deadsuperhero

joined 2 years ago
[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago (5 children)

You know, you're not the first person to say that about something I wrote. Neither of us use general AI, and I make a point to avoid all of those tools to do things "the old fashioned way".

It could be due to me being neurodivergent, or it could be that a certain kind of writing got slurped up by AI and that's the default style now. I don't know.

I work hard on everything I write.

 

This is a follow-up to Tim Chambers' "The Seven Deadly UX Sins", in which we collaboratively review where and how the network has improved over the past six months, with a lot of different initiatives to show for it!

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So, I used messaging here in the broad sense. One possible application for it is instant messaging, which there are ActivityPub implementations out there doing that. But it can also be used for statuses or pretty much anything else that gets federated.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

It's not, the demo video actually shows that being one such use case. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing a chat service in ActivityPub. But this can also apply to statuses, media, all kinds of other stuff.

 

Important progress has been made regarding bringing MLS end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, with developers already building implementations and providing feedback to a future version of the protocol spec.

 

I wrote a little bit of what forms of advocacy on the Fediverse have historically looked like, and contrasted with a few interesting case studies that are trying to move the needle on network growth.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 24 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It's slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable...meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.

It's just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To be clear: that's for the entire application. The ActivityPub part is here: https://github.com/TryGhost/ActivityPub

There's still development, but a lot of it is writing test units, updating dependencies, and optimizations. Still good stuff, but all we can really see is side-effects of their development plans, not really much of a roadmap itself.

 

Look, I think Ghost is a really great publishing platform. But after dogfooding their Fediverse integration for six months, I'm realizing there's still a lot missing. With their blog dormant, I'm left to wonder: is development still happening?

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Silverpill might not like me making this comparison, but its form and function are shockingly similar to OnlyFans.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

OpenCollective is a pretty solid open source contender in my experience. It's not perfect, but it's definitely workable.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

PeerTube's support button is, at best, a lightbox that holds a text string. It's fine for highlighting links, but you still kind of have to dance around with having an account in another system to make the payment.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Yeah, the YouTube algorithm itself is a huge problem. I think about the fact that there are entire slop studios out there trying to ride algorithm trends, churning out crap to push onto YouTube Kids so that they'll do numbers and make a lot of money from it.

Like, I have nothing against the concept of a recommendation algorithm itself, but the relationship I just described is nightmare fuel.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah, Wafrn uses both protocols, and basically runs its own PDS and AppView.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Remote profiles appear to show up, it might be possible to also remotely pull in posts. I didn't see Subscribe functionality in Lemmy, but maybe PieFed or MBin support that.

 

For those seeking out a federated and open alternative to Tumblr, Wafrn is looking extremely promising. It can speak both ActivityPub and AT Protocol, offers a ton of interesting features and customization, and focuses on making an incredibly fun experience.

 

This was a really great interview we had with the team from A New Social. We talked about bridging, being able to migrate data across different protocols, some of the team's latest ongoing efforts, and a long rant about where the network is, and where we hope it will go.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly, it's a tough choice. Hubzilla can theoretically do everything you want, but there's a steep learning curve.

One thing that might help is to narrow down what kind of features you want. What I'm seeing so far from your description is:

  • Blog / HTML hosting site
  • space for webgames and assets
  • code?
  • Something like Facebook?

Friendica and Hubzilla] (and everything derived from them) are theoretically right up your alley, but each interface is kind of janky and introduces a learning curve of some kind. Misskey is extremely good, and often feels like the most polished option for long-form stuff. You're kind of limited on clients, though, as most mobile apps use the Mastodon API. Some Misskey forks add support for it, though.

I know you said you didn't like WordPress, and I get it. However, the actual ActivityPub integration is really really good, and continues to improve. If you self-host WordPress, there's hypothetically enough extensibility there to build everything you want. However, WordPress as a platform can be extremely janky. We tried doing it for We Distribute, and there's a bunch of stuff under the hood that doesn't quite work right with Fediverse integration. Then again, we've been doing a lot of experimental stuff over the years, so it might be different with a fresh install.

 

The Social Web Foundation has been experimenting with the lesser-known other half of the ActivityPub protocol. Here's what they're up to.

 

We Distribute recently launched a dedicated weekly newsletter that aims at rounding up a lot of things happening around the Fediverse and wider Social Web, and adds other publications and community voices to amplify them. This is our very first issue!

 

This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people's fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.

 

Building on some initial reports coming from the FediPact account and Dropsite news, we dive into potential measures admins can take for their instances.

 

There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for the open source federated alternative to Tiktok and Vine, including a Web UI and a boatload of new features. Let's dive in, and see what's coming in the next release.

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