!?
The Pollyanna in me is determined to find good things to say about the #Threadiverse, so please share your advice and tips 🥲
Lemmy interoperability with other Fediverse projects
Hi everyone!
I'm new here and I wonder if you have any advice/testimonials to share regarding Fediverse interoperability.
I'm working on a post about it for my blog series The Future is Federated. I’d like to do a show & tell, demonstrating what interoperability looks like between #Lemmy and #Friendica, #Mastodon + a federated blog to start with.
I scheduled this post in #Friendica this morning - explaining why this week I won’t be able to write a new article for my series #thefutureisfederated - and it worked yaaaay!
The only problem was figuring out the exact time it would be published - I messed up with the wrong time zone. But otherwise it’s pretty cool to use this functionality 💁🏻♀️
This week I won’t be able to publish a new article for my series #TheFutureIsFederated – I’m traveling with family, moving on to a new location and I won’t have the luxury of grandparents helping out with my toddler 🥲
Next week I’m back with my family in Italy and I look forward to adding a new chapter to the series.
First I will write an addendum to the original Friendica post, showing things I didn’t have time to include (because that post took 12 minutes to read!) Expect this on or around August 22nd.
After that: #Lemmy will be in the spotlight. I’m currently testing out Lemmy and its integrations with the Fediverse… planning to publish a post about this topic on August 29th or 30th.
A HUGE thank you for all your kind words and support, I’m delighted to hear my series has been resonating with you 💗
This week I won’t be able to publish a new article for my series #TheFutureIsFederated – I’m traveling with family, moving on to a new location and I won’t have the luxury of grandparents helping out with my toddler 🥲
Next week I’m back with my family in Italy and I look forward to adding a new chapter to the series.
First I will write an addendum to the original Friendica post, showing things I didn’t have time to include (because that post took 12 minutes to read!) Expect this on or around August 22nd.
After that: #Lemmy will be in the spotlight. I’m currently testing out Lemmy and its integrations with the Fediverse… planning to publish a post about this topic on August 29th or 30th.
A HUGE thank you for all your kind words and support, I’m delighted to hear my series has been resonating with you 💗
I've been planning to write about #Lemmy for a future issue of #TheFutureIsFederated but the more I read about Lemmy interoperability with other Fediverse projects, the more confused I get.
There's a superb guide by @informapirata (informapirata.it/2024/01/02/ma…) about this, but it's going over my head... I feel like I need a PhD in computer science to understand the subtle complexities of Lemmy.
Anyhow, I'm highly motivated to figure this out and do a show & tell. Wish me luck! 😅
