Если в один прекрасный день ты поймешь, почему круглая пицца пакуется в квадратную коробку, а кушается треугольником, ты таки научишься понимать женщин!
@sasha Там просто 2 опции на одно и то же: ссылка в посте и chebotarev.spb.ru/blog/categor… - это выборка по категории "диафильмы" Чтоб не путать, может, уберу вторую
@sasha да, есть плагин, он подтягивает динамически список дочерних страниц. Но так как там уже ничего не меняется, то я перевел его в статику, чтоб быстрее подгружался.
А можно подарок выклянчить на Новый Год - выкачать все Ваши диафильмы? В моей коллекции разрешения поменьше хоть и выбирал лучшие из нескольких источников. И объем несравненно меньше. Все необходимые ссылки поставлю. Вот моя самодельная галерея: pole.nsupdate.info/disk1/diafi…
I think it's funny some people's solution to Bluesky fucking its users over is to move to a different server with all the potential headaches and complications that might cause, but these same people are loathe to touch Mastodon.
Предлагаю обсудить, как сейчас дела у протокола Matrix и его клиентов на Android.
Кто чем пользуется? Что раздражает в текущих приложениях или каких функций, по-вашему, остро не хватает? Отдельный вопрос по безопасности — есть что-то, что вызывает сомнения или опасения? Было бы интересно услышать разные мнения на этот счет.
Разрабы matrix HQ рукожопы Медленная разработка Мало рабочих ботов Отвратительно кривая основа с оглядкой на email которая портит приватность Мейнтейнится отвратительно, не скейлится Средняя безопасность по меркам безопасных мессенджеров
что среди безопасных мессенджеров для себя выбрал? И про приватность ты упомянул, что можешь рассказать? Я просто собираю информацию, и хочу небольшую серию постов сделать.
давай расскажу. Матрикс пока что во главе, потому что я им рулю и с гемором он работает стабильно и привычно. Новый Кандидат - simplex, но в прошлый раз были проблемы с стабильностью.
Про приватность matrix - метаданные есть Передаёт данные об устройстве и клиенте серверу, достаточно полные зачем, не понять. (Юзерагент вроде) Раскрывает клиент+ОС всем кто с тобой на сервере с нативного клиента. Приходится патчить сервак либо юзать другие клиенты. Retention работает из задницы, стирание сообщений на клиентах нормально работать не хочет, рандомно остаются данные. E2E + боты - несовместимо криво и больно
Система звонков сломана старые клиенты когда звонишь 1 на 1, более менее окей
Когда звонишь в группе с старого клиента - jitsi который вероятно без e2e и редко когда работает адекватно и на android и на Linux.
Новые звонки на новых клиентах никто в лицо не видел потому что надо поднимать ещё 3 сервиса иначе работать не будет, но там все должно быть окей.
Не поддерживает tor
Самый главный минус - чинить это никто не собирается.
Это чисто по безопасности, сломанного и кривого ещё полно.
Обнаружил, что не видно постов с mastodon.world. Он не дружит с mastodon.ml или вообще заблокирован в России? Собственно, в браузере mastodon.world тоже не открывается, если через мобильный интернет. Через рабочий, по проводу, открывается, но зато там mastodon.ml выдаёт 403 Forbidden. Такие дела.
это один из нюансов федерации. Ты его посты смотришь не просто *от* нас, но и *у* нас. С нашего сервера на этот аккаунт (!) никто не подписывался и постов его не бустил, вот его постов у нас и нет. Подпишешься — новые будут поступать. Старые, увы, пока придётся смотреть в первоисточнике браузером. Чему да, РКН мешает (mastodon.world на хостинге Hetzner, которому РКН велел приземлиться, а он просьбу проигнорировал). Но у нас с ними никакой ссоры нет.
Если хочешь повзаимодействовать с постом, найденным в браузере, скопируй ссылку на него и вставь в поиск в приложении, должен найтись.
@dside Ага, то есть только после подписки. Понятно, спасибо. Ну, я так и подозревал, что хостинг попал под раздачу. Когда начались блокировки в этом году, у меня перестала работать пачка приложений, включая прогноз погоды, онлайн-радио и так далее.
I realize my title has little to do with the post, lol, tired ADHD brain. I did have the thought that if someone were to be ambitious and motivated enough, the Red Dwarf code could be used to build direct access to BlueSky content into a Fediverse client.
But then, I'm always the guy in the corner pining for the good ole' days of Trillian for IM, the one client to reach them all ^_^
I was recently playing around with Constellation and - partly as a statement but mostly as a personal challenge - used it to build ATProto notifications support into my ActivityPub enabled web app (writeup here, I'd post from that but I think lemmy.world blocks it since I sent it too many invalid activities or whatever).
I already had the ability to follow someone on atproto by resolving their handle and hitting their PDS directly (without authentication - that's all public), and I also turned Bridgy Fed on. With Constellation, I was able to (a) find the bridged atproto version of each ActivityPub post I made, and (b) find any likes, replies, or reposts related to each post.
When a Bluesky post hits my inbox and I click on it, my app checks to see if that user is also using Bridgy Fed, and if they are, it shows me their post over ActivityPub instead, so I can like or reply to it.
More broadly, it might be interesting if someone made an app that used a PDS as its primary datastore, but also had ActivityPub S2S support built into it. I know wafrn can do both protocols, but I think in its case it mirrors posts to a separate PDS kind of like you're describing.
PandaCap is freaking awesome! Pretty much just what I had in mind when I posted previously about a single client to act as inbox for all ActivityPub and RSS/Atom content, only I had imagined it as a browser plugin or full on custom browser so that the content from the inbox would be opened in a client of the user's preference based on post type.
Really awesome project! including DeviantArt etc is really great for the art angle.
The only feature I would miss here vs. other clients is the search function as you mention. I assume that is omitted because it is a lot of work to implement. Have you looked at extending your project with someone else's code for that function? I know sometimes that is more trouble than help, but it would really take the project to that next level of "completely full featured client".
I have looked at wafrn, definitely a cool project and I like that it handles both protocols, but it has some limitations that hold me back from switching to it as my main client. I didn't know it was using a PDS in that way, do you mean it uses a server side PDS to mirror ATProto content or is it PDS per user?
I'm not exactly sure how it works in wafrn - I haven't looked into it myself - but last I heard, they were using blacksky's PDS (lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/51892713) which I'm guessing means all their users (at least the ones who've turned atproto on) get mirrored to that particular PDS.
The search functionality missing from Pandacap is in some ways intentional; I don't personally like searching for anything in the fediverse or in Bluesky, because I run into a lot of text posts, photos, screenshots or whatever that I don't have context for and that I haven't mentally prepared myself to see. But there's also the technical issue that right now, Pandacap doesn't index incoming posts in one place; they either go to the inbox, go to notifications, or get ignored. If search were to be implemented, perhaps it could take the form of an external ActivityPub instance that indexes posts, and Pandacap would just hit its API or something.
The other issues with Pandacap are that it's single-user, and that it's on the Microsoft stack, so no one can really use it unless they're willing to sign up for Azure and know their way around it enough to get it deployed. But that keeps overheads down for me compared to running a VPS.
