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submitted 1 month ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/meta@lemm.ee

This is my current understanding of the situation:

  • The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
  • Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy's database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
  • Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I'd like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of "read-only" mode until Lemmy matures.

What would that require?

  1. Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
  2. Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
  3. Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
  4. Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
  5. (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.

This won't help solve the current problems and it wouldn't help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.

I've been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky's PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.

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submitted 2 months ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/android@lemdro.id
220

Please, tell me how "paying for hardware costs is enough"...

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Can we fix job sites? (raphael.lullis.net)
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cross-posted from: https://communick.news/post/2494298

If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.

With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I'm realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.

I'd like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:

  1. Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.

Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse. Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.

  1. Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.

Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source. Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.

  1. Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.

Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it. Cons: It's yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don't have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.

Please, let's avoid any "who cares about sports?" or "I only want organic content here" type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don't care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by rglullis@communick.news to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.

With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I'm realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.

I'd like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:

  1. Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.

    Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse.

    Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.

  2. Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.

    Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source.

    Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.

  3. Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.

    Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it.

    Cons: It's yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don't have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.

Please, let's avoid any "who cares about sports?" or "I only want organic content here" type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don't care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.

3

A community to help people on Lemmy discover and promote the photographers that are looking to showcase their work on the Fediverse.

Rules are simple:

  • Links should be to a post with a photo.
  • Photo should not be your own content.

!fediclicks@viewfinder.pro

1

Seems more suitable for serious photographers than the casual audience from Instagram, but it might be worth it promoting it as well.

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[-] rglullis@communick.news 182 points 8 months ago

FYI: it looks like Trump is going to win the popular vote on this one as well.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 60 points 10 months ago

There is less of everything. Less sports, less hobbies, less local groups, less crafts, less academic discussions, less indie hackers and entrepreneurs, less fashion/brand/style enthusiasts...

Memes and entertainment are too shallow and can be found anywhere, we need to focus on getting some people focused on the deeper end. Reddit's strength is in its long tail of interests. Instead of running blackouts or general protests, we should have focused on bringing one specific community to Lemmy (like e.g, knitting), figure out the issues and support them to migrate fully. If we pulled that off, other communities would have a template to emulate.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 58 points 1 year ago

A few reasons:

  • The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
  • The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support an ad-based economy. Even if by some magical powers we got an ethical ad network working here (which didn't track users and focused solely on paying people by the opportunity of broadcasting their inventory) there wouldn't be enough eyeballs to attract advertisers.
  • The userbase is still anti-business.
  • For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
  • Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.

I've added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

  • Does the server support MUC?
  • Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
  • Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
  • Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
  • If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 63 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Evidence No. 3783 that "social media" and "privacy" do not mix well together.

Let me repeat one more time:

  • anything you write online should be considered public.
  • There is no "consent-based" fediverse.
  • There is no "GDPR protects me from that".
  • There is no "security through obscurity".
  • There is no "dark corner of the internet".

No matter your morals and ethical values, If you need to have any type of conversation that you think might get you in legal trouble, do not have this conversation in a public forum. Use #matrix if you have to, and even then you'd still need to worry large group chats which may have some undercover agent.

And if you are really concerned about "censorship", then ActivityPub is not for you. Go join forces with the bitcoiners and use #nostr.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 54 points 1 year ago

Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.

I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.

How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 78 points 1 year ago

https://fediverse.hanbitgaram.com/

410 Gone!
I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far.
We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed.
The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.


I trawled unintentionally.
[-] rglullis@communick.news 58 points 2 years ago

There is also a lesson in implementing proper tests. During these holidays I started to play a bit more with Rust and went on to look at Lemmy's backend code. Not a single unit test in sight...

[-] rglullis@communick.news 59 points 2 years ago

we’re avoiding

"We" are a minority share of the market and no one really cares about "us". "We" are irrelevant and we will keep being irrelevant unless we start actual and effective evangelizing for an open web.

This is not just about "avoiding", it's about fighting for culture change.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 122 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Repeat after me: anything I write on the internet should be treated as public information. If I want to keep any conversation private, I will not post it in a public website.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 56 points 2 years ago

The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:

  • Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
  • By closing down with Threads, you'll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
  • By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say "hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden."
[-] rglullis@communick.news 70 points 2 years ago

Can you tell me any successful open source project where the lead developers take a "merge everything with little fuss over quality, principle and overall design" approach?

Maybe PHP? When you think of PHP, do you think "that's a project I'd like to work on"?

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rglullis

joined 2 years ago