Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!

  • 5 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 4Y ago
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Cake day: Nov 29, 2019

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Hey, thanks for sharing this! The site seems to be down right now, and needs to migrate over to new servers anyway. I’ll be investing time into that process - for now, I’m writing weekly articles over at the fledgling FediNews publication.


Yeah, the comment spam eventually got really bad. I think as a way forward, I’d be interested in trying a better ActivityPub integration and maybe hide the comments form in such a way that only ActivityPub actors could actually post responses to anything.


I’d just point out that the fediverse exists, is way better, and that Truth Social just cheaply rips off Mastodon.


I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have some platforms be specialized around really particular kinds of activities, but I have like 7 different accounts floating around. It’s tiring. I’d really just prefer a good generalist platform and a handful of different apps that all hook into the same account.

That being said, I don’t mind the concept of following someone’s Pixelfed to see their neat photography pics, or another person’s PeerTube to watch their videos. In fact, if my hypothetical server can interoperate with them without any major issues, I’d consider that a win for me.


You know, every time I’ve tried to take a look at Solid’s protocol, I find myself struggling to understand what they’re actually trying to do, or how any of it is supposed to work.

I’ve tried to read the protocol spec several times, and my brain just kind of melts. From their About page for the Solid project, I kind of get what they’re talking about, but so much of the under-the-hood stuff feels really vague.

I’m not against making a fediverse platform support Solid, if only to support the core concepts its promoting, but I feel like they have a lot of work to do to make their own project more accessible to people.


I think it’s kind of arbitrary, but I personally upvotes and downvotes more as “I agree with this / I disagree with this”, which is perhaps much more biased than “This content belongs here / this doesn’t belong here”


Huh, I’ve never thought of doing something like that before! Maybe I’ll do some research on adding some kind of TTS functionality to my articles.


Over the years, I've been studying a handful of different fediverse platforms that bring a lot of interesting concepts to the table. As someone that has studied and [reported on](https://wedistribute.org/) the developments of these various systems, I've decided to put together a summary of things I'd like to one day put into my own federated platform, should I ever develop enough brainpower to actually develop one.
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In a lot of ways, NFTs bear a strong resemblance to DRM - except that many in the NFT community will argue that the content of the NFT isn’t actually the important part.

It’s like they actually buy the DRM itself, because that is what accrues value, with little consideration to what the DRM holds.


In 2018, a platform was launched to build an open, decentralized web for videos. In 2021, the network is still struggling to grow. I take a look into some of the problems with content discovery, along with some small suggestions for instance admins.
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BookWyrm is the Federated GoodReads Replacement I Didn’t Know I Needed
An overview of a new federated GoodReads alternative, powered by ActivityPub. It's awesome, and I'm really excited about it!
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Introducing Spectra, an instance for video creators
TL;DR - A month or two back, I launched an instance with a specific goal in mind: provide a home for creators that want to put videos out into the fediverse, without having to deal with storage space limitations or the hassle of maintaining their own instances. This motivation gave birth to Spectra. The service is invite-only, and I'm looking for creators that would like to get invited to the platform to upload videos. As a bonus, creators are entitled to basically unlimited upload space. If you're interested, reach out to me on the fediverse (sean@social.deadsuperhero.com) about getting an invite. ---- PeerTube kind of has an inherent discovery problem, when it comes to finding good content to watch. Granted, the project offers a global search system, along with a discovery tool for finding instances to join, as well as a way for instances to subscribe to the global firehose of a growing video catalog. However, I feel as though these are the wrong solutions for growing an actual user community - instance admins can end up with a video catalogue filled with crap that's simply not relevant to anybody. I believe part of the solution to this problem is by using human curation to focus creators into a space, and subscribe to a handful of other reputable PeerTube instances to get some kind of community engagement going. So far, we've got about 3 or 4 people actually uploading stuff locally. It's a humble beginning! But, I'm looking to grow this little community further, because I think this effort could grow out the video part of the fediverse in a meaningful and significant way.
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If you're a creator on PeerTube, share your channel!
I think PeerTube has really come along as a project, but I think it's caught in a situation where the technical aspects are advancing far faster than the communal ones. In order for PeerTube to actually succeed in practice, I believe that creators ought to reach out to one another to create a type of loose community where we actually follow each other, comment on each other's stuff, etc, kind of like YouTube's early years.
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