Does /tech/ participate in the Fediverse? Seems to me that this is the sort of social media we should be trying to get people into, even if social media itself is kinda trash.
I've always disliked social media, but after the news at >>>/leftypol/1066439, I've been considering getting into the Fediverse. You see, I would like the people who DO use social media (basically everyone) to be on better platforms, but I feel I cannot demand that from them if I cannot even use them myself. For instance, it would be disingenuous to ask Comrade Cockshott to start his presence in Mastodon after getting banned from fedbook if I could not be there to follow him and boost his follower stats. So..
So, /tech/, any thoughts on the Fediverse? What are some good instances and communities I could join? What are some people I should be following? What implementations are better, Pleroma, Mastodon, something else?
Also fediverse general.
Also, for anyone who is not familiar with the Fediverse:
>The Fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing, social networking, microblogging, blogging and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create accounts. These accounts are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard.Adapted from the Wikipedia entry on "fediverse"
Example networks would be Mastodon, Pleroma and Diaspora. Here you can browse a list of some (officially endorsed) Mastodon instances:
https://joinmastodon.org/communities/ . Note these are not *all* existing instances.
>>5055That's good to hear. Guess I shouldn't have speedread through the thread. Still, this discussion is relevant, we cannot rely on proprietary corporate platforms for our communication. We know anyone could get banned at any moment. Even happened to my local org's fb page.
>>5058Peertube is very promising indeed. Allowing communities to set up their own site for video sharing is a great way to get people out of YouTube. Especially since the main problem in getting people to migrate to other places like BitChute and LBRY is that they're filled with shitty cryptoscam and conspiratard content. PeerTube avoids that problem.
Got any good instances or channels to share?
>>5061>Especially since the main problem in getting people to migrate to other places like BitChute and LBRY is that they're filled with shitty cryptoscam and conspiratard content.That's only part of the problem. The real issue at hand is just about everyone who has attempted to be an alternative to Youtube in the past was intent on copying their business model. The problem is Youtube for the longest time actually operated at a loss in order to strangle the competition. In doing so they were able to provide greater bandwidth and higher transcoding service in doing so. Only very recently has Youtube finally sought to capitalize on their monopoly with a deluge of aggressive ads and pay-for-movies schemes. Youtube competitors trying to be businesses find themselves in a battle they cannot possibly win. Vimeo is practically the only one that was about to carve out a small niche for documentary and film students by being a paid service for them–this has allowed them to subsidize the free users with better quality and transcoding standards for than Youtube. But decentralized alternatives like PeerTube finally provide a way around this conundrum: by distributing the hosting load among many independent servers and the users themselves it allows a community of non-profit-seeking peers to form that can sustain itself. At the moment PeerTube needs more transcoding options for instance owners to take advantage of this freedom (in particular I want to see a PeerTube instance that gives its users the freedom to use no transcoding at all, instead relying on file size limits), but this is a feature that can be added very easily (perhaps even trivially since it's open source) and conversations with the main developer suggest they might get around to it eventually. The added bonus to all of this of course censorship resistance.
Lainchan used to have a comfy PeerTube instance but it died early last year and nobody has heard from its owner since.
>>5062Nice. I've seen this instance before, but lost the link. Thank you for posting it.
>>5063>That's only part of the problem.True. I immediately regretted saying "the main problem" as soon as I saw my final post. There's a lot more involved here.
>The real issue at hand is just about everyone who has attempted to be an alternative to Youtube in the past was intent on copying their business model.That is a very good point. Right now services like LBRY are very intent on shilling their business model, which is just YouTube with cryptocurrencies. Of course, if a service like this were to surpass YouTube (unlikely, as you pointed out), it would just develop the same problems YouTube currently has.
I'm looking through a list PeerTube instances, will post any content I personally enjoy here.
>>5053StatusNet oldie here. It's been interesting to see the developments in the fediverse over the years. One unfortunate thing has been Eugen letting himself get pushed around by radlibs. He has forgotten that users are not important, especially not whiny ones that don't contribute.
>>5142Pleroma development was more active last time I checked, but GNU Social has had more features for a longer time. GNU Social also has !groups, which neither Mastodon nor Pleroma have last time I checked. There is an ActivityPub plugin for GS in the works, or maybe it's even finished.
>>5145So stablity/maturity-wise, GNU Social? I want something that will just work. I don't need fancy features. What attracts me to Pleroma, however, is Elixir. I'm guessing Pleroma can scale very well.
