DeadSuperHero

Loops aims to be an open Fediverse alternative to TikTok, Snapchat, and Vine. We take an early look at the app, and talk about what it's like!

Check out Fedify. There are still advantages to bespoke protocol implementation, but this is the closest we've gotten so far to "protocol-in-a-box", and it's great.

https://fedify.dev/

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.

We just sat down and wrote a review about NeoDB, and it's a fascinating project. In a nutshell, it's a federated user review system for cultural works. Not only does it log books, but also movies, tv shows, video games, board games, music, podcasts, and more. The project is pursuing some really interesting ideas through data integrations, and the ability to import archives from other services to easily rebuild your social graph.

PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project's lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.

Article is now available here: https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/us-government-hosted-fedive...

In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: “Why didn’t the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?”

Here’s some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don’t consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.

Technically, yes, that's totally doable. However, whatever NGO is operating the instance would still have to get buy-in from administrations and officials that this is the server to join. You'd still likely have contractual and service-level obligations.

But I'd imagine that it's probably less red-tape than a government entity self-hosting their own Fediverse infra.

I'm actually writing a piece about this today for We Distribute. The long and short of it is that it's not impossible, there's just a lot of red tape.

Whether it's a government entity, or a large corporation, you're going to have the same issues with procurement:

* Finding software that fulfills requirements on auditing and security requirements.

* Selecting a vendor that fulfills a laundry-list of contractual obligations / legal requirements. They'll need to honor comprehensive Service Level Agreements for government access, and be proactive in patching, deployment, and mitigation.

* Integration with a government-grade Single Sign-On solution like ID.me

* Onboarding resources for agencies and individuals, plus tooling for social media teams

* Setting policies that respect the First Amendment, while also moderating things like hate speech, pornography, etc

The other hurdle for this is funding and staffing to run all of this.

None of this is necessarily impossible, and I think something like this could be really beneficial. But, I don't think the ecosystem of the Fediverse (from a platform or vendor perspective) is necessarily there yet. I'd love to be proven wrong.

We talked to Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed! Ryan has a lot of experience in working with a variety of decentralized social web protocols, including IndieWeb, ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and Nostr, and has a lot of interesting thoughts on making them talk to each other.

A lot of people make up all kinds of wild assumptions Mastodon, how it works, and what it is. We're here to help clear up some of the biggest ones.

ActivityPub-WordPress is a plugin sponsored by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Recently, they made a 1.0 release with some quality-of-life changes that makes integration easy and approachable to most people.

We wrote a guide going over how to get set up, along with the variety of configuration options that can be used to adjust the output.

A collection of really cool retro clients for Mastodon, dating back to the very early days of consumer desktops.

This is a comprehensive guide that I wrote for people new to Mastodon, and people interested in trying it out. It’s more of a “field manual” than anything else, but it attempts to highlight some of the most important things new users should know about, while introducing them to the bigger concept of the Fediverse.

Recently, I started experimenting with the prospect of turning some music that I had made into karaoke. I was curious about whether it was possible to do entirely with Free Software, and what the karaoke landscape looked like out here on Linux. So, here's a breakdown of what that exploration ended up looking like, along with a final result and some thoughts!

I mean, in practice that would probably work. But an interesting caveat is that apps for federated networks don't typically have one singular privacy policy. It varies server by server. Architecturally, this is a different beast than having a client for a specific service, like Twitter.

I guess they could probably get around it by showing an instance's policies prior to user registration, but not every server actually has them, or needs to (in the case of self-hosted servers)

Ostensibly, you are correct. However, an increased problem of app curation is that, all too often, perfectly innocent apps can get caught in the cross-fire of bad automation.

The fact that most people get their apps from one of two app stores (Google Play, App Store) makes this situation somewhat worse for people that effectively develop apps for the platform in their spare time. There are alternatives, like F-Droid...but, it's still not the same as mainstream distribution.

Another key point is that LBRY and PeerTube have different philosophies on how to approach decentralization. I believe LBRY uses a Blockchain for media storage, but PeerTube is more built around the concept of data federation - people set up separate sites that can then seamlessly integrate with one another by passing messages around, rather than each site having to maintain a separate copy of the same ledger.

Additionally, PeerTube is also compatible with the wider fediverse through the usage of the ActivityPub protocol, meaning that channels can be followed via a dozen or so other platforms that all speak the same federation language. Theoretically, it would be possible to write an entirely new project from scratch (in a completely different language even) that's capable of federating videos with existing PeerTube installations.

This is not to say that there's anything specifically "wrong" with LBRY, just that one approach already integrates with a broader set of platforms due to what community it was developed out of.

The fediverse has conversation streams that are mostly in public indexes, which other people can observe and interact with. In addition to these conversations comprised of statuses representing activities, it is also possible to follow the authors providing said content so that their latest posts show up in your stream, regardless of whether those posts pertained to that conversation or not.

Email, conversely, often is a limited-scope conversation that can only be observed or interacted with between the people participating in said message. Of course, this changes slightly with the use-case of mailing lists, which often provide a public archive of prior messages. But email content is generally not accessible from the web in the same manner that a status is.

Oof. I forgot my description said that.

Thanks for the dose of humility.

That's super ridiculous. You wouldn't want to use a decentralized social platform in a production environment that's only got 5 weeks of development work in it.

As an aside, do the submissions have to use the Blockchain? There are already a ton of good decentralized social platforms that make no use of a blockchain whatsoever, and the majority of them inter-federate with one another.