Entirely unmoderated tags are not an option for lemmy as the moderation workload would be too much. Additionally users being able to type out tags themselves introduces splintering in the tag contents due to typos. A better solution is a curated list of tags users can attach to their posts

I vehemently disagree with the main idea behind this RFC. Just let users put arbitrary tags on their posts and other users can search for whatever tags they want. The rest of the fediverse has unmoderated hashtags and it works fine. I don’t see a good reason hashtags should require moderation. And typos can be corrected by editing the post.

Adding those restrictions just makes this feature more complex than it needs to be and reduces compatibility with the fediverse. Users of any fediverse software can create a post in a lemmy community and those posts may have arbitrary tags. Why should lemmy users have less capability on lemmy than external users?

Finally, hashtags could be a useful way to filter posts within a community if these restrictions are dropped. I posted this in the github thread, but imagine a general programming community. Posts could be tagged with a language, paradigm (OOP, functional, etc), or whatever else to allow users to browse subtopics within a community. Having to request moderators add a tag is an unnecessary extra step.

This is exciting. I think code forges are one of the biggest opportunities for ActivityPub to really go mainstream and change the internet. Not only because it’ll make working with open source way easier since you can work with any compatible forge, but developers will be more exposed to ActivityPub just by working with the software and so more likely to participate in AP dev. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the fediverse. There’s been a lot of talk from various organizations/companies but this will be the first large project adopting AP. I’m interested to see how development goes for them and for other fediverse projects.

I wonder what changes it will force on Mastodon. Masto won’t be the biggest project anymore and won’t be able to throw its weight around as much. Just like the recent influx of users forced the implementation of full text search and has reenergized conversations about quote posts, I think federated gitlab would force masto to rethink some things.

The numbers for lemmy are probably way outdated. Take a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. It lists 636 instances but FediDB only has 302. And remember most of this growth has only come in the past week or two.

Also, mastodon only has 1.25 million active users according to FediDB, though that’s probably outdated too.

A lot of kbin users are coming from reddit and don’t care about its additional (microblogging) features. Using a Lemmy-API powered app would give them exactly the experience they’re looking for. And there’s nothing stopping these Lemmy-API apps from adding support for the kbin extended api.

Fedilab is an app that was originally built for Mastodon and uses the mastoapi but also supports some Pleroma specific features. Apps don’t need to be directly one-to-one tied to services.

The lead dev of kbin has said he’s evaluating implementing the API.

kbin has a totally different backend and also additional functionality that is not available in Lemmy apps.

This doesn’t make it less likely. They can implement the lemmy api for compatible features and add their own api (or more likely use the masto-api) for the other features.

there is an initiative for federated git “forges” called ForgeFed. I’m on mobile but will find some links when I’m on desktop

ah you’re right. I misread the section that mentioned that and thought there wouldn’t be any public post pages. Thanks for the clarification.

And mastodon has consistently used platform-centric thinking over interoperability since its start. You can notice how whenever gargron talks about groups, he doesn’t mention any of the current implementations and the masto team is rarely involved in FEP or interoperability conversations (other than to defend their own stance)

Here’s hoping that the mastodon team actually pays attention to this when they start their group implemenation

Not only is it exciting that they’re adding ActivityPub support, but its great that they’re basing their implementation off of Lemmy. Up til now, most implementations have been from scratch and implement federation after the project has gotten up and running and then do federation testing. That leads to different assumptions about models/flows and inconsistencies and hacks to get it working. Working off of another implementation’s federation guide will mean less hacks but still leave room for impl-specific features and workflows.

While I agree with the EFF that the fediverse could become “the fabric of the social web”, I think this article is slightly off. Their argument is about the fediverse and how it’s based on ActivityPub and so could be used for many different types of interactions. But they were arguing against the idea that mastodon is a failed twitter clone. I think the article they’re replying to is right; mastodon is a twitter clone that misses what hardcore twitter users like about it. Everything the EFF wrote about the fediverse is right, but that has nothing to do with whether mastodon is a decent twitter alternative or not becuase mastodon is not the fediverse.

I don’t know much about open source licensing. What’s wrong with the SSPL and what does that have to do with mongo?

Complaining that you’ve been banned for a seemingly innocuous post isn’t proof that you deserved to be banned. If the author is telling the full story, the admin(s) of their instance were in the wrong.

And this is a legitimate issue. If new fedi users try out an instance and get banned without warning, they’re unlikely to try another instance. I want the fediverse to have a wider array of people and conversations happening, but that can’t happen if admins are quick to ban instead of engaging their users.

just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should

The web worked this way before there was a large corporate presence. Scraping was common during the blogosphere period and robots.txt was the solution everyone at the time agreed on and that’s been the standard ever since.

I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it

We’re not intruding on this space. We’ve been in the fediverse for just as long or longer; the fediverse has been scrapable since 2008.

cool bot. thanks to whoever wrote this

But unlisted toots are still technically public. If you scrape my profile, you will get them

Then that’s a scope issue with your server software.

the fact that they are public in the technical sense does not mean I consented to them being scraped etc.

This is what I was trying to say with the analogy to a public announcement. Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Just as wearing a short skirt is not blanket consent to sexual advances

This is a ridiculous analogy. Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades, is not remotely similar to sexual assault.

Yes. Business that can afford it have security cameras. And more relevantly, nobody talking in a cafe thinks their conversation is private and that nobody will overhear it. We use a combination of location within the space, voice level, and body language to show how we want others to interact with us. If you walk into the cafe and make an announcement at the front, you have no right to expect that nobody will respond to that announcement, or tell others about it, or even record you while you make that announcement. That is what posting on the fediverse is like. If you want a quiet conversation in the corner, you can post unlisted.

Yeah, I know. I shoulda put a /s on that; my bad.

Disappointing. It’s too bad there’s not a standard API that clients could use to communicate with servers.

EDIT: That was a sarcastic response. ActivityPub has a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that would solve this problem if anybody would ever implement it.

This seems to be relying heavily on the mastodon markup and prolly won’t work with other fediverse software.

EDIT: After looking more closely I realize all the markup was the author’s own markup, not the mastodon markup. As the author is using the Masto API, this should work with any software that implements that API. I still think this is not a good solution because it prioritizes mastodon over the rest of the fediverse. Comments from some people will be displayed, but not those of people using other software.