fediverse

Hello fellow fediverse feds, I'm 100% sure this has definitely been thought of before, but I'm apparently bad at googling the idea, so what's up with this?

There's obvious problems with the federation model:

• It's a moderation nightmare and standards are effectively that of the worst website Federated with
• It's a bandwidth catastrophe, last I heard Lemmy broadcasts every single vote to every Federated server??? At serious scale this is a genuine waste of resources with real carbon cost. I've read mitigations to this that seem to basically be going down the same route of Usenet or cryptocurrencies, such as having trusted servers/shards/whatever bundle transactions, which is a whole new mess
• No cross-server identity management (not an inherent problem though). Super important ™️ clout chasers can try to squat their names on the big sites, but nobody's stopping anyone from doing a "REAL Elon Musk crypto give away" on a new server with the name not taken yet.

So what if users just had an rss-like experience of subscribing to individual communities on any server they pick? Their signed identity could carry meta data to facilitate cross-server connections (DMs go to XXX, also member of X, Y, Z, etc), and servers would only have to worry about serving and moderating their own content. What's lost? Discoverability? That seems lower stakes to centralize than moderation and corporate control.

Obviously the technology already exists: we have centralized OAuth providers and a more decentralized regime could be built off asymmetric encryption, but the attempt to apply it here is where?

Welcome! Don’t let the ironic detachment fool you, this is one of the kindest and most well moderated places on the internet.

Be open to having your opinions challenged because if you’re from the anglosphere I promise you the propaganda and indoctrination run much deeper than you expect. No one challenging your views is doing so out of some desire to personally attack you. Feel free to report if that’s what it feels like because our mods are A1 best in the fediverse and they will attend to that shit. Most of us are just trying not to feel hopeless and powerless, especially those of us in the west. Sometimes that can manifest as vitriolic rhetoric but our mods are pretty good and catching and stamping that shit out.

We all believe that growth happens through struggle and we’ve all had to struggle a lot with each other and ourselves to arrive at the positions we carry. And do not mistake this for a hive mind because there’s actually a pretty wide range of beliefs here and we’re all the better for it.

And we all recognize that we are all fallible and so it’s ok to be wrong about things. We get stuff wrong all the time here. But often times the difference between correct and incorrect is not so much whether “X thing happened like this” vs “actually X thing happened like this” but “X thing happened like this” vs “I do not have the firsthand knowledge or resources to say how X thing happened or whether it’s happening at all”. This is especially true when it comes to current events. (Uyghur “genocide” being a great example of this)

Just keep an open mind and remember that the atomic unit of propaganda is NOT falsehood, it’s EMPHASIS.

And if that comment about Xinjiang is too spicy for you then DM me so I can set you up w/ my homie Mehmet. He’s no Authoritarian tankie totalitarian apologist and he can get you an incredible deal on some Iraqi WMD’s!

Oh and don’t clean the owl, we like them that way!

As you probably know, lemmy.world's admin recently put out a post addressing their decision to defederate from Hexbear before Hexbear had even federated to another instance. Their reasoning can be found here, and I wanted to break down and critique their reasoning.

Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

None of lemmy.world's rules would be broken by Hexbear's federation, no rule states against ideological instances federating. If lemmy.world was a strictly non-political instance, this would make sense, but lemmy.world promises to "Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all members; regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic. Human comes first."

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below: “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.” “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.” “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The first paragraph, in shitposty-leftist terms says: Keep the shitposting to Hexbear itself, when interacting with lemmy.world users, be polite and informed. The second paragraph is explaining that Hexbear is anti-NATO (not against lemmy.world's rules), anti-IMF (not against the rules), and anti-World Bank (not against the rules). It is a core part of leftist ideology to oppose these things, and calling it "concerning" is ridiculous. The final paragraph is again, explaining Hexbear's stance on the three imperialist organizations and calling for the dismantling of the organizations. This could be interpreted as concerning, but nowhere does it say "the violent takeover of the world" or "genocide" or whatever the people in the comments are saying about us ("Hexbear is a cesspool for genocidal lunatics").

