Long Covid - stuff that helps
I sincerely hope that you aren't building Letterbook to only interact with itself and Mastodon.
Sooner or later, Letterbook will encounter content coming in from instances of software created by Mike Macgirvin , namely , (these two are actually older than Mastodon), or . For reference: I am on Hubzilla.
You/it will have to expect and be able to deal with the following:
Some of the above may also come in from elsewhere, e.g. a wider range of text formatting than Mastodon allows itself to render is fully supported by just about everything that isn't Mastodon.
Also, ActivityPub is currently evolving. New FEPs are being put to use and bringing in new features far away from how Mastodon is working. In particular, (streams) and Forte and 's use decentralised identifiers as per . Forte has fully implemented via ActivityPub while (streams) at least supports it. And all three have implemented, silverpill wants to make them , and Hubzilla is planning to implement them with version 10.
This means three things. One, weird identifiers. Two, weird actor identities: What looks like one user automatically cross-posting to another account on another instance to non-nomadic ActivityPub implementations is actually the very same actor residing simultaneously on multiple server instances. Three, again, conversations work drastically different from Twitter and Mastodon.
Lastly, it may be a good idea to implement a little server type display from the get-go so that the user knows what kind of Fediverse instance something comes from. Misskey and its forks have it, Friendica has it, (streams) has it, Forte has it. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea not to have it. Besides, if content from certain server applications malfunctions on Letterbook, users can pinpoint right away what server application causes that trouble when submitting a bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #ConversationContainers #FEPef61 #NomadicIdentity
Nomadic identity is older than Mastodon. By some four years.
Mastodon is from 2016. Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 and first implemented on Red in 2012. First implementation in a stable release was in 2013 when the Red Matrix got stable. Oh, and Hubzilla itself is from 2015 it pre-dates Mastodon by ten months AFAIR.
It's fair to mention that has had since before the Twitter Migration and before Bluesky was launched.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NomadicIdentity
One click of a button, maybe a bit of configuration first, and within a split-second, your flat and barren land turns into a meticulously AI-crafted sim. No matter how big your land may be, even if it's a 16x16 varsim (that's 256 standard regions for you Second Life users for those of you who don't know either, that's a square of 4x4 km or 2.5x2.5 miles) which is not the biggest you can have, but the biggest you should have. The land is neatly, sensibly and precisely organised in parcels.
Of course, it isn't just one non-functional textured blob of mesh that's nice to behold. It's actually built like a typical sim in OpenSim, namely out of single assets with neatly terraformed land underneath. The vast majority of these assets were created on-the-fly specifically for this sim.
All objects have perfectly optimised meshes with LODs and support for both BulletSim and ubODE physics, regardless of what physics you have on the sim. All of them have super-realistic PBR textures at whatever resolution makes the most sense with Blinn-Phong fallbacks that look as close to the PBR textures as Blinn-Phong can possibly look to PBR. Optionally, the non-PBR textures don't even feature Blinn-Phong normal and specular maps instead, they have highlights, shadows, reflections etc. baked on for people on toasters with on-board graphics.
The quality of everything is beyond anything you can buy in Second Life nowadays, it's also beyond any free or commercial content available in OpenSim, and still, it lacks any AI-typical quirks.
All doors have the same lightweight script that still provides realistic motion, including individual opening and closing sounds for each kind of door. The same goes even for windows, curtains and blinds where it makes sense. Certain doors can even be configured to limit access.
Also, everything that's made to sit or lie on is scripted. You can even choose the script: either by default an improved version of SFposer that makes it possible to save individual positions and orientations or, if you prefer that because you're more familiar with it, AVsitter with a bunch of plug-ins. Likewise, lots of other objects are scripted to be interactive if it makes sense.