I've never tried loading a PeerTube post in Pandacap but I wonder if it would try (and fail) to display the video in an image tag, or if it would just show up as a text post.
Wafrn (tumblr alternative with fediverse and bluesky support) has started using an alternate relay; this means that they depend on none of bluesky's infrastructure to work.
Bluesky post by @gabboman.at.app.wafrn.net saying: "Thanks a lot to @[url=https://bsky.brid.gy/ap/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw]Rudy wants revolution.[/url] for hosting the blacksky PDS. After confirmating thatis ok, wafrn now uses blacksky's relay! In the next update other wafrns may also use the relay"
I think it could be. Cosmos DB might have to be replaced with a different EF Core provider - not sure which would be most appropriate but I'm sure something would work. Key and image storage could just be done on disk.
Looks like someone's built a Reddit-like on top of ATProto. Would be really interesting to see whether it could interact with the threadiverse through something like BridgyFed, which currently only works with microblogs (I think?)
In a nutshell, it's because you don't have to build the entire kit and kaboodle all at once.
Lots of BlueSky is centralized so you don't have to worry about distribution, user, hosting, scaling, etc. and just focus on the frontend.
It's the same reason why all the Lemmy and Mastodon apps look way better than the web versions, because all those other parts are no longer relevant and the creator(s) can focus on just putting out a polished product.
That site looks like it's closed source. FOSS projects tend to not be well designed in the frontend except the occasional gem. Not sure why it's such a pattern, considering this project isn't making much money and it's made by a single dev.
I think the most interesting opportunity here is that ATProto's strength is that it was built for a "credible exit", i.e, it allows users to migrate from any centralized network to a decentralized one.
IOW, it would be a lot easier to implement Fediverser on top of ATProto than of ActivityPub.
Federation is not the natural unit of organization, that's a hill I'm ready to die on. The problem is that most people get hung up on the idea of instances because they've only experienced the two extremes of siloed networks and the "Dark Forest" of blockchain.
On the topic of 'hills to die on', I will say I have gained a significant respect for you over the last 2 years, for sticking to your principles on this and following through on them.
We might disagree on the best way to do things. I'd witnesed you in the past receiving a lot of pushback (to put it lightly) for a well-intentioned but controversially implemented project (the whole Reddit mirroring and account claiming thing you tried). If I had been in your shoes at the time, I would probably have quit Lemmy and the Fediverse entirely for something else in order to try to pursue that vision. Yet, you've stayed with it, with the aim to refine your ideas on how to better bring decentralized social media to the general public. So kudos to you for your resoluteness on this.
I agree with everything. The thing is, I've been thinking about the psychology behind this lately.
When Fedi-Fans complain about Bluesky, it is usually based on the misunderstanding that it also is instance based. It really doesn't seem to occur to many that things might be done differently. But I think it may go a little deeper.
A common complaint is that it's too expensive to run a full relay. People want to self-host it all. They want to feel that they are in control and don't need anyone. It's not particularly rational but people do lots of silly things chasing that feeling. The rational start would be to move somewhere remote and grow your own food. Instead, people buy a pick-up truck or degoogle their phone.
That architecture also appeals to a more tribal mindset. An instance is "our" place. We just pull up the drawbridge when bad people come and we are safe here in "our" castle.
I think to some people that is more appealing than the more open design of atproto.
On Bluesky, there is all this waffle about some people trying to get someone banned. They might find such tribal architecture more appealing.
It's a mess, I find it ridiculous that my account and all of its data is tied to a fediverse instance (which is most often operated by a single person that could decide to shut it down at any time) and other people are ok with this
Fediverse Report 137 - this week’s fediverse news
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[li]altstore joins the fediverse, and you can interact with apps on the alternative iOS app store now via your fediverse accounts. Altstore also made a 500k USD donation to various fediverse platform
Fediverse Report 137 - this week's fediverse news
altstore joins the fediverse, and you can interact with apps on the alternative iOS app store now via your fediverse accounts. Altstore also made a 500k USD donation to various fediverse platforms
Mastodon is getting Starter Packs, with more details on the design, soliciting feedback
A New Social announced a new version for Bounce, which allows you to transfer your account from the fediverse to #bluesky
Alternative iOS app store AltStore joins the fediverse, with a 500k USD donation to various fediverse projects. Mastodon talks about their upcoming Starter Pack feature. Bounce your account from the fediverse to Bluesky.
Since 15 September, IFTAS has been tracking a coordinated network of accounts operating across Mastodon. These accounts are engaged in a high-volume propaganda campaign, promoting pro-Russian narra…
Remember every time we find Putin backed propaganda outside of Russia in the wild, it's nearly always boosting predominantly conservative viewpoints versus anything else.
Outside of their borders they're more interested in people fighting with each other than anything like coming together. Right wing politics is how they do that
Sorry, but this is wrong. They're also actively sponsoring "left wing" propaganda, to further sow discord. Depending on which group you yourself belong to, it's just easier to spot "the others".
And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can't find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.
The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don't really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they're the ones that fall for it.
I think one of the problems with citing that first study as evidence Russian disinfo is targeted at conservatives more than liberals is that it only studied one case, and Russian disinformation campaigns tailor their disinfo to different demographics, often through brute force/trial and error. So it is quite possible that the particular case they studied happens to be tailored to (or more successfully resonated with) conservatives, while another specific case would have resonated with liberals more thus resulting in more liberal exposure by their metrics.
Your assertion that more is conservative is a meaningless assertion in the context of this discussion.
More can be conservative on average but you don't see an average view of the internet, you see your filter bubble, and that source backs up the original assertion that yes, Russia is targeting leftists too.
Rumors and smears are part of free speech. To the extent that right-wing trolls and their audience are actual voters, it's essentially just a coarse form of ordinary political speech.
The extent to which a foreign government acting coverly is either creating or artificially boosting such content is scandalous.
True enough. But even a tyrannical government at least has a presumable intent of working for the betterment of its country. (Albeit through wrongheaded and small-minded means )
A.foreijgn power, especially a historical adversary and bad actor, is instead presumably working to harm or diminish us.
No, they have the intent of working for themselves. That's it. They don't give a shit about the country and you should never presume the ruling class of your country has your country's best interests in mind.
You presented it as proof that Russia is supporting misinformation on the left. To be that, it has to both include all three parts of the claim -- that there is disinformation on the left, that Russia is covertly supporting disinformation, and that some of the disinformation on the left was supported by Russia.
If your wife sleeps around, and I engage in casual sex, it does not necessarily follow that I slept with your wife.
A common suspicion in America is that Vladimir Putin believes that Trump as POTUS is good for Russia, and that Putin interferes with US politics with a specific goal of helping Trump.
If you have some reporting that directly links Russia to left-wing disinformation I'd love to read it. But the BBC article I read after following your link didn't have any such link.
When you make a statement it's your responsibility to provide proof because what if you're talking out of your ass? How would we find any proof in that scenario when it literally wouldn't exist? How would we know if you misinterpreted a source? How would we know we misinterpreted the correct source? What if we think what you're saying is so stupid we don't want to waste our time looking for proof? There are a lot of reasons the burden of proof shouldn't fall on us, which means the burden of proof should fall on the person who made the statement. They know if what they said is factual and if it's factual they know where they found this fact and thus it would be significantly less effort for them to find and present the source.