Here are some examples: “I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.” “All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.” https://lemmy.world/comment/121850 https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168 https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084 https://lemmy.world/comment/171595 https://hexbear.net/comment/3648500 Overall community comments: https://hexbear.net/comment/3526128 https://hexbear.net/comment/3526086 https://hexbear.net/comment/3652828 To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529

These are comments from people arguing on the internet. Nothing special. Go look at the comments.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected. We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

WHAT IS IT THEN, LWADMIN? IS IT A LAST RESORT, OR A PREEMPTIVE STRIKE?

Ok, thats just my little rant, if I'm wrong, be sure to dox me and send me death threats and all'at.

Edit: Formatting issues

Original title: Calckey codeberg repository has been taken over by malicious actors.

Calckey, a federated microblogging platform much like Mastodon, recently rebranded itself as Firefish. They set up their old organization/repository to redirect to their new one. Unfortunately, due to a quirk in the way Codeberg works, this allowed some rando to take over the original repository.

Hello and welcome to the ultimate Fediverse admin guide with all needed knowledge to run your very own Fediverse instance.

An update:

• fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
• As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
• We have backups, so don't worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)

Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.

https://lemmy.ml/post/2286939

Lemmy discussion

I'm waiting for the GDR instance personally.

The feverish news regarding the launch of Threads the previous week has died down somewhat. The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server. Lemmy experiences a critical vulnerability. And some mixed messages regarding Tumblr adding ActivityPub support at some point in the future. Lets get into it! Microblogging

The major news of the week is that the Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server at social.overheid.nl. I wrote an article about the launch, and how it fits in a larger trend of the Dutch government thinking about open software, and Digital Common Goods, such as Mastodon.

Mastodon hits 2 million active users!
IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust and Safety, is working on providing guidance and service for servers to become compliant with the DSA.
@renchap, who works on Mastodon, confirms that currently nobody is working on major features at Mastodon due to a lack of personnel.
Mastodon had a critical security vulnerability, dubbed ‘tootroot’, that allowed attackers to hijack servers. A patch has since been released.
A collection of feature requests to help with moderation when Threads federates.
Tangerine UI is a new Mastodon web interface with just CSS.

Lemmy and Kbin

Lemmy and Kbin are fully settling into their own specific communities on the fediverse that is clearly distinct from the microblogging side.

Lemmy had a vulnerability that got actively exploited this week. The biggest instances such as lemmy.world got targeted and hacked. Here is the summary from the side of lemmy.world, and here the recap that focuses on the technical aspects of the vulnerability. Lemmy released an emergency patch the next day.
An update from the Kbin team regarding finances and future plans. The accompanying graph, that shows how the project jumped from 10k visits in May to 2.9m visits in June is spectacular.
One subject that has regularly come up with Lemmy is that of duplicated communities. For example, the lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and kbin.social servers all have a community called ‘fediverse’. In some cases, people deem this to be acceptable or even desirable. For the Android community on lemmy.world however, they preferred to merge with the community on the lemdro.id server.
If you’re interested in setting up your own Lemmy server, @reiver documented his experience step-by-step with the entire process.
Using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A blog that explains in detail how you can use the federation of Mastodon and Lemmy to your advantage by using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A showcase of both how powerful and cool this is, but also of how much clunky the process still can be.
New tools for Lemmy and Kbin keep appearing at a rapid speed:
    Kbin Enhancement Suite, a script manager for Kbin. Personal recommendation to check this one out, it has made my Kbin experience significantly better.
    Alexandrite is a new desktop-first Lemmy web app.
    Instance Assistant is a browser extension that replaces Lemmy links with links to your homeserver, making interacting easier.
    FediRedirect does something similar to Instance Assisant, and also handles Mastodon.

Fediverse

A new edition of FediForum will take place on September 20 and 21.
Communal Bonfires is a fascinating blog post about to design online community platforms. It ends with the announcement of Commune, a different way to structure Matrix chats, which will plug in to the fediverse as well. It is still slightly esoteric and meant for developers currently, but for people who are interested ways to think about the fediverse that goes beyond Twitter-like microblogging, this is highly recommended.
Discourse has implemented the first step of federation with their ActivityPub plugin, and is now working on the second phase.
ActivityPub federation of GitLab is underway.
A proposal for ActivityPub API service.
StreetPass is a browser extension that uses Mastodon’s verification system to show you the fediverse profile of someone when you visit their website. It is now available on Safari, after being released for Chrome and FireFox earlier.

