I can only comment on my experience searching for communities in lemmy and people to follow on mastadon, but in both cases I am not sure I'd say "works quite well" would describe my experience.
But also that's not what I think OP was talking about.
They want a search engine for a random fact like google. It's been long true that you need to add "reddit" to the end of any google search to find the info you needed.
Hello everyone, check out my announcement post linked above and if you don't know who I am, check out my past post to learn more about me and It would mean a lot of you show your support for my future iniatives inside the fediverse!...
As a project, Mastodon has operated under the umbrella of Mastodon GmbH, a German company that benefited from non-profit status with the German government. Despite all indications that they were doing everything right, Mastodon GmbH recently had its non-profit status revoked, resulting in the team to seek an alternative....
Those well-meaning-but-terrible-in-practice consumer protection laws are probably a good indicator of why the EU isn't a hub of technological innovation.
They're at least a symptom of the same underlying outlook on the industry.
I don't know the answer but they pointed this out further in the press release:
However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.
I'd assume that this is for a reason, too. If it were advantageous to run your company out of the EU people would probably do so sometimes.
In response to Bray’s toot, Evan Prodromou — one of the creators of ActivityPub, who is currently writing an O’Reilly book about the protocol — noted that this “is also the argument for using the ActivityPub API.” He described the API as “an open, extensible API that can handle any kind of activity type — not...
Nothing about this idea implies centralization. There is no reason identity has to be tied to the platform using the identity and no reason why there needs to be a central identity store.
In fact, right now my identity IS centralized to lemmy.world and I have no control over that.
Your solution to create as many identities as you want is great for avoiding having one identity, but not an example of decentralized identity.
I would like to be able to have multiple, decentralized, identities.
Imagine if login was a federated feature in lemmy.
What this would mean is that I could go to lemmy.ml and login using my lemmy.world account credentials and people from lemmy.ml could go to lemmy.world and log in using theirs.
Neither could go to beehaw and login because it does not federate with the two of them.
In this world I could create an identity on lemmy.world and a separate identity on lemmy.ml if I wanted to.
Now imagine if I could login with my lemmy.world account on a non lemmy platform that lemmy.world federates with.
There's nothing centralized about this, and it is exactly in the spirit of everything else in the fediverse. To login on beehaw I would have to create an identity on beehaw or someone they federate with.
What you seem to be against is forcing you to have only one login. That does go against the model we are talking about.
You are describing the current situation in the fediverse, not a problem caused by the idea proposed.
Allowing for federated identity would also imply allowing migration of identity, which wholly prevents what you just described.
The current system is guaranteed to have larger instances where people won't want to leave because doing so abandons your identity.
If I could move around the fediverse freely I would do so, but that is not a feature that is supported so I stick to the largest instance which happens to be the one I chose. I am not unique in this. Obviously, or this instance wouldn't be so large.
Offering federated identity is only a better situation than today.
If you're a developer working on a fediverse app or service and want to get it right – or just don't want to be the center of the next firestorm – here are a few suggestions.
That's similar to the "you're being inconsistent" thing that the article says not to say, kind of.
Consent isn't really built into ActivityPub and it's inherently the opposite of how I understand it to work (copying your content all over the place regardless of your desires).
But their argument is kind of reasonable.
Who cares?
We can change ActivityPub, but we couldn't change Twitter. People were tolerating worse just for the sake of having a community before they moved to the fediverse. They had no say before and they're asking for better from it now that they can have their voices heard at all.
I'm not sure there's a better way to put them, but I bristled at the two suggestions at a high level which tell me what to say or not say, and call out my being cis as a thing to be careful about.
I'm glad that I read them despite the bristling, because I found that they were things I wouldn't say or do, and they were reasonable suggestions.
But especially the cis comment made me kind of worried. As the platform grows these types of desired policies are going to be drowned out by the majorities.
All of the proposed solutions are intentionally not scalable ones, and seem designed to keep the platforms smaller and protected. This makes absolute sense especially when held up beside the marginalized peoples who are asking for them's experiences of being marginalized.
I hope that we can find ways that satisfy those needs even through growth. It would be interesting to see scalable opt-in solutions for this problem. It would especially be useful to integrate solutions into the protocol.
But in truth I was shocked to learn about robots.txt recently, and more shocked to hear how well-ish that type of solution worked until AI came along and ignored it. So it's anyone's guess as to how well similar solutions might work here.
