boramalper

joined 2 years ago
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decentralization
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German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The article is a year old, fyi.

Take Exit 50: Your Off-Ramp from Big Tech to European & Open Source Roads. in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

That's a good question: I don't mean that 100% of their stack should be FOSS but

  1. Most of their "code", or their core offering, should be FOSS. For instance, Codeberg is powered by free software (Forgejo), in addition to being hosted in Europe.
  2. More importantly and inclusive of the first point, they should adhere to FOSS ethos: users should be able to export their data easily in a standard format, federate with other instances running compatible software, and so on. For instance, Bluesky is free software implementation of free AT Protocol, but Bluesky is also the only provider (instance) of that service. There is an effort named "Free Our Feeds" who is looking to raise 4 million dollars to setup a second instance while Mastodon has 200+ instances alone listed on its website. :)
Is it a PTB move to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Absolutely, and it's already pretty hard to bootstrap a community organically† to so you should not hesitate to do what's necessary to keep it healthy as small communities cannot moderate themselves easily.

† From How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts:

Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it. In the above video for Udacity, an online source for education and lectures, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.

Is it a PTB move to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:

  1. Hacker News users cannot downvote anything until their karma is > 500 and even then only comments (not submissions) [source].
  2. Some large Reddit communities such as r/politics hide downvote buttons altogether or for non-subscribed users. They even ran a study back in 2018: Does Hiding Downvotes Improve Behavior in r/politics?

    Community cultures vary widely, but in the case of r/politics, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected.

I'm not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it's okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.

Take Exit 50: Your Off-Ramp from Big Tech to European & Open Source Roads. in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

In my opinion replacing US Big Tech with European alternatives is bullshit unless they are also free software. Many European alternatives who started in Europe later moved to the US when they got big for better access to capital etc. It's like moving from Twitter/X to Bluesky only to see its enshittification 10 years down the line.

Is it a PTB move to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Ban them.

Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.

3
Atproto Ethos (atproto.com)
 

This post is a blogpost version of a recent talk that Daniel Holmgren gave at AtmosphereConf (March 2025).

AT Protocol (or atproto) is a protocol for creating decentralized social applications.

It's not the first protocol with that aim to exist. In the history of decentralized social media protocols, atproto takes a unique approach which is still deeply influenced by technologies and movements that came before it.

The phrase “atproto ethos” often comes up during our protocol design discussions. It's a fuzzy term, but we use it to refer to the philosophical and aesthetic principles that underlie the design of the network.

In this post, we'll distill that ethos. First, we look at the movements in technology that have most directly influenced atproto.Then, we pull out the core innovations that atproto brought to the table. Finally, we highlight some opinionated ways of thinking that influenced the design.

Great ATProto blog post on the reasoning behind their design architecture in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

By “Fediverse” people usually refer to “ActivityPub”-based social networks such as Mastodon and Lemmy.

People also rightfully argue that Bluesky, despite the best of intentions, is not decentralised. See How decentralized is Bluesky really? (long read).

5
ActivityPub v5.6.0 for WordPress (wordpress.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink
 
  • Added a Mastodon importer to move your Mastodon posts to your WordPress site.
  • User setting to enable/disable Likes and Reblogs
  • + a ton of fixes
36
Organic Maps migrated from GitHub to their Forgejo instance (lemmy.world)
 

Mar 13, 2025

We have a temporary glitch with GitHub—probably some contributor was geolocated in a sanctioned region (no details yet). All required documents to unlock the account have been uploaded. Don't blame Microsoft/GitHub - it is just U.S. law. Please be patient. It should be unblocked soon.

GitHub read-only

Mar 27, 2025

GitHub has gone - long live Forgejo (@forgejo).

Fully migrated out of Microsoft’s walled garden after they blocked us:

  • 54k commits
  • 9.5k issues
  • 4.3k pull requests
  • 100k comments

Everything moved. Nothing left behind.

https://git.omaps.dev/organicmaps/organicmaps

Cons of decentralization in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

See Reflections: The ecosystem is moving (2016) by Moxie Marlinspike the founder of Signal (privacy oriented secure messaging app).

The gist of it is that decentralised systems are more difficult to evolve by their very nature, therefore we need centralised but public† services to keep up with the pace of centralised and private ones. Another emphasis is on the word "services" as software alone is often not sufficient without some server component, centralised (e.g. Signal) or federated (e.g. Lemmy).

† Public as in the commons: owned and controlled by non-profits for the benefit of public.

13
PeerTube v7.1 is out! (joinpeertube.org)
*Permanently Deleted* in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Why?

*Permanently Deleted* in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is BitTorrent which I'm sure you're aware of, and then there is also WebTorrent which you may not.

I'm also actively working on this exact problem with WebMirror with the key difference being that it works in browsers without requiring any additional software. Here is its demo: https://webmirror-demo.netlify.app/

John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

How is Brave right wing? Because of cryptocurrencies?

180
It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds (berthub.eu)
1
Funky & Progressive House Mix in a New York Loft | Jojo Lorenzo (www.youtube.com)
1
Groovy Disco and R&B Mix at a New York Mansion Party | Tinzo (www.youtube.com)
10
Ask Lemmy: Which websites (or content) we can mirror? (lemmy.world)
 

I'm working on a project called WebMirror that allows visitors to access websites in a decentralised fashion by fetching their content from mirrors (like BitTorrent but) just using a browser (without having to install any additional software including browser extensions).

I've a technology demo for it already (https://webmirror-demo.netlify.app/) but it's mostly interesting from a technical standpoint. I'm trying to find a kind of website and/or content on the Web that would benefit from being mirrored. For example, OpenFreeMap is a great example of that (free map tiles for everyone), but it's just that the dataset is much bigger than my project could support (28.33 million files).

―Bora

Ghost blog adding activitypub in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Perfect thank you!

38
The people should own the town square (blog.joinmastodon.org)
184
Facebook started blocking links to Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative using ActivityPub (bsky.app)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink
 

More discussion on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113819523685288481

21
How decentralized is Bluesky really? (dustycloud.org)
 

Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.

[...] I mostly believed that anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively, and so I figured it was best to reserve comment to myself and those close to me. But recently I have received some direct encouragement from a core Bluesky developer that they have found my writings insightful and useful and would be happy to see me write on the subject. So here are my thoughts.

[...] Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either. However, this is not to say that Bluesky is not achieving something useful; while Bluesky is not building what is presently a decentralized Twitter, it is building an excellent replacement for Twitter, and Bluesky's main deliverable goal is something else instead: a Twitter replacement, with the possibility of "credible exit".

Also see, part 2: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

12
Google Play Store removing peer-to-peer app ‘Share’ functionality (9to5google.com)
 

The changelog released today for Play Store 44.1 says this “Share apps feature on Google Play will be retiring.”

At the time, Google billed this feature as a way to send and receive Android apps without Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity. Peer-to-peer sharing can also conserve data and is ideal for places with slow networks

You can still use Files by Google to share Android applications in a similar manner. Under Categories, go to “Apps” and then the overflow menu for what you want to “Share.”

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