I strongly suggest that only stable builds be considered for usage in this flagship instance.
In case of Firefish, making the flagship instance a sandbox was not a good decision. Also, the major database update did not live up to the expectations as timelines still continue to feel buggier.
Though not dead, since Firefish is not fast enough in fixing issues that affect real users and real admins, I see that some Firefish instances are migrating to Sharkey or Iceshrimp.
Otherwise, for the most part, usage of Firefish has been a nice experience.
From a user perspective, both Sharkey and Iceshrimp have good prospects.
A case of spec ambiguity, maybe? I can't find a mention in WebFinger or ActivityPub specs of usernames being case insensitive. Are @osma and @osma referring to the same actor? Is that up to implementation? How does a remote server determine which is correct?
Edit: I wrote above (at)Osma@mas.to and (at)osma@mas.to, but some part of the stack converted both to a lowercase mention during posting. I don't know which part, and what specs describes that.
I should take a break from whining about #ActivityPub to crow about my big breakthrough. Today, I successfully sent my first messages and replies between #Emissary and #Mastodon. And all it required was a complete overhaul the custom ActivityPub outbox.
It’s a small step forward, but a huge milestone for me. Hopefully, it will translate to big wins for other devs who can use my #Golang libraries in the future.
Every now and then, technologists are able to translate their strongly held beliefs into action for the benefit of society. Sometimes these actions result in new features, apps or platforms but it's especially powerful when this happens at the protocol level.
In the latest episode of Dot Social I talk with @evan about how he helped get #ActivityPub started, how it's going, and what he hopes for next. Check it out here.
A new episode of Dot Social, the first podcast about the open social web, is out! In it, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with ActivityPub co-author @evan about what the protocol unlocks for builders and entrepreneurs, how open-source social networks change our relationships to content and each other, and why any of this matters at all. Learn more and take a listen!
I'm thinking I might stop using the term #fediverse#fedi or #activitypub when I want to talk about this community of federated social media services.
It's confusing and to be honest sounds way too much like a corporate brand trying to sell something.
I'm thinking I might start using something like "open internet" in general and "open social media" in particular to make the point that fedi isn't some specific thing; it's the default social media for the open internet.
Don't think you're wrong. As long-time fedizens we are kinda used to hear fediverse / fedi. To the uninitiated it sounds weird and off-putting.
I avoid "social media" (media too much associated with broadcasting, selling your message), and use "social networking" there, which we also do offline for ages already.
Instead of #Fediverse I increasingly refer to open/decentralized #SocialWeb, which makes it more broad and inclusive (e.g. different network stacks than #ActivityPub-based).
Our CEO, @mike just launched a new podcast series titled "Dot Social" to explore the evolution of the internet and how new open standards, like #ActivityPub, can forever change the web and the world of social media.
"Joining #ActivityPub would have been a big engineering effort, but federation could have brought in enough interesting content to make sticking around be worth it."
#ActivityPub has a lot of the same characteristics as email. But in email, the duties of each part of the process are split up, and you can mix-and-match software. Fediverse software is more tightly coupled than that.
SMTP is like the ActivityPub server-to-server protocol. Like in email with sendmail/exim/postfix/etc, you could have a program that does just this.
IMAP is like the server-to-client protocol. Like in email, with courier/dovecot/etc, you could have a program that does just this.
It is nice he thinks ActivityPub is the Internet of the future, calling it "the post-platform" world in which journalists, individuals, organizations all run their own ActivityPub services rather than create accounts on platforms like Ex-Twitter or Facebook. But his perspective is still limited to a world where all applications run on the HTTP protocol with DNS identifying services. He talks about the "Post On (your) Own (host), Syndicate Everywhere" (POSSE) model, and how organizations and individuals can deploy Mastodon instances on their own servers. They also interviewed @pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) which was nice.
They really should have interviewed the @spritelyinst folks to see the real Internet of the future, in which HTTP is replaced with the Object Capability Network (OCapN). But to be fair, this tech is still pretty new and maybe not yet to the point where tech journalists at The Verge would be interested in doing articles about it.
When Twitter changed hands and Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame, on October 2022, it seemed that we were on the verge of a digital revolution based on Act...
I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.
You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.
And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.
And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.
Managing hashtags submitted with an #ActivityPub note is not as simple as you'd think. Hashtags are collected into a separate node in the Note object.
Firefish and Friendica for example, have their hashtag entry below the content. You've got to do cartwheels to combine those with any a user may have added in the note text itself, removing duplicates.
Then ensure you maintain the integrity of the note text but also add any missing tags so they are visible to end users.
"We get exponential growth based on having one protocol, not a half dozen. [..] standards aren’t about competition. They’re about cooperation".
Great article by @evanprodromou . I completely agree, #ActivityPub has to win if we want to have a great social web. Don't get seduced by the shiny marketing of the next VC driven social network (protocol).
I've just discovered that lemmy.world (and potentially other) users I've banned from my magazine are still able to comment, comments I can't see on kbin but that do show up on lemmy.world....
@adam thank you for explaining this. Am I correct to understand, then, that this is something about which we ought to approach the #activityPub devs, rather than ernest?
Ernest's comment that ActivityPub tries to federate moderation (but isn't ?why) was very interesting.
It seems to me, on the face of it at least, that moderation is a key part of any social medium.
Is the Fediverse the start of taking back ownership of the platform? Do we need an ActivityPub for ecommerce, streaming, news articles? What else? #activitypub#technofeudalism#fediverse
Automattic's Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved (notes.ghed.in)
When Twitter changed hands and Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame, on October 2022, it seemed that we were on the verge of a digital revolution based on Act...
Magazine bans not federating with lemmy.world (and potentially others) (kbin.social)
I've just discovered that lemmy.world (and potentially other) users I've banned from my magazine are still able to comment, comments I can't see on kbin but that do show up on lemmy.world....