The article addresses this directly in the section on things to not say, though:
ActivityPub does indeed "makes assumptions that are fundamentally opposed to the kinds of protections that people seem to be seeking." But in a discussion about whether or not to get consent, even the ones that are true the miss the point – just because ActivityPub leaves open possibilities for you to do something without getting consent, that's not the only option.
DON'T say the things that developers who ignore consent typically say
That's likely to increase the pushback. If that's your goal, great, go for it! If not, though, it's best to avoid stuff like this.
"Posting publicly gives implied consent to use the data"
I don't inherently agree with the article's ask, but you've literally only proven its point by stating, verbatim, one of their "please stop making us retread these tired arguments over and over" points.
OP links to a Mastodon thread from a user who breaks down the technical limitations of ActivityPub and proposes how the situation can be improved. Maybe read that.
Also, if you think that these are reasonable suggestions, then perhaps ignoring them directly isn't the best way to engage with this article?
I don't think you added anything new to the argument and their linked source addressed it from a technical and ethical perspective.
Personally, I don't think that it's reasonable when someone asks you to not do something for you to do that thing directly to them.
You've done that here. Whether or not you think you're bringing up good points, it's still pretty rude.
Anyway, you're right that this isn't about points. I started off trying to give you benefit of the doubt that you were respectfully responding to the article and just missed what they had said, but then you doubled down and triple downed.
I understand the need to try to voice concerns, and so I understand why you're continuing to push.
If it helps, I feel like "Be an ally if you're cis and joining the conversation" might fit what you're saying and wouldn't have bristled me. But I recognize that it isn't your responsibility to manage the emotions of people who have unquestioned privilege.
I also hope this isn't a weird question but I noticed that I have to turn my vpn off to see your site. Is that intentional?
On the other stuff, I love that you're talking about the importance of account migration, and I like the idea of the concentric federation.
There's a bit more in there about scalability. So it's nice to see your thoughts around it. I was thinking that the opt-in process which messages you for approval was the closest to scalable from the former article, because it allows everyone the opportunity to opt in without requiring hidden knowledge. But it could also feel like some sort of fishing attempt to get a message asking for consent.
So I guess finding a way to build opt-in into the protocol in some way would be the most scalable option in the long term. However that could work.
That's all fair. I can see what you meant after reading it, so maybe it's more of a me thing than one you have to consider in any depth. I know I have issues around feeling heard that aren't the general. And people who don't like being called out for cis-typical behaviors tend to be various forms of awful people that don't really need to be included.
Anyway, thank you for the conversation and the blog posts. I'm using Hotspot Shield as a vpn, if that helps and looking at your site through Safari on my iPhone.
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram....
I went to the article expecting rage inducing decisions based on your comment, but your TLDR has no relation to the article whatsoever.
The article is pretty glowing about Threads and Mastodon, and its author seems to be excited by them being connected through federation. They seem hopeful that they can use Mastodon to continue to enjoy their Threads communities.
They also claim that the default Threads experience is way better than the default Mastodon one, especially for the average user, but the API of Mastodon makes for a way better experience in terms of third party clients and tools.
They were able to consume the Threads content chronologically instead of through the algorithmic For You feed that none of us want.
Generally this is the first article posted I've seen that was talking about this from a UX perspective, as well as from a Threads user's perspective, and I found it interesting to read.
I was having a conversation elsewhere about funkywhale being used to share copyright protected content and in that conversation I ended up reading about the US DMCA Safe Harbor's requirements.
It requires you to have a designated person with their name registered with the copyright office to be considered a safe harbor.
There's definitely stuff in the rest of the law that addresses how effective your solution needs to be. So just ignoring requests will get you into trouble.
It also would be fraud to name a person who isn't real or isn't aware of being appointed or isn't actually doing anything in relation to the problem. You have to give their name and contact information to the copyright office.
It's fun to think we could stick it to the RIAA if they came knocking, but if you don't have the cash to back it up, you are going to lose that fight.
Right now, I'm feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I'm hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or the...
I like lemmy but also I've been following the drama from the sidelines, so I think the focus on Rust vs Java has nothing to do with the choice to create a lemmy alternative.
The reason sublinks exists is that the lemmy devs have made some large technical and PR mistakes that have led to multiple larger instance admins losing faith in them.
There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their "entitled" "demands" with them. It's not surprising to see various alternatives to lemmy springing up as a result of the devs telling people to do so.