Better. That actually supports the assertion that Russia does engage in left-targeted disinformation (in Canada, on Twitter.)
It also supports the original point you dismissed as "wrong" -- of the 90 "most influential" accounts, only 9 were subjectively identified as "Canadian far left".
Maybe you should spend more time reading the actual articles, and not just their headlines?
Absolutely and utterly false. They try and promote fighting, anger, and distrust of government to everyone.
They target leftists with things that will upset them, make them angry at the right and the government and other leftists and sow further discord and polarization.
Less extreme Leftists generally aren't nearly as likely to be control freaks as the right (although there are always exceptions), so getting them (as a group) angry enough to fight takes much more effort than it does the right.
Thats false, every report ive seen on Russian activity shows that they antagonise both left and right wing people creating and boosting misinformation and organising real world protest events.
A source for my lived experience? Or do you mean an example?
I have been banned from .ml twice for stating that Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine - a matter of incontrovertible fact which has absolutely nothing to do with any leftist theory, as far as my masters degree in political science can discern.
.ml is moderated to be ideologically one sided. Pro-capitalism is literally not allowed and will deleted. Making a pro-west or anti-China or Russia comment is like a bat signal for .ml admins and users alike to dogpile on your comment.
It’s their right to moderate their instance how they see fit, but removing content on ideological grounds is going to result in people thinking what’s left is propaganda.
For the most part I like .ml users, I don’t care for the admin team and moderator decisions and that’s why I’m not on that instance. I could care less about the fact my instance is defederated from hexbear users or grad users. They do want to be polarizing and live in a propaganda bubble
I wouldn't call them that. Most if not all of them are genuine people with some having accs for many years before Reddit crossed the line for most of us and them becoming anyhow relevant to interfere. In a recent hexbearean post about fediverse negativity I've read a couple of opinions with a notion that federating with others wasn't that great, and they were pretty happy just by themselves. I assume, it's the same for other two too. That's a game too long and effortful to be a psyop imho. Their positions and where they get their info are things to argue, but let's not get as far as dehumanizing them.
Almost everywhere I soundly proclaim that I am a russian dummy anarchist, that I live in that state for I have no options, and I angrily disagree with their fascination, mystification of what it is, I hold a grudge with anyone who wants that russki mir to be the model the whole world should share.
I, nevertheless, find a lot of points, like personal stuff and grieveancies, theoretical things, sympathy to protesters, to Gazan survivors that I share with them. Unlike transparently racist/fascist troll comms that were there, unlike their campaigns I've noticed, there is a huge population of real people worthy of talking, arguing with.
Call me any names and ban me, but as long as any person or community is supportive of basic pillar causes like body autonomy, you, like, can at least talk to them and find something in common.
What I missed though, is that Diva said the same, but misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks. Them and state suppression ruined the rusophonic space to that degree I dropped it altogether. I don't know how their actions affected other countries, but as a nolifer shitposting addict trying to trust them just a bit, I came through fire, water and copper tubes before dropping them altogether. They are like current Twitter, but worse. And, well, fuck, I wasn't abandoning that to find the next option already corrupted.
To be honest I didn't understand the thrust of most of what you wrote, but if you are against the Rusky Mir, you are probably on the right side to begin with. If you are an anarchist, you probably have no place on .ml to begin with.
Drunktexting and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
The main point why I wrote it was that I don't find them either bots or artifical influencers. They do probably want to have some reach or fresh blood, but don't want their local culture to be spread too thin like it's reddit 2.0. They are anything but cancer that I've met seeing real botfaming ops.
And, although I don't share many of their thoughts, most of the posts I see in my feed discuss common issues where we aren't that far from each other. Closer, than to maga/zionist/z-crowd. And in that context I find it alright to not draw any lines and just talk.
When things start to get overly political, well, that's a whole another thing, where different bestest solutions are incompatible, historical betrayals are dugged up and the internet infighting ensues. It's exhausting and pointless with just 2mil mostly irrelevant nerds on Fediverse. It's easier to just scroll through some amuzing takes, and instead focus on things where we can cooperate.
misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks
don't get me wrong, I know these exist. I am just expressing skepticism because people on the English speaking Internet will act like every reply they don't like is a bot puppeteered by foreign intelligence.
It's just more likely to be a normal person and any state actors are probably going to be focusing on the corporate-run social media spaces
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB agent says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
Lots of people can not stand the fact that you don't agree with them. They will accuse you of being a bot or something, rather than to accept the fact that people have different opinions on things.
The fact the comments here are so contentious is just funny. I will block as is appropriate but so far have not had to do to much of it on the fediverse. Man it needs to be reciprical though so their training is limited.
There are obviously agents from elsewhere, and some of them may be pretty effective, but it's nothing compared to Trump and Co getting money from the likes of Saudis and acting like they own the place. If the main concern is american politics, well, the real worms aren't theoretical or real foreign enemies, but corrupted fuckheads that ignore human, state rights, shutdown government, pack people from the streets to deport. No enemy could've done such damage so-called friends are doing.
The rise in right-wing nationalism has been notable across Europe, as well. It's a good guess that the Russians have been pushing that, too. The US is just ahead of the curve.
The network includes accounts impersonating reputable news outlets such as BBC News, Euronews, and Meduza, designed to give credibility to Telegram propaganda links. We believe it may be connected to the “Pravda/Portal Kombat” pro-Russia propaganda network.
Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes more clearly than across decentralised Mastodon services.
If your first reaction was to post "posts I dislike are Russian bots", then you haven't actually grasped the argument. It has nothing to do with anyone disagreeing with specific posts.
It's also very telling that you're reflexively posting that when it says nothing about the data being presented.
I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas : - Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it. - Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation. - Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting. - Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two). - Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community. - Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
I suppose not. Although I imagine if the Fediverse gets more users it will happen more and more. The current mod tools are not really up to the job as it increases in activity.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
By now I've written four bots using the lemmy API.
Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven't. Several communities and instances already have them.
Honestly that's how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.
Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.
Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.
If you need tools, find them. If they don't exist, create them. If you don't have the skills or time, then don't volunteer.
Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.
To be clear, I'm not thinking about Lemmy here specifically. But in any case, however its done - either via the settings, or an easy to access official or officially endorsed mod-bot - access and knowledge to and of these tools should be easy and well-known for community owners.
If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.
Not every would-be moderator of a community has the skills or knowhow to make and/or host these things. Even Reddit now, at its size, lacks some capable tools not consistently covered in automod tools.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It's a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven't shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
Well I'm thinking in terms of how to 'shore up' the fediverse, so to speak - to make it able to cope with potential future growth. I do think all of the examples in my OP that I've given are pretty general and one or more of them would be implemented by most communities the moment they were able to do so.
In Skavau's defense, they aren't a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed's chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).
Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy's. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.
My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.
Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.
After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.
There are a lot of people who make excellent mods who are not programmers. It's already a small enough pool that requiring a particular skill only further narrows the pool. It also has a secondary effect that good mods may be unwilling to take on larger communities, or additional responsibilities.
