@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world cover

deadsuperhero

@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

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deadsuperhero OP ,

It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

deadsuperhero OP ,

I can't tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅

As far as the "global square" part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you're right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.

However, there's nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it's definitely not impossible.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

deadsuperhero ,

It's an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:

  1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.

  2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.

  3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.

Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin ( wedistribute.org )

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....

deadsuperhero OP ,

It's the WordPress competitor.

PubKit Officially Launches Closed Beta ( wedistribute.org )

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.

Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging ( wedistribute.org )

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.

deadsuperhero ,

Radio Free Fedi is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

deadsuperhero OP ,

Literally just saw this in my feed: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-sues-truth-social-co-founders-says-not-entitled-stock-shares-rcna146106

deadsuperhero OP ,

Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.

"Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!"

deadsuperhero OP ,

Yeah, I don't have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

There may be a "minimum threshold" for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I'll readily admit that this is conjecture.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven't tried anything else.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

Decentered Podcast: Interview with creator of Blacksky ( wedistribute.org )

This ended up being such a great interview. I know some people will shrug it off, because it’s Bluesky and not Mastodon, but Rudy’s a super smart dude and an amazing guest, and he shed a lot of light on building a community space for black people on an emergent platform. There’s so much good info coming from this man!

deadsuperhero ,

  1. There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.

  2. The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.

  3. It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.

deadsuperhero ,

Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.

The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.

I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.

Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.

deadsuperhero ,

Let me think...

  • Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
  • Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
  • Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
  • Wordforge - federated novel-writing
  • SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
  • GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.

deadsuperhero ,

Nostr is more of a protocol / network in and of itself, as is Scuttlebutt. Both legitimate efforts in their own right, but not quite Fediverse in the traditional sense. Though, with bridging, it's getting harder to tell where one starts, and another stops.

Regardless, I would love to start a list of really esoteric Fedi software like what I have above. I know there's more, it's just harder to dig up.

deadsuperhero ,

So...it does do what it sets out to do, just not in the way you would think.

ActivityPods doesn't bring Solid to ActivityPub accounts. It brings ActivityPub protocol capabilities to Solid Pods. The reason this is significant is because Fediverse platforms historically use relational databases, whereas this is like using Google Drive and files to create a graph database. Additionally, ActivityPods is a framework for building apps on top of.

Damon, my friend and co-founder at We Distribute, is building a really killer app on top of it called Memory.

deadsuperhero ,

Basically, it's the second half of ActivityPub that's for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

What's cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says "whatever, that's valid."

It could be brilliant for prototyping.

deadsuperhero OP ,

It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Good to know, I was wondering about that!

deadsuperhero OP ,

The Pixelfed app isn't officially published yet, but you can easily grab a beta build: https://pixelfed.org/mobile-apps

deadsuperhero OP ,

They can upload videos for Stories, I don't think videos can be uploaded elsewhere from mobile, at the moment.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Within the Pixelfed app: tap the Camera button, then the Clock. Tap +Video to add a video story.

deadsuperhero OP ,

There are a handful of decent instances, but you really have to dig to find stuff, sadly. I run Spectra Video and basically have to curate sign-ups and which servers we follow.

It helps cut down on a lot of the crap, but it takes work.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. Apparently the Pangora (Lemmy fork) dev joined forces, and the new UI is starting to look great.

https://bytes.programming.dev/notes/9qi6rc2avj3gn9dx

deadsuperhero OP ,

While I think you're correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.

It's one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I'm trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.

But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you're connecting to a global network that has:

  • Hate Speech
  • Targeted Harassment Campaigns
  • Child Pornography
  • Extreme Gore and Violence

Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say "you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it's reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core."

Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says "Hey, this thing doesn't actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion". To me, that's fucking insane.

deadsuperhero OP , (edited )

The reason that an open source developer might experience burnout are myriad, but can include:

  • Lack of compensation
  • Insufficient tooling or project infrastructure
  • A high ratio of operators to maintainers
  • Lack of a concrete roadmap, quality documentation, tests, essential resources
  • Lack of an onboarding process for new contributors
  • Inability to reconcile differences with contributors, leading to hard forks or exodus of contributors
  • Intractable architectural issues that require substantial engineering effort, possibly more than the maintainer can actually contribute

As someone who has done Community Management for an open source, decentralized communication platform (Diaspora), I am familiar with all of these things. This shit is hard, and I am not denying that Lemmy devs have done a lot of good work.

The problem is actually much simpler than you're making it out to be. For a social platform, which depends on interconnected self-hosted communities to succeed, you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities necessary to deal with all the crazy shit that comes with the territory. Ignoring this causes a cascade of problems that gradually get worse the longer they remain unaddressed.

The devs are surviving on crowdfunding and grants, and doing the best they can with that. That's commendable! They probably need more of both to have their needs fully covered. But don't get it twisted: receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.

deadsuperhero OP ,

That's not the argument being made. What's baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It's a profoundly bad strategy.

It's like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game, and leans on the modding community to actually put in half the things that would actually make it in any way fun to play. Except Bethesda actually makes money, and the community works for peanuts. Here, Lemmy makes some money, but a huge chunk of the user community shoulders the cost out of pocket. A big chunk of the Fediverse is actually unpaid labor that brings in negative dollars month over month.

The devs have a vested interest in ensuring their project continues to grow, they continue to get funded for their work, and features on their own roadmap get planned and developed. They can't do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.

Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say "fuck it" and walk away.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don't have to agree on every point (or at all), but I've decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/

deadsuperhero OP ,

Yeah, one of the project devs threatened to ban me after I told him to get past his own ego.

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