There was the illegal content spam incident which required instance admins to interact directly with the image database in complex ways for each image to remove the content from their servers, and I believe lemmy.world disabled submitting images if you are using a VPN or the tor network as a result. The lemmy devs have made some bafflingly derisive comments about that incident.
And then there's the recent update that has broken federation of bigger instances, which is an ongoing issue. Communities are having to move instances to help with this bug which should have been caught in testing the update.
So sublinks seems to be some folks deciding that they can do it better.
Choosing Java is one way that they think they can do better. The argument goes, significantly more people know Java than Rust. Lemmy has had some problem getting extra help as a result of this limit, so hopefully sublinks will have a much larger pool of talented devs who will step up and submit code.
Sublinks isn't the only one, too. Piefed is the python Lemmy alternative that's cropped up recently and I believe there are some others in other languages.
Whether any of them can do it better remains to be seen, but it does seem like the Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn't always the most important part of a project.
Beehaw was acting like a customer, which they kind of were and sort of weren't at the same time. Customers act entitled, but they didn't seem to be any worse than most. Lemmy's devs are right in that they don't owe them anything, really, but the way they voiced that was bad PR, IMO.
It sucks having to care about message when all you want to do is make something you like, so I get it, buy I don't think it looked great from the outside.
I don't think choosing Rust was inherently a bad move. I think it makes sense that if you are going to try to make a competing platform to NOT choose Rust, and instead pick something that a lot of people can contribute to.
But yeah, complaining about their initial choice doesn't make sense, and neither does the "why don't they just learn Rust" sentiment given the context of all this other stuff.
Having a support contract has nothing to do with being a customer. If the devs didn't want customers, they shouldn't have released their product to the public. It really just seems like they can't handle the stress of writing code AND managing their customers' needs.
Tough love is never the correct way to deal with people, and never the way to manage a product.
In some of the threads I've seen the devs have said that they could be making more money if they went to a big tech corp while also exhibiting behaviors that would NEVER fly at any of the big tech companies.
Learning projects are great! Releasing them isn't necessarily the best way to go about things, though.
Don't get me wrong, I don't envy the lemmy devs for the position they've put themselves in. It is incredibly stressful to juggle what they're trying to juggle, and PR is not usually the strongest skill an engineer has.
I hear you on the context of choosing Rust. It's not really that relevant to what I'm saying, but I have seen people complain about Rust as the language preventing them from contributing. Having more contributor's wasn't their goal, it was to build something in Rust to begin with.
My point was that Sublinks' goal IS to invite contributors, so Java is a smart choice.
Please post one top-level comment per complaint about Lemmy. You can reply with ideas or links to existing GitHub issues that could address the complaints. This will help identify both common complaints and potential solutions....
It was a bad system on reddit and it's worse system here. There is no guideline for how it should be used, so a downvote means anything from "your community showed up on the all feed and I don't want to see it" to "I disagree with you" to "your behavior warrants a report but I'm lazy and this button is right here."
It's not clear what it's supposed to be used for, even on reddit. And here it's worse because moderators can see your upvotes/downvotes, so people rightly using it without any guidance are getting banned from communities for downvoting.
Removing it altogether and replacing it with a tagging system would be an interesting option. Communities could choose which tags are available, and users could apply them to comments. Maybe "helpful" or "propaganda" or "friendly" or "hard disagree" or whatever.
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
Sometimes people have different opinions on tech stuff so I'm hesitant to block people for opinions I disagree with...
But I also saw some posts that you're talking about OP. You linked one up thread that had come to mind. That user's post history is super suspect. With people pointing out their shill-like qualities 6 months ago in response to Meta propaganda links.
It would be more fair to say that they approached the problems that need to be solved in federation with different priorities than ActivityPub.
People on ActivityPub based networks seem to want more independent niche communities with their own control over the community's content.
The AT protocol makes it so that the users, themselves, are able to control their content.
Philosophically it's an alternative to the Nostr protocol more than ActivityPub, and I don't know that you could wedge their prioritized solutions into this protocol's ecosystem.
While practically there are limitations to Bluesky federation (the cost of running a general purpose relay is not likely to be user supported), there is only one piece of their tech stack that currently is centralized (as far as I'm aware).
Sadly itself the ID generation and authentication portion.
And I wish we had a solution to that problem in the ActivityPub fediverse. There is no way to keep yourself if your instance is shut down, so you don't have any control over yourself as a user.
If that problem were solved in a way that still enabled communities the way we do I would prefer it to any of the current options.
