smallcircles
I am @humanetech at Mastodon, #FOSS and #Fediverse advocate, mod at SocialHub, and facilitator of Humane Tech Community.
I help fight tech harms and “Promote Solutions that Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society”.
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https://fediverse.space/ shows graphs, I think, though currently the page blanks out on me in Firefox. So dunno if they offer the functionality you referred to.
It works but loads a bit slowly. Thanks for posting, I added it to https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-clients
In part this depends on personal preference and objective you have. If you want to be really organized then separate accounts is way to achieve that. But for me that is too much of a burden really. Gives a lot of real and mental/sensory overhead. For some things - with lack of federated identity - it is inevitable to have multiple account. Like I find myself talking to my other self between Lemmy and Mastodon :D
One thing to consider is if your followers like the combination of stuff you are interested in. If a large number of your posts are in Italian, then that may be a reason for English-speaking fedizens to not follow you anymore. Scholarly stuff and book stuff seem to go better together. NSFW not so much, for obvious reasons…
My new way of advocating fedi, may ‘campaign slogan’ if you will is: “Fediverse: Peopleverse!”
These types of instances should be filtered out by default, otherwise the site only serves to give fediverse a bad reputation. With such instances in the top you cannot pass the link to the site to someone and say “Here, discover the fediverse with its many nice instances, but be careful when doing so and keep your children away while browsing them, just in case”.
Fediverse might be Web4 in situations where it makes sense to highlight technological evolutionary iterations of the web. And if you consider Web3 to be the (failed) Semantic Web - where the 3.0 was first introduced - then it makes sense too. The Fediverse is then the Social (Semantic) Web, as it based on Linked Data open standards (ActivityStreams / ActivityPub). But in doing so you also needlessly set yourself up for techno-ideological ‘warfare’ to claim that turf. It can be useful. It can be logical. But I wonder if it is worth the fight.
Web0, introduced by Aral Balkan in reaction to Web3’s ‘blockchain-override’, is also putting emphasis on a technical characteristic. But along a different dimension than evolutionary versioning, namely “web made simple again” and hence for everyone (note: simple != easy).
Peopleverse is yet another dimension: the human aspect. It is a ‘unique selling point’ and almost unclaimed space in the corporate onslaught that the normal web has become. And certainly wrt what the Metaverse aims to be… some cyberpunk corporate-controlled world. No, thank you :)
The most important thing we have on the Fediverse, imho, is our culture. And that culture is determined by everyone’s interaction. I tooted about this this morning in reaction to something I wrote on Fediverse Town:
Be careful what you preach. Those promoting the #Fediverse to the world beyond should be well aware that that the current culture spun up by all fedizens together, are what makes fedi such a worthwhile place to be.
And that this culture is the primary ‘weapon’ in fending off unwanted forces. How we build and integrate our apps is important too, but only in a supportive manner.
Protecting and fostering our culture collaboratively is key to Fediverse’s health and future.
There will be challenges to the Fediverse to overcome in the future, and I feel that for the most part that ‘versioning the web’ will play at best only a minor role in solving them :)
Sad news indeed. I posted an announcement to SocialHub and involved with migrations of ForgeFed discussions (to SocialHub and Forgefriends) and Fediverse Party website plus the ActivityPub Watchlists (to Codeberg).
Besides two long-running discussions about standardizing how Groups work, there’s a more recent topic at Social Hub to be able to define Unbound Groups. These are Groups that are not tied to an instance, but are independent of them. With it the same Group can exist on multiple instances. The mechanism we are thinking about is a bit of a workaround to the limitation that Groups are bound to an instance via their Object ID (which is an URL).
Other than that, for a long time I am promoting a concept which I call “Community has no Boundary” (just linking to one comment, but I wrote many). It is about setting the concept of “Community” free of instances once and for all, by defining an Fediverse/ActivityPub extension for it. The “instance” means a server boundary, and that is a technical concept. With the extension we no longer have to talk about instances, but refer to communities instead. Each instance hosts one or more communities, just like Lemmy does.
But it goes a bit further than that. If you look in real life to the groups and communities you are part of, then there are many different types of relationships you have with them. You may be a ‘member of’ a sports club, but also ‘sponsor’ it, and ‘volunteer’ behind the bar in the canteen. That’s three relationships. In fedi apps we see Groups still be limited to ‘member of’ relationship and the additional privilege to be either a moderator or an admin. But it does not go further than that. With Relationship in place for Groups it becomes possible to better express the rich social fabric that exists IRL and build functionality on top of that, which takes that into account.
Your observation is correct. The project is pre ‘official’ announcement and still in preparation, but site is up publicly and that’s why it ended up here prematurely. @csdummi and I started the initiative, after discussing on United Software Development: A new paradigm? in !fediversefutures. You might say the idea was born on Lemmy :)
We have a discussion repo on Codeberg, but found a place on the forgefriends community. The website will be changed to position what Social Coding is and does more clearly and to enable the “Social Coding Movement” as our initiative will be called, to be crowdsourced, incremental and extensible. See: Positioning Social Coding and Forgefriends. We have a Social Coding chatroom on Matrix.
