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

  • 79 Posts
  • 153 Comments
Joined 5Y ago
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Cake day: Nov 29, 2019

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Fucking amazing book, I laughed so hard from start to finish.


A Brief History of the Fediverse Symbol
In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.
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Flohmarkt is a Fediverse Marketplace
As the Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today. Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.
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Flipboard Users Can Now Follow Anyone in the Fediverse
Flipboard continues its rollout of federation capabilities, this time implementing a "soft-follow" system for users to try out federated subscription for the very first time.
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“Mastodon for Harris” is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism
The Mastodon For Harris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
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NeoDB is a Review System for Culture
Today, we sat down and reviewed NeoDB, a Fediverse review system that lets you track books, movies, music, tv shows, games, podcasts, and more. There's some really incredible ideas beneath the surface.
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Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide
Sometimes, developing a new app, platform, or concept for the #Fediverse can seem like a minefield. Here's some rules of thumb on how to maintain goodwill with the community, and ideas of how to do it.
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ActivityPods Releases Example App to Help Developers
In an effort to better help prospective Fediverse developers understand Solid, the ActivityPods team has released an example app as a reference point for understanding how everything works under the hood.
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Canvas 2024 is Live!
And now, for some lighthearted fun: Canvas, the r/Place alternative for Lemmy, is back for its 72-hour collaborative art event, and this time, the whole Fediverse is invited!
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The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”


Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts
Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
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IFTAS Launches Moderator Resource Portal
IFTAS, the Trust and Safety organization for the #Fediverse, launched a new community portal full of guides, resources, discussion groups, and tools for community moderators and instance admins. We take a look at what it does.
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You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!
Bridgy Fed's Bluesky integration is now in beta, and makes it possible to connect your account from the Fediverse to Bluesky, and vice versa. There's still some quirks, and every bridged account has to opt in to it, but it's a promising moment for people that want to communicate across networks.
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Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

Mastodon’s community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it’s a new feature or a design change or that he didn’t do something that other projects wanted to do.


Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.


It actually does have that nowadays, it’s just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.


Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing… but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.


This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There’s some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There’s also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.


The Trouble with Forking Mastodon
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
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How to Stream to PeerTube or Owncast with OBS Studio
The Fediverse has, not one, but two different streaming platforms readily available to people. They both work a bit differently...but, both of them work great with OBS Studio. We dive in to how to set each up.
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Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin
We sat down with Matthias Pfefferle to talk about his journey in developing an ActivityPub integration for WordPress, along with the challenges of implementing a protocol for a platform that everybody customizes in a wide variety of ways. We also check in on how development is going, and what's in store for the future!
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Hell yeah, I’m all about this. Article gets rendered so poorly on Mastodon, and the behavior is inconsistent from one platform to the next.


Yes, we have an article in the works about it. 😁


ActivityPods: Federated Solid Pods
ActivityPods is a wild project that's bringing the architecture and data capabilities of Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Protocol to the Fediverse. We dig in to what it is, how it works, and what's currently possible with the framework.
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I think there’s a balance to be struck between “good defaults” and “customize to your heart’s content.”

Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it’s still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.

Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here’s the docs.

I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.


Emissary is Whatever You Want It To Be
Emissary is a revolutionary next-gen Web platform that lets you tinker with every little bit of it. It works with the Fediverse, is built on IndieWeb principles, and looks incredible.
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PubKit Officially Launches Closed Beta
PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project's lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.
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Just tried it for the first time the other day. As an Akkoma user, it’s awesome to see so many native features being supported!

It’s now my main app! 😁


Nice goalpost shifting, but miss me with your inane rambling, projection, and misplaced sense of entitlement. Just block me and move on.


You’re also screamingly White

Just because I have privilege doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced harsh realities that are relevant to this context. The idea that a person’s race automatically qualifies or disqualifies them to speak on a subject without context or nuance is just silly.

You’re out here mad because a dude expressed that it’s stupid to compare server hosting for commodity open source communication software to societal decay caused by landlords, real estate developers, and people with four times the local income all rushing into a place and pricing out the people who already lived there. Y’know, something that actually has a real and tangible material effect.



Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging
We sat down and interviewed Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.Blog. Micro.Blog is an IndieWeb platform with microblogging capabilities that marries a social experience with a more traditional personal website / blogging concept. It federates via ActivityPub, and has been a part of the Fediverse since 2018.
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I dunno, federated communication systems have a very different utility than lemonade stands. 😅


Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server?
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: "Why didn't the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?" Here's some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don't consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.
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It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified

As someone who has repeatedly seen cities become gentrified (first Peoria, Illinois, then San Francisco, then Phoenix), I get what you’re trying to say, but also don’t think it’s an appropriate metaphor.

The half that doesn’t federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

Frankly, I think this is a bit melodramatic. The Anti-Threads part of the Fediverse will stay in their isolated bubble with little to no change, while the rest of the network continues to grow or change. It’s not like operational costs are skyrocketing, or that hosting will become any more scarce or more difficult. It’s not like the servers have to move to a different neighborhood. Gentrification is predicated on the finiteness of physical space and affordable places to live.

and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

This is probably news to you, but there’s not even a coherent, all-encompassing definition for what the Fediverse even is. The idea that there’s a “real Fediverse” vs “Fake Fediverse” glosses over all kinds of history and nuance. The best anyone’s gotten to defining it is by specifying protocols and interoperability, but even that doesn’t quite cover it.

The Fediverse isn’t just the parts you like, minus the parts you don’t like.


I’d actually love to see something like this happen, as it seems to be something European governments and officials are embracing. To have something similar for the United States would be incredible.

I think at the moment, there’s a real need for advocates, consultants, and vendors that can actually cater to government entities here. I would imagine there’s probably some crazy data requirements needed for US Government Officials.


Thing is, for federation to work, his team had to opt into it. The fact that his statuses and profile render natively in Mastodon and Akkoma are a pretty strong start.

I’d like to see Meta put their money where their mouths are, and finish the integration. I think we’ll probably see that happen sooner rather than later.


They probably thought they’d reach a greater number of people. They’re probably right.


You Can Now Follow President Biden on the Fediverse
Both President Biden and the White House have enabled the Fediverse integration on Threads.
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It’s not that crazy, the Threads devs are already looking at specific FEPs for things like quote posting. If they really wanted to, they could implement Lemmy-compatible community groups.