If we want better moderation, the fediverse has to become more friendly to non technical people.
That seems like the best of these ideas. But it would be better for the originating instance to warn the poster that their url has already been seen and stop them posting it unless they really really want to.
Well yeah Piefed actually already does this. But some people will just ignore it even if everyone uses Piefed. I would make use of blocking repeat-url posting and have it so anyone who ignores it has their post automatically removed or blocked.
What are the differences between piefed and lemmy? Is one financed/supported/organised by commercial companies (or people that work for them)? Are they both grassroots and independent? Do they combat algorithms? Or something else?
Yes, piefed is independent in the same way as lemmy is.
Piefed has tools that Lemmy does not: Flairs, user flairs, hashtags, custom feeds/topics, scheduled posts, poll posting, events - word filters for users.
Most of these features are also implemented in Lemmy, and others too such as private communities (which can only be browser by users that were manually approved by moderators). However we have very high standards for correctness, performance and UX so it takes a while to get all of this released in the upcoming 1.0 version.
Don't donate to the Lemmy devs except if you are ok with supporting transphobes and tankies, because that's what the Lemmy-Devs are (and it's very well documented!). Donate either to the piefed team or to your local instance instead!
Donations are to pay for the development of Lemmy which is a full-time job and pays for our bills. Donating to Lemmy does not mean "supporting transphobes and tankies", thats a really weird thing to say.
If you want to donate to lemmy instances (or the devs as well if the other replies haven’t changed your mind) a lot of them are on Liberapay and if yours isn’t, they probably have a donate link on their web UI.
Interesting, why do you think that scriptable moderation bots need a completely new platform? Wouldnt it be much easier to utilize the Lemmy api directly?
Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn't care about scalability.
However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.
They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who's going to give you database access? So you'd have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I'd imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.
Another solution would be using Lemmy's new webhook system, but I don't know how reliable it will be.
So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:
Make a new federated platform
With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find a suitable Lemmy instance for it or even self host one yourself.
Stronger integration with platforms via a modular federation system
If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn't be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn't, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.
Not really answering your question, but I'd like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.
To get new posts and comments for all known communities you only need to make regular requests to /api/v3/post/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All and /api/v3/comment/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All. Its not necessary to make separate requests for each community. The default rate limit allows 180 read requests per minute so you can comfortably poll this every second (in practice every 30s or so should be enough). If you miss an item (ie post or comment id was skipped) just load the following page.
The plugin system in 1.0 would be another option. It will still take some time until that is released, but there shouldnt be any reliability issues.
Youre right that federation solves these problems, but instead you get another problem of writing all this federation code and making sure it is compatible with different platforms. Lemmy's federation code has around 12k lines so that is a lot. It seems much simpler to use the API for Lemmy, Piefed etc and write abstractions for common functionality.
Anyway this is my opinion. Its your project so in the end its your decision how to implement it.
Yep. I did use those endpoints with the ModeratorView (The bot doesn't need posts or comments from communities it doesn't moderate) on my first attempt. I went with the federation approach at last because of future scalability issues. Though that is probably an exaggeration. If the default rate limit is 180 read requests per minute, that would be more than enough, honestly. The scale at which the scalability issues I mentioned would appear at about more than 4500 comments/posts per minute. Frankly, I think we'll never reach that in the near future. So actually the rate limiting issue is practically not an issue for the foreseeable future.
The plugin system would work. The fetching problem would disappear.
Though I don't think the federation code would be huge. I am not trying to make it compatible with all platforms. For example I'll write the required Lemmy ActivityPub structs to send moderation related activities and actors. The Group's instance would handle distributing the activities, so even though this project might not federate with Piefed for example, it would still receive the activities the bot sends to the Group's inbox through the instance's software, Lemmy.
If someone wanted to get the bot to work on another Ap platform that supports groups, they would have to write the necessary Ap actors, activities, and a bit of glue code, and that would be it... or at least that's how I'm planning it.
I guess I'll try to work with the plugin system if I can't achieve what I want and keep it simple. It would at least be a learning experience, if nothing else. Thank you for the info.
With 4500 posts per minute you will probably get a lot of other scaling issues too, like with your database or the processing of incoming and outgoing activities. In any case its a good way to learn how Activitypub works. Is the code open source? Dont see it on your codeberg.
Using the plugin system you basically just need a way to get notified about each new post and comment, right? I expect that will be one of the major use cases for plugins. We will likely provide various official plugins, eg push notifications for Android and iOS. The same thing should also work for you.Version 1.0 will let you subscribe to communities to get notifications for all new posts and comments (code).
Rewrites the notification system to be more flexible and extensible
Removes the tables inbox_combined, person_post_mention, person_comment_mention and comment_reply replacing them with a single not...
I haven't released the source code yet. The private repo at the moment is very messy in general so I am just waiting until I get a somewhat working pre-alpha done with the design that I am still experimenting with finalized. There's still a ton of work to be done since I just started 2 weeks ago.
Yes, although communities on here already roll with some of these rules. Some don't want double link posting or want to ban specific urls or specific keywords - they just have to do it manually. This can cause mod burnout over time.
That could happen in the future but at the moment and in the past surely we lost more mods as a result of their community being dead than from their community being too active. But we don't hear from them because they feel rejected and like they failed so they slink away quietly.
True. I am just mostly trying to make a record of this stuff for the future. Obviously in the event of these tools existing, mods wouldn't have to turn them on.
I definitely think there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
I guess in a way that's what it offers, just that instead of an algorithm it's human curated. Mastodon is a lot about boosts, so following someone doesn't mean just following them, but also being subjected to whatever they boost (unless you silence their boosts of course). So if you're interested in pottery and you follow a pottery starter pack, chances are that feed will end up a curated channel of pottery content.
The great thing is that it has quality control and cannot be abused the same way algorithmic feeds always end up being. The funky thing is, of course, that you also end up being exposed to everything else those people are interested in. But I think that's part of what makes Mastodon feels so nice.
I see what you mean, but it's never worked as well for me as a simple, well designed algorithm or even bsluesky feeds, or, incidentally, lemmy communities.
I wish there was something like this for tags. So: display only posts that contain tag X, but sort them with some algorithm. Ideally: steered by number of likes and date of adding. May be even the same that is used by Lemmy.
That's what I want, it could be implemented like bluesky feeds, where you choose the tags and words you want included, and then choose what kind of ordering you want!
Congratulations, you've been included in the "Assholes" pack.
If you wish to be removed from the pack, you must write a letter explaining why we should remove you and mail it to the address listed below with an attached blood sample in a crystal vial packaged in a refrigerated container with proper padding fit for shipping.
Mastodon Inc, 228 East 45th Street Suite 9E New York, New York 10017
::: spoiler Spoiler Disclaimer: this is a joke not intended to convey anything. :::
Bluesky pioneered a brilliant solution to this “empty feed problem” in 2024, with the introduction of “Starter Packs”, a feature that allows users to curate and share their own collections of recommended accounts.
Bluesky pioneered, eh? I distinctly remember using a feature called "circles" on Google+ back in 2011. It allowed people to create arbitrary "circles" of people, share them and have others bulk-follow/unfollow the people from a circle. It worked incredibly well and Google+ became a lively social network even with its small userbase at the time.