Can Pleroma not federate and have a private server? Mastodon and diaspora can't do this.
>>5146>Can Pleroma not federate and have a private server? Mastodon and diaspora can't do this.Should be possible, but I'd ask on IRC about it. I'm pretty sure you can disable federation with Mastodon and Diaspora too if you really want to.
As for GS vs Pleroma, Pleroma has the benefit if being written in a based language like Erlang.
>>5226Well, continuing off of this: I ended up just dumping the videos in some """breadtube""" instance, since it seemed the most general leftist out of the ones I found, despite them specifically talking about anarchism in the about page, but not communism in general. I hope my content is allowed to stay there. Link is
https://watch.breadtube.tv/ for anyone interested.
>>5227We can surely hope. Bunkerchan peertube would be really great. Could call it bunkerchannel, bunkertube or something like that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube-will-now-show-ads-on-all-videos-even-if-creators-dont-want-them/Is it time to start shilling PeerTube like crazy?
I need to finally settle on an instance to move all my video game stuff to, because I sure as fuck did not make a Youtube account in 2006 to spam people with ads.
>>6454Yes, you've got the right idea. The easiest way to explain it is that it's like email: gmail users can talk to yahoo mail users, which can talk to hotmail users, etc etc. That's what it means to be a descentralized, federated network. The whole network is made out of these servers which are able to communicate with each other, since they all use a common protocol, called ActivityPub.
It also might be worth mentioning that mastodon and gnu social aren't websites, they're programs. They're programs you can run on a server in order to host your own little social media site. These servers are called instances, and they all use the ActivityPub protocol to communicate with each other. Users on a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social can talk to users on a Pleroma instance like pleroma.social or a GNU social instance. Anyone (whether an individual or an organization) with access to a server and a web domain can set up their own instance.
gentooGentoo >>6468> recommend setting up an instance of Hometown, a fork of Mastodon that lets you limit posts to only your instanceAre you saying 'limit the accessibility of posts you make' or 'limit the source of posts you view on your feed'?
I've only used Pleroma (and PeerTube) which has an easy-to-find feed for viewing local posts (and not all the rest from federated instances). I assumed Mastodon would have done the same, because it's a pretty simple and useful feature.
The issue with restricting posts to your instance is I think it suggests a false sense of security. It's not inherently a bad feature but it's easy for an uninformed user (i.e. almost all of them, let's be honest) to think it's any more 'private'.
e.g. Mastodon's 'unlisted' feature is (was??) a similar example
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/privacy-and-tracking-on-the-fediverse/ (original creator of Pleroma, 'lain', posted early 2018)
>“Unlisted” posts are not even in the ActivityPub standard. There’s no reason to expect any non-Mastodon server to respect the ‘unlisted’ setting, and they will most probably display those posts like public posts.>There is no end-to-end encryption on the Fediverse. Even direct messages are sent unencrypted. That means that the admin of any server that your message travelled to can read it by looking it up in the database.Now the second is pretty standard for social media and isn't surprising, but the first could easily trip people up and is what I'm getting at. It's fine if people realize a blogging site shouldn't have any expectation of privacy (I mean, look at Parler lol), but I don't think that's a widely-held understanding.
>>6474I would say it's better designed but has different bonus features, although I'm no expert (I don't have an account on either Mastodon or Pleroma). I think Pleroma easier for the host to maintain.
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/#how-is-it-different-from-mastodonBy the way:
>Compatible with Mastodon clients (including the Mastodon frontend).>this includes Twidere, Tusky, Mastalab, Tootdon and many others.I love open protocols.
>>6478I know Mastodon accounts can subscribe to PeerTube channels and like/dislike/comment. I haven't tried but I doubt it works in Pleroma.
Fortunately someone made a reddit post today asking a similar questions:
>Pleroma was behind in functionality but has caught up considerably. Mastodon last releases have been more about polish in the UI and in developing pointy-clicky admin/moderation tools, while Pleroma is still more focused on giving more flexibility to power users (e.g., pleroma's MRF [Message Rewrite Facility] is a really cool to process and programmatically moderate / transform any message received by the server). I finally got fed up enough with Youtube's bullshit that I spend the last few days investigating the entire list of PeerTube instances on the official tracker.