When I worked at Pixar long ago an intern had a cron job that was intended to clean up his nightly build and ended up deleting everything on the network share for everyone!
Fortunately there were back-ups and it was fine, but that day was really hilariously annoying while they tracked down things disappearing.
That issue will be true on any linux platform because Epic Games is a nasty company that doesn't care about consumer friendly practices. How will this device get around that?
Regardless, to say that the Steam Deck is locked down to the steamverse, is such a weird thing to lie about. You can install basically anything on Steam Deck:
Man, it must suck to put so much heart and soul into creating something that you care about and then have some jerks use bots to scrape it for data to train their AI algorithm without your permission!
I know there are a ton of iOS apps for Lemmy. But what are they missing? What experiences would you like? It could be quality of life or big and ambitious features...
Honestly, my dream lemmy client would combine posts in my home and all feed based solely on the links in the post regardless of community or instance, and it would then provide UX to present the rest of the information if I choose to click into it.
Lemmy is designed around a concept that almost requires but definitely invites spamming links. Assuming you have good intentions and want to reach a wider federated audience, you would post your link to a few instances at once.
is there a search engine for the fediverse?
Since big part of the web is drowning in AI junk, including Reddit, is there a good search engine to find answers in the fediverse?
An update regarding the future of m/AskKbin (where we are headed towards) - AskKbin - kbin.social ( kbin.social )
Hello everyone, check out my announcement post linked above and if you don't know who I am, check out my past post to learn more about me and It would mean a lot of you show your support for my future iniatives inside the fediverse!...
Mastodon Incorporates as a Non-Profit in the US ( wedistribute.org )
As a project, Mastodon has operated under the umbrella of Mastodon GmbH, a German company that benefited from non-profit status with the German government. Despite all indications that they were doing everything right, Mastodon GmbH recently had its non-profit status revoked, resulting in the team to seek an alternative....
Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit ( blog.joinmastodon.org )
One Login: Towards a Single Fediverse Identity on ActivityPub ( thenewstack.io )
In response to Bray’s toot, Evan Prodromou — one of the creators of ActivityPub, who is currently writing an O’Reilly book about the protocol — noted that this “is also the argument for using the ActivityPub API.” He described the API as “an open, extensible API that can handle any kind of activity type — not...
soft squishes provide cute dreams ( lemmy.ml )
Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers ( privacy.thenexus.today )
If you're a developer working on a fediverse app or service and want to get it right – or just don't want to be the center of the next firestorm – here are a few suggestions.
Meta to close Threads in Turkey to comply with injunction prohibiting data sharing with Instagram ( techcrunch.com )
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram....
Threads on Mastodon and The Bright Future of the Fediverse ( www.augment.ink )
Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat ( lemmy.ml )
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/
IFTAS release a guide to help instance admins comply with the Digital Services Act ( about.iftas.org )
The Things Users Would Appreciate In Mobile Apps — Smashing Magazine ( www.smashingmagazine.com )
Regarding sublinks and feeling concerned about what is going on with it ( lemmy.world )
Right now, I'm feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I'm hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or the...
What are your complaints about Lemmy?
Please post one top-level comment per complaint about Lemmy. You can reply with ideas or links to existing GitHub issues that could address the complaints. This will help identify both common complaints and potential solutions....
Waymo self-driving cars are delivering Uber Eats orders for first time ( www.cnbc.com )
Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: “Block Threads to Remain Listed” ( wedistribute.org )
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
Are you seeing a massive uptick in pro meta propaganda as well?
I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act....
Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber ( www.theverge.com )
A Linux user's nightmare: the machine was wiped clean with one click ( www.mikrobitti.fi )
google translate
Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time ( www.theverge.com )
If Linux Made a VR Headset - YouTube ( youtu.be )
Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming ( www.theverge.com )
https://www.playtron.one/...
Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping ( www.theverge.com )
European Court of Human Rights Confirms: Weakening Encryption Violates Fundamental Rights ( www.eff.org )
The perfect Lemmy app?
I know there are a ton of iOS apps for Lemmy. But what are they missing? What experiences would you like? It could be quality of life or big and ambitious features...
Threativore: An anti-spam automoderator for Lemmy ( github.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/15112791...
Instances in the free fediverses should consider "transitive defederation" from instances that federate with Meta ( privacy.thenexus.today )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7477620...
LIME: Localized Image Editing via Attention Regularization in Diffusion Models ( i.imgur.com )
Abstract...