I really don't understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don't use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.
On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it's often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.
Instead I'd like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.
Какой-то сервис в тик токе переписали с го на раст и всё стало дешевле и быстрее в 2 раза 😁
Критический сервис TikTok, написанный на Go, был переписан частично на Rust для узких мест. Это дало двукратный рост производительности, снижение задержек и нагрузок на CPU и память. В итоге сервис обрабатывает в 2 раза больше запросов, что снизило инфраструктурные затраты на $300,000 в год #go #rust
What nobody likes to talk about is the amount of developer time (and therefore money) it takes to write and maintain a correct and optimized Rust program.
I recently discovered NodeBB can federate and started hunting for interesting instances. I’m into tech, literature, and indie games but haven’t found an instance that fits. Could anyone recommend NodeBB instances with active communities focused on those topics? Thanks!
I checked some of the forums in the link (nodebb.fediverse.observer/list) you posted, but it's hard to tell what most of those NodeBB instances are actually for: many lack descriptions and the forum names don't say much. I would have to read a few posts in each forum to figure out what each one is for. I found a literature forum but it only has three posts, I don't want to make an account just to shout into the void, so I'm trying to post to it from Lemmy.
I tried posting to the literature community I found via Lemmy but the post never showed up on the NodeBB instance. I used Lemmy's search with the target community URL (community.darkscribes.com/cate…), it found the community, and I created a post from Lemmy (lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54997372). I can see the post on Lemmy but not on the target NodeBB instance. Any idea why that might be or how to get Lemmy posts to appear on federated NodeBB forums?
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that... unfortunately debugging server-to-server interactions is kind of tough. It should work though, so I don't know why it didn't... yet. It could be their version of NodeBB isn't up to date enough.
Federation is eventually consistent, but when we're talking practical terms, how long is too long for a node to be offline?
I suffered a bit of a data loss and while I was able to recover my mastodon instance within 2 days, lemmy took me a week and I don't see anyone spamming the inboxes again.
Should I expect that other servers effectively defederated me and should I resubscribe to my communities or I should give it a few days?
Bonfire’s latest release puts data portability (moving and taking your data with you) and anti-enshittification (avoiding manipulative platform tricks) front and center.
1 . As you could have guessed from the community this was posted in, a software that is part of the fediverse. It has various modules for different functionality. 2. Because they made a long blogpost that explains the new features that you hopefully read before commenting?
Sorry, it's just that there's a bad habit going around on Lemmy at large, of lazy copy paste posting of releases of software without any description of what the software is or why the OP thinks this release is of particular interest, or why they think we should care.
The project is very interesting. After quickly browsing their website I understand that it's a kind of a framework to build fediverse apps. It's implemented in Elixir programming language and uses Postgres as a database. Looks like they are putting a lot is emphasis on community and cooperative aspects.
There should be a Fediverse platform that makes blocking entire topics as easy as blocking a tag, not subscribing/unsubscribing dozens of communities. Firefish (antennas) and PieFed let you follow/block keywords, but that’s not the same as robust, community-wide topic blocking. Imagine collaborative, booru-style tagging across posts so blocking a tag reliably removes all content using it. Does anyone know of software that already provides topic-level blocking out of the box without needing long manual lists?
You don't seem to get my point. For a platform to let me reliably filter a whole topic, the majority of posts need to be tagged with that topic first. Reddit/Facebook don't do that, they have communities and loose categories, not consistent topic tags across all posts. Twitter only partially does it with hashtags, and hashtags are neither comprehensive nor applied consistently. I'm talking about platform-level, booru-style or collaborative tagging so blocking a tag actually removes the tagged content without me having to unsubscribe from dozens of communities or build giant keyword lists.
Imo it might be easier to collaboratively build keyword lists. It's tedious to tag posts manually, and it becomes impossible to do it effectively after the user base grows past a certain point. You can auto-remove any post that isn't tagged, but a lot of people dislike that kind of filtering and only a few communities would implement something like that
Quora had heckloads of users before the well-working topic system was destroyed with the excuse of tag spamming (real reason: cost-cutting), which us tedium-loving "Topic Gnomes" had always corrected quickly. So it's not impossible. Now the tagging is done badly by "AI" and my feed content went to shit, even worse than on PieFed with a leaky keyword mute list.
Missing features were a trust system for topic editors (new user = 0 trust, etc.) and answer topic tagging - only the questions were tagged, which didn't work when the question was general, like "What should you know in 2025?" and the specific answers were all over the place.
Keywords would never have worked for the infinite questions about perpetual motion machines, because the askers never knew the correct term. Similarly, I have failed to craft a keyword block list to filter out all U.S. politics.
Here's hoping keyword blocking hits Lemmy/my instance is able to facilitate its planned switch to PieFed without a hitch in the future. I used that feature extensively on Reddit (with RES) to great success and with minimal effort.
However, I'm not a fan of crowdsourced tagging. Topic tagging is significantly more subjective than e.g. the functionality provided by crowdsourced extensions like SponsorBlock.
I feel that crowdsourced tagging will likely reduce/fragment engagement if shared blocklists become widely adopted. I can easily imagine somebody tagging something inappropriately to soft-censor certain posts to groups of users... there are many scenarios that this could be abused if improperly designed or implemented.
There is an argument to made towards making post/community-level flairs a thing and allowing blocking from that. There could also be basic/broad meta-level flairs (e.g. Photo, Video, Meme, Discussion, etc.) that could also be used to filter content.
Mmm not sure how it will be managed. It depends whom you trust.
On our jlai.lu chat (jlailu.zulipchat.com) we have a section that has a list of keyword to remove all post related to MAGA and far right. It gives us a peace of mind and we can purpose our keywords.
Imho, you may suggest a git, put your blocklist and invit some people to edit it. Honnestly, i think it is safer to handle personnaly because you know what's inside. But i may be wrong
I don't feel something like crowdsourced tagging would work for the Fediverse unless it has some sort of approval system built for either post's author or commuity admins (and those are already busy). Otherwise it would be far too easy to do things like brigading, or pushing government-style "self-censorship" (or straight out censorship of others: just get an army of ~~bots~~ "volunteers" into one instance, let the resulting blocks federate). Something closer to AO3 style tagging, where the author retains most control but readers can add tags to things that are valid only to them (and maybe to people they share data with too?) should workbetter IMO.
Blocking keywords is not reliable to block topics because a keyword does not a topic make, for example in this post I mention queer, socialism, musk and islam yet it's not topical to any of those things.
I think moderating tags is the same as moderating any other content. If there's a brigade, you can revert all tag changes made by the brigading users the same way you remove content posted by a user when banning them. That said, the moderation system could be improved. Reddit-style moderation is one of the biggest jokes on the internet.
PieFed let you follow/block keywords, but that’s not the same as robust, community-wide topic blocking. Imagine collaborative, booru-style tagging across posts so blocking a tag reliably removes all content using it.
This would require a fediverse platform that has a built-in, accurate tagging system. So no under that basis.
That would be easier implemented with microblogging tagging, and the only thread-based platform that uses tags is Mbin afaik. However, even in it you can't still block tags. Maybe poke the devs of Mbin to implement it?