>>6690LinuxRocks and yt.is.nota.live are nice PeerTube instances. There's some very comfy technology instances like the Diode Zone that are basically self-hosted too. If I could figure out if one needs an exceptional internet connection/high bandwidth and how easy it is to federate with lots of other instances I'd be interested in hosting my own.
It's kind of amazing to me how many propertarian and ostensibly leftist instances that claim to care about free speech also have "no commies" or "no nazis" rules. Such hypocrisy.
>>6498User ranking can be legitimately useful in some situations (esp. in non-political and non-commercial settings where there is less incentive to game the system).
>>6695>It's kind of amazing to me how many propertarian and ostensibly leftist instances that claim to care about free speech also have "no commies" or "no nazis" rules. Such hypocrisy.This. It's like Google saying We Value Your Privacy™. Just admit it's not the case and no-one will leave.
>leftist instances […] have "no commies"Fun if true. source or gtfo
>>6697For uploading or just browsing and commenting? Do you want a comfy community or mass reach?
All I can say is pick well and join me in asking the devs to start on implementing account migration: I chose a decent instance and started uploading but then a perfect instance was launched a year later and you can't just move the account over keeping the likes and comments. Luckily I haven't had an instance get shut down but it's almost an inevitability, right?
>>6696I meant there are propertarian "free speech" instances that have "no commies" rules and there are leftist "free speech" instances that have "no nazis" rules. Peertube.social is a prominent example of the latter.
By the way Marxanons, there's multiple anarchist PeerTube instances and even one explicitly for breadtube. We better get on the bandwagon before the anarchists leave us behind.
>>6708Don't call yourself censorship-free if you're not free of censorship.
>Why the fuck would you as a communist share an instance with nazis?There are several reasons to do so. One is to foster an atmosphere of genuine free speech to build communities of resistance when the crackdown arrives, the other is to occupy places with people who can be rescued into the fold of anti-capitalism by proximity to our arguments. The latter is the same reason I still lament the death of the 8ch and the fact that we never joined the webring of 8ch diaspora sites.
>>6710The far-right already have Gab, this Mastodon has solidified itself as a hub for the far-left and non-reactionary libre software hackers.
>One is to foster an atmosphere of genuine free speech Okay crypto-lib go make your free speech zone with Fuentes, Chomsky and /pol/ - nothing's stopping you.
>>6711>Okay crypto-lib>only real leftists are censor-happyGood call moron, I guess the mass purging of socialist orgs on Facebook the last few days means nothing to you. Imagine saying shit like this on an image board. An image board that descends from
three censorship battles, no less.
>>6713>All platforms are the sameWhat your dumb ass can't wrap your head around is the fact that this "censorship" as your using it here, conflating it with Facebook of all things, doesn't apply. Gab is literally a safe haven
built out of Mastodon infrastructure. Porn is already on Mastodon. Your initial conception is fundamentally false. MLs are on Mastodon. Solarpunk anarcho-vegans are on Mastodon. Programmers of illegal copyright-circumventing software is on Mastodon. If one out of 1000 number of instances in a free federation says "no dogs" that doesn't mean the
federated decentralized network censors dogs, fuckhead, especially when it's quite possible that there are already seven instances specifically dedicated to dog discussion already. Your misunderstanding comes from not knowing jack shit about the technology in question but still making a fuckload of assumptions, while arguing inside the framework of
a fucking liberal. Newsflash: free speech is a fucking myth to keep you in check you basic bitch retard how about you analyze the free speech "empowering" communists throughout history. The bourgeois can disappear you whenever the fuck the want - That's power.
Our power isn't some fucking 1776 constitutional amendment
they handed to "us", rather it's our ability to strike a stop to their machines and services and murder them by force afforded by the sheer mass of our class acting in self-interest for the productive mode of communism.
>>6721>When freedom of speech is stricken from the constitution people's tongues disappear and success becomes impossible, Just like in Tsarists Russia, occupied China, Junta Cuba and -wait…I bet you aren't even using anonymizing technologies.
>Communications control and propaganda absolutely matter.Then stop arguing for synthesis organizations with defenders of capital you clown.
Rely on the laws of the tsar and organize with the Whites!-Vlad the Loonatic, 1817
>>6784How would we do this? I feel like we need to get a few big names I'm afraid.
I think one of the more interesting parts of the fediverse is the self hosting aspect, getting normies to care about this stuff is borderline impossible, however if you host your own instances you can approach them more easily with "Hey buddy, wanna try some federated microblogging?"
Now that peertube supports streaming. When should I expect seeing one of you streaming silent hill there?
