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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by deadsuperhero@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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!

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

The list of shout-outs in the main announcement pertains to projects who have partnered with the SWF, and intend to support it and collaborate.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there are more than 80 different platforms in varying states of development. Yeah, Lemmy is one of the bigger ones, and OG Threadiverse, but the list of platforms to name is absurdly long at this point. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the protocol, and immediate partners.

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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.

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

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 26 points 2 months ago

Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.

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For Fediverse musicians looking for a new Bandcamp alternative, Bandwagon feels extremely promising. It's built on top of the Emissary platform, and offers a robust amount of features for playing, promoting, and discovering music.

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sub.club is an emergent new platform for paid subscriptions in the #Fediverse. It's simple, smooth, and easy to use.

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In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.

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As the Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today.

Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.

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Flipboard continues its rollout of federation capabilities, this time implementing a “soft-follow” system for users to try out federated subscription for the very first time.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by deadsuperhero@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

Within the last few years, publishing within the Fediverse has started to take off. This week’s opinion piece focuses on some of the current hurdles this network has, when it comes to user experience, and proposes ideas and a vision of what’s possible.

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As we've been building out our site, we've wanted to showcase the icons of various projects and protocols. However, there's been a real lack of any kind of icon font for that purpose...Mastodon is pretty much the only Fediverse project to be featured in FontAwesome, and the ForkAwesome project has been dormant for a long time.

So, we've been building our own.

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The Mastodon For Harris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

It's actually not too bad to run, it's just that my community instance has grown a lot, and is close to four years old at this point. Issues crop up, I mostly wrote this guide to share some insights on how I deal with things.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 26 points 6 months ago

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

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 19 points 8 months ago

Let me think...

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

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 24 points 8 months ago

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 46 points 8 months ago

Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.

It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.

Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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

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

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

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

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

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

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago

It's technically possible, just really, really hard. One example of a successful migration was the transition from calckey.social to firefish.social. It was a massive, extremely difficult undertaking, though.

A big problem involves how user identities are tied to instances. If there were a way to decouple that, I think a lot of the pain goes away.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 39 points 10 months ago

Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.

Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago

For all intents and purposes, the dev did state their intentions on releasing the code "when it's ready", and was super active in working on it. Not releasing, and relying on one server running a specific upstream branch were definitely mistakes, 100%. But, I think the dev legitimately believed they would hit that target, which was a prerequisite for releasing.

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deadsuperhero

joined 1 year ago