Other networks

Things have settled down after a first intense week of the launch of Threads. Meta’s new platform skyrocketed to over a 100M users in a week. Now the first report of a pullback are starting to come in. This is a normal second half of what happens when people try out a new platform, not everyone sticks around, the fediverse has experienced this multiple times as well with the twittermigration and redditmigration. The Verge reports that ActivityPub integration for Threads is a ‘long while off’.

One question that is currently being debated on the feeds is whether Meta will pull through with adding federation to Threads. In that context, I wrote about this from the perspective of three new regulatory acts; the EU’s DMA and DSA, and Canada’s Online News Act. You can read that here. The conclusion is that from the perspective of compliance with the DMA, adding ActivityPub might make sense.

Bluesky experienced some major pushback from their community this week, after people found out that users could register the n-word as a user name. People on Bluesky have asking the Bluesky Team to implement a full Trust & Safety team for a while now, and Bluesky has struggled to provide safety for their Black community. The conversation and frustration from the community also focuses on the lack of apology, as well as a lack of communication from the team. The drama is indicative of a larger conflict of expectation: the Bluesky Team wants to build a protocol where online communities self-police, and the software should only provide tools to help with that. The current communities on Bluesky are significantly less interested in protocols, and want a place that resembles Twitter, but with better content moderation. This mismatch in expectations is not easy to overcome, even though Bluesky’s heart might be in the protocol, better communication and Trust and Safety would be helpful in reaching their goals, and providing safety to the community they have gathered.

An engineer from Meta has joined the ActivityPub working group in the W3C. TheNewStack provides a good summary of both the welcoming, unwelcoming and open reactions from people.
Trust Cafe is a new discussion platform by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Their FAQ mentions that they are open to federation with ActivityPub, and welcome volunteers who want to contribute with implementation.
A blog post about how blocking Threads might not be enough to protect your privacy, for people on Mastodon servers who do not want any of their posts to be accessible to Threads.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says that Tumblr is still working on ActivityPub integration, but that they have to do this with orders of magnitude less resources than Meta. Meanwhile, an unverified claim that the project to add ActivityPub got cancelled two days after starting last year. They say not to be working on Tumblr since May this year, and have no information on what currently is being worked on by Tumblr. One of the people at Tumblr working at projects states that the project is delayed, and that they are still considering it for their labs.

Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this weekly newsletter right in your inbox every week, subscribe below!

no hexbear yet :<

also this

https://lemmyverse.net/

https://github.com/WardPearce/Purplix.io

Purplix.io is a open source end-to-end encrypted survey system & warrant canary manger / viewer.

And hexbear.net is not even included!

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73 https://lemmy.world/post/1303827

FediRedirect is a browser extension that redirects you to your favorite instance.

It currently supports:

• Lemmy => Lemmy
• Mastodon => Mastodon
• Mastodon => Lemmy
• Lemmy => Mastodon

I don't really understand what any of this means, maybe someone can explain it for me, I'm a little nervous to keep browsing on lemmygrad if this can apparently be exploited thru comments and posts or something?

there's disagreement about what's happening several comments down so an explanation would be appreciated

Supposedly randomly redirecting to porn or gore sites, some racist vandalism even if you don’t get redirected, screenshot in the comments.

Edit: comments saying it might already be getting fixed, glad they got on top of it quickly.

Looks like the domain is now registered by a squatter. The administrator's accounts on liberapay and stripe are all gone too. Disappeared without so much as an announcement.

This article has its faults, but comes from the perspective of a socially progressive lib and does a decent job covering the subject matter.

The news is dominated this week by Meta’s launch of Threads, a new microblogging competitor to Twitter that is quickly catapulting itself towards 100 million users. There is a ton of news about this, with just as many hot takes, opinions and feelings. So for this week’s episode I’m going to limit the focus on Threads to a few aspects. I’m working on another article about this that zooms in on the legal and policy aspects of Threads, such as around the DMA. ...

tankie misinformation :<