>>6812Get a mastodon account for that
>>6932https://www.marketwatch.com/story/blockchain-firm-lbry-tries-to-rally-sector-against-sec-critics-allege-a-cryptocurrency-suppression-program-11617807779So apparently LBRY is being sued by the SEC over claims that the company violated securities laws by selling their cryptocurrency in order to fund their work without registering it with the SEC as a security.
Is this where all of these social media alternatives that feel the need to shove crypto into their service are headed? Bruce Schneier sure seems to think so. In addition to crypto being little more than a zero-sum pyramid scheme, he says all it really does is invite government investigative and regulatory meddling by the IRS, the SEC, FinCEN, and probably the FBI:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/wtf-signal-adds-cryptocurrency-support.htmlI kind of hope this gets some people to choose PeerTube over LBRY in the future.
>>8579>if there's a decentralized net, it's going to come from blockchainName one positive thing that blockchain
actually adds to these systems.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html >>8580>Just about everyone using bitcoin has to trust one of the few available wallets and use one of the few available exchangesthis guy doesn't know what he's talking about. you can make a wallet in seconds. you don't even have to use it.
>Name one positive thing that blockchain actually adds to these systems.if a server shuts down it doesn't mean data suddenly disappearing into nothing.
>>8070>reclaimthenetanother freeze peach website using freeze peach to mask their far right positions.
disgusting.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/13/scott-ritter-twitter-wars-my-personal-experience-in-twitters-ongoing-assault-on-free-speech/Big escalation on Twitter last week. Twitter is now knowingly allowing phony accounts to stay up whose purpose is to smear the reputation of people it has banned for wrongthink.
Anon are you doing your part to guide people to GNU social/Mastodon/Pleroma… Instead of that stupid fucking Panquake project?
>>14506democratizing discourse bro
it's just like your local water cooler but online
>>17835>How did it end up being called Fediverse anyways? >I get that it's supposed to be short for "federated universe",…. so are you asking a question or just answering it and making a joke?
Not everyone is preoccupied with government agents, you know.
>>9937I looked there once two years ago, because some (clearly unironic, self-admitted) schizophrenic spammer on an imageboard revealed their username while getting permabanned from a very permissive imageboard.
Was basically a tiny bit of microblog misc stuff and a whole bunch of trolls trying to harass each other in crews of like 5, while sucking at it.
Actually I saw it one other time, where they were all laughing at Gab when it defederated.
>>18575>shitposter.clubthis is a fash instance lol
>>18579i hate the fediverse because it only has the most uncool retarded spergs you can imagine, the few interesting people ive found on twitter dont care about moving
Wrote a post in the online craziness thread that was topical to the Fediverse -
https://leftypol.org/leftypol/res/941093.html#q1546940 We're getting opportunities when big social media corps do massively offputting things, but I'm concerned that a lot a lot of Fediverse platforms are not only failing to take advantage, but are shooting themselves in the foot. To a much smaller degree its some actual development or technical issues in a project - Lemmy had both usability/feature and privacy/security issues that, when revealed by the new influx of users after the Reddit debacle a month back, was seemingly met with hostility or derision (Kbin, a similar project's devs reacted a lot better last I saw) etc. However, the bigger issue comes down to admins of individual servers behaving not just badly to the point it disrupts the benefits of an open, federated, interoperable protocol or platform itself.
Its bad enough if admins refuse to use several tiers of moderation tools up to and including essentially preventing a user/server from having any public presence on their node while still allowing their users to make their own decisions about what users and servers to whom they'll connect, but instead uses the maximal block that prohibits any contact between users on their server and those on the node in question (frankly, I don't see any technical reason for this option to exist when others solve the problem but that's another discussion), treating one's users like children. Its even worse when this is done not in reply to any actual event the vast majority of the time, but rather because of tenuous claims of finding someone or something objectionable allowed and therefore marked as "bad'; many of these are laughably poorly justified if it wasn't for the fact it affects hundreds or thousands of users on both sides when one admin takes offense. Blocklists with the hardly substantiated "proof" and the list of their sins show up and admins on the same ideological side are encouraged to wall off all the problematic locations, disrupting the interoperability benefit of federation. Even worse is the childish extrapolation where one can be blocked for simply NOT blocking servers someone considers 'bad", which sounds a lot like schoolchildren (or regrettably, enough adults it seems) that because X and Y broke up, you can't be friends with X anymore and if you refuse, then all of Y's friends will also disown you too.