Forget cooling and maintenance; let's call that engineering minutia. Let's focus on pure, theoretical physics
...Does he realize how mind-bendingly difficult sending a pound (much less tons) to orbit is?
This reminds me of how Musk and his evangelists talk about colonizing mars, when it would be orders of magitude cheaper and easier to, say... live in the mariana trench.
Or under the antarctic ice sheet.
Or in Kilauea's open lava pit.
I mean, it's fine to not understand the 'tyrrany of the rocket equation,' but please, let people who do make the plans instead.
The 2nd Berlin Fediverse Day is a networking event for people in the Fediverse. With talks, workshops and networking opportunities, we want to spread knowledge about the Fediverse, promote creative solutions and strengthen the exchange between developers, administrators, academia, civil society and content creators.
Speakers include, among others: Elena Rossini, Andy Piper, Evan Prodromou, Christine Lemmer-Webber, Matthias Pfefferle…
The Berlin Fediverse Day is a Fediverse conference taking place on 3-5. October 2025 at c-base Berlin with workshops and lectures for interested people, newcomers and experienced users.
I'd avoid using a domain you dont actually own. Those free DNS places can take the domain back at any time. They are also often very low reputation domains.
I'm dealing with some health issues at the moment, and it's getting exhausting to update everybody one by one, so I'm looking for some ideas of where to host a blog in a way that might give my friends & family a small, painfree introduction to the fediverse, or at least something that's more on the FOSS side of things. A family friend used caringbridge.org a few years ago, which looks like a not so terrible fallback option, but I figured I'd see what else is out there before making a decision. The last time I really did much blogging was probably 20 years ago on livejournal, so I'm pretty out of touch with the current options.
So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user. […] Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.
AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.
Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.
I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform.
This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.
Bluesky is of course just another American social media company. If they are not shit now, they will be once they get bigger. The American model has reached a dead end and it's not suitable for good products, competition and real innovation.
Side note, it's been a while since I've lived in the US, so my knowledge of local "culture wars" is from online sources, but the article is incorrect in claiming that Jesse Singal is a transphobe. I say this as someone who often disagrees with him.
I will add that many of the commentators in his substack are unhinged and likely transphobes.
Legal scholar John Inazu characterized the backlash as "widespread outrage from progressive commentators" and that in some criticisms, "ad hominem attacks far outpaced their substantive critiques".[13]
US americans are largely the same, be it trumpers or self styled liberals, they always have to be "better than" or "the best" of something. This leads to dangerous orthodoxies that don't allow debate or discussion which furter leads to stances that are nothing but distilled anti-intellectualism. The trumpers call everything woke, the liberals call everything phobe. Meanwhile the overton window has moved so far to the right, the country elected a pedophile scam artist as president because they know him from TV and the rest of the world is left holding the bag.
There is a bunch of normalized transphobia in America. That certain views are shared by elected politicians doesn't make them not transphobic.
"Trans allies aren't even bothering to debate this white guy, they're just calling him names" isn't proof of anything more than the frustration of said allies. It's essentially the same thing as "Trump derangement syndrome".
If we want to argue that someone is or isn't transphobic, it would be a better use of everyone's time to focus on what they actually said and what justifications their critics give for applying that label.
IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia, it's ridiculous it has so much air time in the anglosphere in the face of the much more relevant inequality and destruction of association rights. The neonazis set up the bait and the idiots gobble it up, hook line and sinker.
Are you telling trans people that the unequal treatment they face isn't relevant? It's all part of the same pattern of restricting rights. It's a bit like saying, "never mind all that about the Jews, let's focus on the Nazis."
Everyone who questions your orthodoxy is a nazi, got it. That type of reasoning has worked wonderfully for everyone and resulted in better government and standards of living for all trans people. Wonderful job you've done protecting trans people in your country, the results really show.
And they use the threat of trans people getting government healthcare as a way to stop socialized medicine. They also use racism this way, and sexism, and homophobia, and xenophobia, and other reactionary ideologies. These things are directly connected, we can't really ignore one to focus on the other.
Besides, we need to form a mass movement, and you can't form a mass movement by telling minorities to shut up and wait their turn.
Also I might lose my healthcare in the next few months. It's kind of fucking urgent?
This is complicated by the fact that the English speaking world isn't safe, or won't be for long. The UK is having its own wave of transphobic reaction which has spread to Ireland, Canada is being threatened with a trade war and being the 51st state, Australia got couped that one time by the CIA, and New Zealand is a hard place to get into since it's basically the bunker nation for billionaires since COVID.
I might apply for asylum outside the English speaking world but that's extremely challenging in lots of other ways. I'm cramming language lessons atm to give myself a chance if I am forced to flee, but it's dire.
By "association rights" I infer that you mean the right of free association.
If so, can you be a little bit more specific as to whose "association rights", specifically, are a more important issue than the right of trans folk to get healthcare, be free from discrimination, and be able to play sports without being harassed?
My inclination is that the most important targets to defend against facist oppression are the ones being targeted, which does suggest one plausible answer, but I really do want to know what you meant in your post.
IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia
Yes. That's why the politicians keep talking about trans people. They are explicitly stirring up transphopbia as a simultaneous distraction and unification tool
he liberals call everything phobe.
Literally the only reason you're even talking about this yourself is because of the neonazis. You're literally doing their work, whilst somehow thinking you're immune to it...
It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.
If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.
It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.
Funny you'd mention that adage because the people getting sent to concentration camps are hispanics by ICEsatsgruppe. Leave it to amis to grandstand while missing the point...
I strongly disagree. Even the section on his articles about trans kids shows that Singal is able to show a measure of nuance and understanding with respect to the critiques of his work.
Not to mention the more global context. Are you sure that non-english speaking trans folks would have the same attitude (i.e. they may have their own opinions and priorities)? The reason I mention this is that I have some exposure to the local LGBT community and their attitudes don't always align with "Western" expectations.
I can see how the AT protocol is designed to scale. ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.
Running a relay is way more powerful than the author states though. You could do stuff like selectivly intercept and reject events before they make it into or out of the firehose.
ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.
You mean that when there's more traffic, the instances will start to DDOS each other?
Yeah i guess you could look at it that way. Each instance would have to scale horizontally to handle the load, which is waste.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that ActivityPub is just a rest api contract that one can implement in order to communicate with the rest of the "network". Its simple, but its such massive overhead to do this all via http. Pushing all your instances events to a dedicated stream and letting the other instnaces read it can be more performant and handle the load better. The downside though is who controls the streams?
IRC is the OG of federation, i am sure we could learn something from it and have federated networks that are in turn federated with eachother. I dunno, just thinking out loud here.
As far as I understand one could split a fediverse instance into three parts: data, backend and UI. The data is not shared 1to1 - each instance gets a copy of the activity and from that creates it's own copy. Hence the same post on different instances will have different id The problem we are speaking about is the capability of the backend to process incoming copies. Meaning, I also understand that the part that serves the local data to UI should not be the problem
What if there was a queue at the front and from the backend a scalable ingestion worker would be split off? Those would only do the putting the actions onto the data. Probably with per community(?) FIFO topics/partitions, so we can process data in parallel and not worry about an updoot for a post that does not exist yet
Those would still be fairly easy to deploy and be vertically scalable, right? Or is there some bottleneck in the protocol itself?
