Fediverse

There used to be a Kbin instance called feddit.online, which was shut down. @Jerry@hear-me.social just announced on Mastodon, that he brought feddit.online back to life, this time using PieFed. PieFed is a pretty neat alternative to Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin, created by @rimu@piefed.social and of course it's fully free and open source on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi
It has some cool features like “Topics”, which are basically groups of multiple communities that you can view all at once (similar to these Lemmy feature requests: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199

A bit of an effortpost :)

Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any

Lookin for something to keep me up to date on the fediverse into my podcast queue.

This week's news:

• Threads degrades their activitypub integration, delaying posts by 15 minutes before they appear in the rest of the fediverse
• Website League is a new ActivityPub-based Island network, outside of the rest of the fediverse
• Ghost discusses their beta plans and pricing.

This week's news:

• Threads degrades their activitypub integration, delaying posts by 15 minutes before they appear in the rest of the fediverse
• Website League is a new ActivityPub-based Island network, outside of the rest of the fediverse
• Ghost discusses their beta plans and pricing.

While kbin.social's site mentioned that they were migrating to a new provider, and as a result, the site might be experiencing some issues, kbin.social has been serving up a similar HTTP 50x errors, and that migration message for well over a month, if not more.

What happened?

Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.

Looking for a simple way to stay up-to-date with the latest news, blogs, and podcasts across the web and the fediverse? Check out RSS-Parrot, an easy-to-use RSS reader built with #Fediverse users in mind. Whether you're following your favorite Mastodon accounts or tracking blog updates, RSS-Parrot makes it effortless to manage your feeds in one place.

Key Features:

Fediverse Integration: Keep up with Mastodon, Lemmy, and other fediverse platforms via #RSS.

Streamlined Feed Management: Add, organize, and categorize your feeds from across the web and fediverse.

Customizable Layout: Adjust the reading view to suit your style for a more personalized experience.

Real-Time Updates: Get the latest content as it's published from your favorite sources, including fediverse-based communities.

Accessible Everywhere: Use it on any device with an internet connection for easy feed access on the go.

If you're part of the fediverse or just a fan of #RSSFeeds, give RSS-Parrot a try! It’s a great tool to keep your content organized and up-to-date across platforms.

#FediverseFriendly #RSSReader #Mastodon #Lemmy #OpenWeb

"As I tried to follow the UK riots from Brussels using X, time and again I saw von der Leyen's carefully coiffed Christian-Democrat torso issuing some polite EU statement, while sandwiched ... between video-clips getting off on anti-migrant violence, pro-Russian bots, and OnlyFans links."

~@vonderleyen is on Mastodon where are the others?~

(Actually @vonderleyen is an unofficial automated mirror, thanks @oilheap for pointing that out).

https://euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the%20World/ar1eb43d53

#Xodus #EU @fediverse

I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

A hexbear user calls for the death of me and all Americans! I reported It to dessalines, but as of posting all hes done was delete my post where I called them out! It seems like death-threats by communists are ok, but calling them silly back is impolite...

Speed demos made at FediForum September 2024, the online unconference that brings together the people who move the open social web and the Fediverse forward.

Also available on YouTube

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!

TL;DR:

Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.

Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.

User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.

Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

Article translated in English :

Confederation closes its Mastodon instance

Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.

As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.

In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.

Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.

Too few active users

On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.

On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.

The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

https://fedidb.org/

Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.

Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.

!announcements@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20509588

Here is an update that explains what we have been working on recently (apologies for not having these for a few months, summer vacations and all that). This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

@privacyguard added Single-Sign-On (SSO) support to lemmy (this still needs some UI work and testing, but the bulk of the work is done). Special thanks to Privacy Portal for working on this!

@carlos-cabello added a way to filter posts by title only (and not body) when searching.

@Freakazoid182 added custom emoji and tagline views.

@nothing4u made our scheduled cleanup job delete denied users.

@sunaurus made a few image proxy fixes.

@sleepless has been working hard on lemmy-ui-leptos, which may eventually replace lemmy-ui. He made improvements to how posts are displayed; made SI formatting consistent with how the current UI handles it; added translations; added post content actions, creator, and community listings; and made some plugins for markdown-it.