The Fediverse has a lot of promise, but this kind of stuff is simply shooting yourself in the foot, turning an open and interoperable network into walled gardens and bubbled fiefdoms. The point of running your own server in a libre federated protocol is to set rules for what happens in "your house" , while recognizing that your users get the best experience when they're able to "go elsewhere" where rules may be different, all utilizing the same accounts and protocols. Its enough of an uphill battle against all the money and vested interest in corporate centralized social media not to mention the inertia and network effect of their established platforms. Users from Twitter who are used to being able to interact with any other user who they havent' personally blocked or vice versa aren't going to be happy to learn that their choice of instance comes with baggage of ideological friends and enemies and whole groups of users they'll never see on that account (and no, the "oh you have to maintain multiple accounts in each one of these petty kingdoms" is not going to be acceptable to the vast majority of people nor should it be); Reddit users won't be satisfied on Lemmy with posts that have different and different amounts of comments viewed from different instances, or being blocked from Sub-Reddit equivalents because you're a member of another sub and/or instance, among other issues. Yes, a tiny minority of users or those with a particular ideological rationale to put up with this will remain, but a lot of others - the ones that we need on federated alternatives to have a chance in hell of highly-used alternatives to centralized, proprietary, exploitative social media (either existing or the next to rise), - will just leave. This is to say nothing for how the decentralized and federated nature of the Fediverse platforms is rightfully extolled as beneficial and a reason to switch, only for the behavior of enough admins to undermine the whole enterprise both ideologically and practically.
While this is not exclusively a Leftist problem (there are tons of right-leaning instances that put up the same walls, act i nthe same childish manner etc..but their it bothers me when a significant contingent of the usual suspects fall somewhere on our side, which leads to among other problems, proliferation and validation of stereotypes as well as just general negativity from those who arrive on a particular instance or set of instances and have a poor experience with someone throwing around Lefty sounding rhetoric as the justification for their bad behavior. These are all problems, both technically and ideologically that we don't need and get in the way of a lot of potential good. I've been thinking of some small ways to start remedying this facilitate moving in the right direction, but I guess we'll see how things progress.
>>24090Lemmy is the worst part of Activitypub. Sorry that you want to be federated with "rapepet.io" I'm sure Stallman would agree with you about freezepeach being the most important part of federation.
>Wasn't the point of social media, that everything and everybody is on the SAME platform??Are you retarded? Social media platforms don't even let you back up your data, they ransom it to you. Interconnected open source data silos are better than solitary proprietary data silos with leaks and inefficiencies and dark patterns and the CIA instigating pogroms in Burundi.
Go look at all of the migration, plus import/export settings on Misskey forks.
https://fedidb.org/ find better servers, don't use Lemmy software again it's featureless trash for brain damaged redditors. Lemmy is for them to grow out of. Skip it. They're trashy people. Go bully liberals on mastodon.social thru mas.to or a based Pleroma until they ban you etc. They're easy to smack around without corporate protection. They've never been tested in their lives. [BOOMING DEEP CATBOY VOICE] Clearly, neither have you, interloper! I COMMAND YOU TO GET SILLY!
>>24090>Wasn't the point of social media, that everything and everybody is on the SAME platform??No lol, that in itself is just an sustainability issue present in overly large central social media sites. Chvd instances being their own archepelegio means there's no chvds on the main archepelegio(s?). Poorly secured sites, like those that still have instant sign up enabled, can be easily detached, and as such there's little to no spam, and when there is spam it is quickly dealt with since every instance is sustainably small, and those that don't handle the spam internally get defederated.
With fedi you get the benifits of small, well moderated sites, but they do interconnect, and that accumulates over time as more join in.
There doesn't need to be a town square of the internet like twitter or reddit.
>>24487>true alternative>bigtech>controlunabstract your concepts
>firefox being an alternative to somethinglmao
>>24488Mozilla can't make any money off of you and you don't do any work, of course like Nextcloud and Element and Mastodon the flagship instance/repository is going to be an actual product you poor motherfucker
Pocket is way bigger faggotry than anything they have added to Firefox which is practically a charity exercise. It seems like the advertising within default Firefox does more to build up animosity towards big tech among actual programmers. Speaking of which why are you talking about basic Firefox when Floorp and Librewolf fix all concerns of people with jobs and NEETs who look at hentai in Saudi Arabia, respectively
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