So lets say there are 100 instances. My instance needs to issue api requests to each instance to sync with the network. They in turn need to issues 100 requests to me to sync (and eachother). What about when there are 100k instances? Its exponential.
From the looks of AT, its farily linear because its really just operating on a set of giant event streams (like kafka).
To me, ActivityPub being based on REST APIs was always a problem. On the upside it makes it approachable, but its not really the right tech imo. Use something without the overhead of http headers and whatnot.
Yes eventually, just like the instances do once enough users are hitting it. Its a matter of how much all servers in the network need to scale, but also the nature of the protocol itself. Streaming binary data is more performant than individual http api requests for instance. Event streams are the way to go un a decentrliazed network for sure.
I suppose technically someone could implement streaming using AP payloads. So long as the format of the payloads are the same they could translate. It would be a different thing though without the pull part of it
So lets say there are 100 instances. My instance needs to issue api requests to each instance to sync with the network. They in turn need to issues 100 requests to me to sync (and eachother). What about when there are 100k instances? Its exponential.
This falsely assumes that everything gets federated to everyone, which isn't the case for ActivityPub. You only get what you actually subscribe to with it.
i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.
OP would have to have their wordpress site running on multiple instances to leverage that. It would work, but now they are paying for more infrastructure.
ActivityPub is designed to scale well for millions of users with a low number of subscribers each (Dunbars number and so on). It is not designed as a mass media publishing tool where a few have tens of thousands or even millions of followers.
I consider this a feature, but feel free to disagree.
This depends on what you think the purpose of ActivityPub is and subsequently the type of scale. ActivityPub is designed for horizontal scale in a "social network". If you have lots of participating entities with a more or less similar number of interconnected subscriptions ActivityPub scales extremely well, unlike ATProto, which needs to more or less ingest the entire network in its firehose.
But you are right that ATProto is better designed for "social media", meaning that most subscriptions are one sided affairs with highly visible "influencers" being the main point around which the network operates. Obviously this is what most commercial networks are more interested in as it allows profitable advertisement and other forms of social influence.
I see these two types as entirely different forms of social interaction, and couldn't care less about the latter. So I am not worried at all about scaling issues of ActivityPub, as it scales extremely well in the "social network" type of interaction.
I like this take, but I wonder if there's eventually a combinatoric problem with having hundreds of thousands of small instances, each with thousands of connection to other instances? I have no idea how that relates to the network/computational constraints..
Modern webservers don't have a problem serving thousands of requests as long as they are spaced out a bit timewise. And since each AP instance only sees and interacts with a small part of the overall network it should not become an issue to expand the network horizontally. It is anyways probably better to think of interconected archipelagos and not of a singular network in the case of ActivityPub.
Is that really true though? Say we end up with 10k servers with 100-1000 users each, even if only 10% of those users have a connection to a server that no one rose on their server is connected to, that's still a highly connected network.
Then add boosts from other servers (that incentivise cross-network follows)...
I don't believe that's true.. It currently has around 9k servers, but I think the vast majority of those will have less than 10 users.
Anyway, there's currently about 1m active users, so the real question is will it scale by 3 orders of magnitude? And my point being that I'd expect the network to become more connected as it scales (at least for the main archipelago, which is probably always going to house a majority of users).
MAU is a very incomplete measure of active users as by far the most users lurk and post very little.
In total numbers Mastodon has about 10m users and only 30% of those are on mastodon.social, the rest is distributed on the 9k other instances. That's pretty close to the scenario you stated.
An instance does not interact with all other instances. It only syncs with other instances when users follow someone there, join a community, ...
But that's also a problem. It means you can't search the entire Fediverse from a particular instance and find new and interesting discussions and people. There is no discovery feed. For that, you need something like Bluesky's relay. That relay actually does keep up with what everyone is posting and archives it.
But that's one aspect of Bluesky that draws a lot of criticism by Fedi people. A full relay is expensive to run and not something anyone can self-host. Pruned down versions are doable, though. If everyone actually did run their own relay, then one would get you the combinatorial problem.
In practice, large instances are the Fediverse solution to the discovery problem. You can see what the many users on that instance post. Also, the many users subscribe to many things and so a large instance will cache much content from elsewhere. That architecture encourages centralization.
There's other difficult issues. So you have a little server that serves your content to a few followers. Some celebrity with millions of followers would have to rent an entire server rack. But what if little old you interacts with a celeb and now all their followers try to fetch your content from your little server? Common problem. You just need caching. EG the celebrity rack also serves your content to their followers and takes the load off your server. But now whoever is doing the caching can also filter replies. There's no simply solution there.
They recommend people other american centralized social media as an alternative to Bluesky in response to this, yet again. When are they going to learn?
I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren't even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.
I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just... didn't have anything say. It's just a "shout into the ether" site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That's a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.
This sucks. Hopefully this will push ppl to sign up to mastadon or to other atproto instances and move away from the main bluesky acct.
For anybody looking for mastadon instance i recommend mas.to and for an atproto alternative, I've been on blacksky.community instance for a few weeks now and I rly enjoy it
Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.
Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.
This does raise a question relevant to the Fediverse. Some Bluesky users are lobbying to have Jesse Singal banned, whoever that is. Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.
Once people find out what decentralization means, are they even willing to tolerate it?
If you're the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they'd be banned, so you'd never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn't any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they're banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.
Yes. On Bluesky, they could be individually muted or blocked. You can make and share blocklists, make your own custom feeds that exclude such posters, or even create your own moderation service that removes (or blurs, ...) posts for your subscribers. Obviously, that is not satisfactory for some people.
Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.
What, you can absolutely ban people on a decentralised network. You may not be able to expunge someone from a part of the network they control themselves, but you can expunge them from the part you control. Bluesky has this power and has used it in the past.
Attached: 1 image
Jessie Gender's account on Bluesky suspended seemingly because she said "I also wish ill will to JK Rowling" https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:zy7ifa3dmd46dcrbjkgkg2xz/post/3lwiszke4bk2x
Yes, but that doesn't seem sufficient for some. Conservatives certainly would like to remove trans people from the public completely. Aside: It's foolish for trans people to copy these tactics, assuming this comes organically from the trans community. These people are certainly acting like the heels in some right-wing propaganda play.
Bluesky offers several ways in which users can remove unwanted content from their experience. Easiest is for users to block Singal; banning him from their personal part of the network. Blocklists can be shared easily. Users can also spin up their own moderation service.
I probably shouldn't go into the details of what Bluesky can do on a technical level. Incidentally, that blog post contains errors.
In short: On a technical level, the Bluesky company can greatly reduce the visibility of someone. But they would likely run into legal problems if they used that on Singal. The EU regulates what can be done quite strictly. Maybe they could benefit from some industry friendly "loopholes". I'd have to look that up.