Yes, true. I asked the question in a more general sense on the fedi: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/107540889998564900
The question is whether the project should be forked into multiple separate projects at all. An alternative would be to have a generic “Directory Platform” and have modules to make it a Book Review platform, a Movie Database, or whatever-you-wanna-collect platform with another module. The modules would mostly be templates and data structures + user interface widgets to present them nicely.
For more Wordpress-related ActivityPub projects and other plugins, check the the ActivityPub Developer Resources Watchlist (I am a co-maintainer, ping me if you know about additional stuff to add).
Yes, you are quite right. With all the tools and features that MS Github brings together there will be more and more network effects and FOMO for devs to stick to their platform. There’ll be implicit vendor lock-in. Microsoft increasingly uses the open source ecosystem (that tbh they did great service to in the past) to bind developers to their entire portfolio of other services. I expect in future, as their dominance growse even further, that they’ll start to monetize more and more stuff. Then it will be harder still for projects deeply embedded on their platform to move somewhere else. And at the same time for people new to open-source it is really hard to get an overview of the free software movement. That ‘somewhere else’ seems to be all github-based.
You might consider filing an issue in their tracker to add ActivityPub support. AP was discussed in 2 issues before, and as a result the maintainer joined the fedi at @prologic@mastodon.mills.io. See:
That would be a nice one for Flockingbird. They worked on a job-hunting bot for the fedi, called Hunter2.
You and @jedrax@lemmy.ml are right, but also I believe that we should start to think more in a different direction on the Fediverse. The biggest strength that flows from its decentralized nature, if you come to think of it, is that the fedi AS A WHOLE should be competing against the traditional social media giants. By overly focusing on individual apps, and seeing them as full-service platforms, we overlook this strength. There’s slim chance that a small FOSS-values driven non-commercial project will ever be truly competitive. But the Fediverse in its entirety could. The network effects of fedi compound to something that’s worth cnnsidering. The total experience of what is means to be ‘a fedizen’ is then important. That experience will never improve much if there’s just single apps without much interop between them, though. Note that this fedi strength is a weakness for the moloch platforms, who have to protect their castle with everything they have, locking people in, while we are essentially coop-based.
There’s a Hacker News front page discussion on this now with currently 69 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312
Yes, and with readers built in. Dunno if Bookwyrm has that. Btw, forgot to mention that they are also on HN atm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29377450
I love the idea, and am advocating myself for some time to create better abstractions of “Community” in the fediverse than we have now. I call it the “Community has no Boundary” paradigm, where a community goes well-beyond a simple group of members. Instead it can have a rich set of Relationships to other actors (Person, Organization, Group, etc.), some standardized, some app-specific. “Community” as a concept might standardized on the fediverse, where a server exposes one or more Group actors. In the current fediverse the community is implicit and defined by the “instance boundary”. Lemmy is among the first apps that slice things differently and expose many communities with the recent federation update. I wrote more on this in Standardizing on ActivityPub Groups and Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension?
The user-friendliness is very important indeed. I see a lot of people comparing to Facebook, and I guess you’d compete with them from functional perspective. But I couldn’t tell as I’ve never used FB. The FB walled garden excludes people that have no account. Maybe your app can shine here, by allowing integrations to the websites that these local communities have. Like GoToSocial the app may be a back-end service, where different UI’s can consume the API.
You can also approach @grhiska on SocialHub where he’s a frequent poster, and also wrote some Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP’s) to give feedback on. SocialHub is in general a good place to discuss technical issues related to federated apps.
PS. I co-maintain the ActivityPub Application Watchlist and ActivityPub Developer Resources Watchlist where you can find other codebases to inspire you.
This does not exist, as far as I know. I co-maintain the ActivityPub Application Watchlist which is AFAIK the most complete list of federated apps. If anyone knows about any app that should be on this list, I’d be glad to know :)
This recently created image (taken from Fediverse on Wikipedia) has a good overview:
It may also be a good idea to promote other use cases that stimulate spinning up PeerTube instances, or use an existing host for that. For instance there are so many initiatives, non-profits, public institutions that want to improve the tech landscape, yet exclusively dump their video content to YT, reference it in their pages and expose you to the trackers that involves. Their strategy should be to first publish to their own PeerTube and then afterwards to alternative channels. This also protects them from their channel taken down or censored for some reason or other, assuring no links get broken and they have an archive to fall back to.
Just a FYI… we had a humongous fedi logo discussion early this year. See: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/105485124372180453
I like the logo design, but getting it to be ‘the’ standard will be hard. The outcome of the other discussion was that most people wanted to stick with current pentagram design. Your design would be good as a ‘share to fediverse’ toolbar icon, as it does well on low resolution.
Bit weird. An anonymous Google Doc, a screenshot of a toot saying “this is legit” and no other references. Could at least provide the URL to that toot.