@nutomic cleaned up the issue tracker by closing invalid issues and adding tags like good first issue. He also made some simple improvements, like adding a category to RSS feeds, fixing an issue with activitypub ids, and removing the enable_nsfw setting in favor of content_warning.

@dessalines integrated a new rust clearurls library into lemmy that will remove tracking params for any post or comment text (Much thanks to @jendrikw for creating this library), increased the bio max length from 300 to 1000, removes lemmy's reliance on openssl, made the list logins response more uniform, added the ability to restore content on an unban, added a default comment sort type for both the local site, and your user.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

In a guest article co-written by Heidi Li Feldman and Tim Chambers, the case is made in favor of political organizing in the Fediverse, rather than through corporate social media.

Both authors bring up case studies in their experience in grassroots fundraising and advocacy for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign through Mastodon and Bluesky.

I'm planing hosting an instance, and I think that in the end I'll have to let the users pay for subscription. But just when I was imagining how I should design the subscription, I found there's a dilemma arose from the nature of fediverse:

(assume that people really like my instance for some reason)

1. If I charge my users, they may simply register on another instance and keep interacting with my instance to avoid paying the fees.
2. I can limit activities of the users who don't register on my instance to force them to subscribe my instance, but such action is obviously destructive to the fediverse.

I think this is not only my own problem. I think every instances with some scale faces the issue of costs, and relying on donation forever may not be a long term solution. So here's the question: how to let the owners of the instances get paid without violating the values of fediverse, i.e. decentralization and federation? Moreover, the solution should let the instances with higher popularity earn more money, so that'll encourage people to host high-quality instances. And I just figured out a (possibly very rough) solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse.

First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:

1. the universal currency, let's say "fedicoin". Fedicoin can be traded on trading platforms like normal cryptocurrencies.
2. the currency of every single instance, e.g. InstanceA coin for InstanceA, InstanceB coin for InstanceB. The instance-specific coins are only used for federation between instances.

and the blockchain holds these data:

1. how many fedicoins and instance-specific coins each instances owns.
2. how many fedicoins each non-instance users owns, if any. I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.

For operating the blockchain, there should be nodes to hold the data and process the transactions. The nodes can be either served by the instances or the non-instance machines. The nodes earn fedicoins.

When instances are federating with each other, every "demand" requires paying some instance-specific coins. The price of each type of demand will be predefined in the federation APIs. For example, if a user on InstanceB want to post on InstanceA, then InstanceB have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world, and vise versa.

To earn instance-specific coins to pay for the demands, all the instances will "trade" automatically with other instances, and the "exchange rate" will be determined by some algorithm, possibly based on the amount of demands between each two instances. For example, if on average the demand from InstanceB to lemmy.world is 5 times more than the demand from lemmy.world to InstanceB, than in a trade, InstanceB may get 1000 lemmy.world coin, while lemmy.world may get 5000 InstanceB coin.

There will be an upper limit for every instance to own other instances' coins. For example, when lemmy.world owns 100,500 InstanceB coins, which exceeds the limit 100,000, then lemmy.world will refuse to trade with InstanceB by InstanceB coins. Under such condition, InstanceB have to trade with lemmy.world by the fedicoin. The owners of InstanceB will have to purchase fedicoin to let InstanceB trade with lemmy.world to maintain the fedaration.

Currently I think that the exchange rate between fedicoin and an instance-specific coin should be controlled by the owners of each instance, because each instance may have different costs for machines and moderation.

Finally, (hopefully) we'll have a fediverse like this:

1. The highly-demanded instances earn fedicoins, which can be exchanged to real-world currencies. Such mechanism also encourages hosting high-quality instances and more open federation.
2. The instances can simply charging their users normally by real-world currencies, so the users don't have to bother about cryptocurrencies.

Other side notes: Defining the prices of the demands may be tricky? For example, if my understanding is correct, there's no actual action like "read" when instances are communicating with APIs.

For the automatic trades between instances, of course there should be some controllable configuration, e.g. "don't buy coins over some price from some instances".

I'm just interested in the fediverse, and I hope my ideas can be helpful for its development. Any comments or crossposting are welcome and thank you for your reading.