I am interested of self-hosting my own instance but one the issue I have is: - Price for renting server and buying domain name. Mainly, I have low income. - Unsure if it be single-user instance or if I want multiple people on my instance. - If my instance is for multiple users, if I be the best fit for moderation as well, pitching it to non Fedizen (whatever you call people that use the Fediverse) as well as the theme of the instance as it would effect my Fedi software of choice (eg. Friendica, Mastodon/Glitch)
I just worried that I try just do it immediately without planning things out or have whatever things in mind which might otherwise help me know what's the best choice and not be upset that I wasted my time and money on something that didn't work out for me.
Very smart to pause and weigh things. There was a lot more to it than I thought when I started mine.
Renting a server is not cheap, but it's not expensive either. Most VPS' will be able to host it fine. You will need to invest effort into swapping data over to S3, volume storage is what really costs money if you use it incorrectly.
I'll say do you want to have an individual/known user instance (like family and friends you deeply trust), or do you want to allow randos? The thing you don't mention at all is liability. I don't know where you're hosted but in most countries you are responsible for reporting material on your server. CSAM? Guess what, you are responsible. You can look at my server, it's based out of the USA and any server is automatically a "mandatory reporter". I am legally obligated to report CSAM that makes it to my instance, if I don't I am legally complicit.
Note that this has been drastically reduced with the image proxying, where if someone on say, .world posts CSAM it's proxied through my server but not hosted by my server. So, liability is still a thing, but as long as the admins of .world take action then i'm protected with them. If proxying is disabled then the CSAM would live on my server too - and that means I'm legally required to report it.
NEVER allow open signups. Spam is real here on the fediverse, and bots are actively trying to sign up for accounts. If you allow signups you need to require a captcha, and I recommend either email verification or asking for a signup message "Why do you want to sign up?". This gets rid of 99.9% of spammers.
This is also a huge reason for not selfhosting an instance. I started hosting mine in my home until I learned that since it's in a home, the feds seizing an instance literally means they bust down your door and take your servers. I decided that I didn't vibe with that, and opted for a hosting provider. If for some reason someone hijacks my server and starts hosting horrible stuff, the seizure will be with my cloud provider, not my front door.
My suggestion is to start a personal instance first. Get the feel for it, see how you like it. Maybe create one community on there that you're passionate about and advertise that it's there to the fediverse (since they won't know about it until you tell them about it). Then judge your risk level and see how much you're willing to do. For me, I host a bunch of swifties, it's well within my risk tolerance. I approve everyone that comes in, and most have to ask to join. (Fight the urge to just create a ton of communities. You'll just end up with dozens of empty communities, there's no way you have the effort to kickstart a lot of communities. Pick one, maybe two, and really advocate for them. Shameless plug them, there's no harm in that here).
None of this is meant to scare you off, obviously I still host and I'm glad for it. My Swiftie Community has over 1,000 subscribers now! I'm very happy to host our little niche community, but I also have learned a lot on the way.
I am not sure OP is asking about hosting a Lemmy instance though. They mention non-Lemmy fediverse software.
However I think you misunderstood how proxying works:
Note that this has been drastically reduced with the image proxying, where if someone on say, .world posts CSAM it’s proxied through my server but not hosted by my server. So, liability is still a thing, but as long as the admins of .world take action then i’m protected with them. If proxying is disabled then the CSAM would live on my server too - and that means I’m legally required to report it.
It is actually pretty much the oposite of what you describe. The image proxy in Lemmy is a user privacy feature, but it comes with the downside that the server does indeed download and temporarily stores all media that are requested through it.
It's halfway between us. Without proxying images are pushed into my server and I end up hosting them indefinitely, requiring me to manually review and remove something if it's removed on another server. (Moderation actions like that from what I understand are still not federated, although maybe that has changed in one of the last updates).
The proxy feature is a privacy feature, but for us admins it also works from a liability standpoint. If proxying is set to ProxyAllImages, it will send the image URL down to pict-rs. From there, pictr's will cache the image based on time that you set. So yes, it's stored temporarily in Pict-rs for quick retrieval, but then I time out after a day also, so if something was banned I hosted it for max a day before it was purged. It removes me manually needing to manually trace back to events that happened a month ago and wiping it from my S3. If my S3 was searched you'd find images from today, and a bunch of images of Taylor Swift.
So you're not wrong, but it switches it from "Image is pushed to my server and there indefinitely" to "Image is requested from someone on my server (very few of us) and is there at most a day"
We dont proxy on lemmy.ca yet, but I assumed thumbnails would still be stored in pictrs like usual? I thought it was just the actual image links that got proxied, and thumbnails were still dumped in like usual.
We turned on cloudflare's CSAM scanner and remove anything it flags for us.
They are but there's an environment vatiable to set how long it stays in cache. Cloudflare actually just ended their csam auto submission, at least the auto reporting. Does it still at least flag it?
oh that's good to hear, I've never had anything pop up on mine, I'm sorry something has for yours. While I have you, do you have a script or anything you use for removing the flagged item?
Hmm, afaik other than some generated small thumbnails no remotely sourced images are stored on your server when you turn off the proxy. At least in theory, but the entire Pictrs integration in Lemmy is such a mess with random unexpected behavior that at this point I am hesitant to claim that no remote images ever get stored (there seem to be alternative code paths for specific image hosts like Imgur and crap like that).
I read the source code, the proxy essentially just hands all the responsibility down to pict-rs. Then pictrs has that environment variable where you can set how long-loved you want the thumbnail to be.
None of this is meant to scare you off, obviously I still host and I’m glad for it.
I hadn't been too scared off and actually found your answer useful so thank you very much!
But for multiple-user instance, I was thinking of maybe having community based on just being fan of music but more leaning on pop music so sort of like your Lemmy instance if it was hosting Mastodon instead. I won't lie, it what I sort of miss Twitter just being a fanboy (minus the bigotry, bullying and just the cult-like behaviour) and just post stuff related to music I enjoyed, even if it just some random photoshoot I think looks great! I just concern that people on Fediverse would see it as it being a pro-"worshipping celebrities" instance instead of instance that just wants to say "Love their music, it means a lot to me".
My advice only host an instance for people you know ansmd trust. Its not hard to self host something like friendica on a raspberrypi or intel n100 machine using something like yunohost
I didn't give it nearly as much thought before I started.
In terms of price, you can set a very low price for a single-user instance. Hetzner and Netcup, for example, offer very affordable VPS (these are providers I know of, but there are certainly others).
I don't see open registration as a problem either. I've had it for years, and when I get waves of spam, which is very rare, I switch to moderated mode, otherwise it remains open.
I would host software according to your preferences. I should have kept Friendica running and turned off Mastodon, but that ship has sailed for me.
For a single-user instant, it might be interesting to connect to a relay; it is important that it is moderated. Fedimins offers such a service.
The thing is, costs grow if your instance gets users. More cpu and disk space needed with time. Domain name renewal costs are known to always cost more every time. I wouldnt do it if I had low income.
If you use s3, it can also become quite expensive. Amazon is known for a lot of hidden costs that will surprise you.
Ownership if locally hosting a private instance; a good point of comparison for this is locally hosting a private PeerTube instance vs. putting vids on YT or even DailyMotion, with that locally-hosted private PeerTube instance, since you own the infrastructure, you set the rules and you decide what stays or goes, on YT or DailyMotion, you're completely at the mercy of a big corporation and they decide what content stays or goes, for example.
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