Many things that would be light sources in real life are light sources in-world. They're mostly point light sources, but a very few ones are projectors. They all emit realistic tones of light and not white #FFFFFF. Some light sources may be controlled by scripts to turn on and off depending on the position of the Sun. Others may be timer-controlled. In residential buildings, lights can be switched between off, on and a configurable timer with individual default values. All light control scripts also change full-bright and glowing settings or even replace entire textures if necessary. Still, they're all very lightweight.
The AI also takes care of EEP. At the very least, it generates a custom EEP daycycle for the sim with realistic Sun and Moon movements, depending on where the sim is supposed to be located. But it can also define a whole number of daycycles and add a script that switches between them monthly, weekly or even daily. If you want to, even the weather can change. Sunny, cloudy, overcast, you can optionally even have rain or snow all over the whole sim.
Speaking of which, if the EEP daycycles change over the year, so do the objects on the sim. Most objects outside have at least one snowy version. Snowdrifts and piles of snow pop up in winter. While we're at it, plants change over the year. Flowers start and stop blooming, trees gradually change the colours of their leaves in autumn and shed them in late autumn, not to have any leaves on them until well into spring. That is, of course, everything depending on where you want your sim to be located.
The sim in general and certain parcels individually can be configured to rez and de-rez decoration for certain holidays at certain times in the year. Holidays from all over the world are supported. This can go all the way to a whole German-style Christmas market rezzing in a certain area and de-rezzing after Christmas.
You want public transit Buses Streetcars Trains Ferries No problem: The AI crafts the vehicles, it builds the tracks if necessary, it defines the keyframes for vehicle motion, and it puts custom scripts into the vehicles that control not only vehicle motion, but also doors, sounds, even lights and rezzing and de-rezzing personnel if necessary.
Speaking of which, the AI can bring the sim to life with animesh and, where they work better, NPCs. The latter can even be interactive. Of course, there can be scripted sources of various ambient noises all over the place to make it more immersive.
If you want your sim listed on OpenSimWorld, the AI can do that for you. It can install one of the current official beacons, an older-style beacon running up-to-date code or a completely custom beacon running up-to-date code. In this case, it also assumes control over your OpenSimWorld account, or it creates one if you don't have one, it generates the entry on the website, it configures it correctly and even writes a description. It either matches the rating in the listing with that on your sim, or it figures out which rating the sim should have and adjusts it both in-world an in the listing.
By the way: AI means "Artificial Intelligence". If you don't want child avatars on your sim, the AI will put up signs that say that child avatars are not allowed or even install an improved, optimised childgate script. But it will not rate your sim Adult just to keep kids out even though the sim itself would work perfectly well with a Moderate or even General rating.
Things really get interesting if you want the AI to build a freebie sim for you. A fully stocked one, of course, no matter if you want some small boutiques on a town sim or a sim that's nothing else than a huge mall.
For starters, there'll be avatar stuff. The AI can stock your body shop with
Most items are probably clothes. The AI can whip up more boxes of these than even Grimm offers. The clothes are rigged for whichever bodies you have in your body shop. And they're rigged so perfectly for all of them that nobody will ever need alphas for these clothes in combination with the bodies from this sim. The same clothes come in several variants for example, certain female clothes in particular are rigged skin-tight, with enough room for mesh underwear, with enough room for mesh bodysuits and even with enough room for mesh hosiery. Styles can range from practical to retro to historical to futuristic to cosplay to badass to formal to partywear to bridalwear to chic to bling-bling to sexy to racy to fetishwear and outright NSFW, depending on what avatars they're for, and they're all optional.
Of course, all clothes, footwear, jewellery, accessories etc. support PBR with a fallback that you can choose, either Blinn-Phong or everything baked on.
The original, AI-generated decoration on the sim, the buildings, the streets and paths, the plants etc. and the scripts can optionally be boxed up and offered in stores itself. If you want to, the AI can generate even more similar content to fill up the stores some more.
The wholly original content in the stores can be offered
The AI puts all original content under a license of your choice, even helping you choose. Copyright/all rights reserved is an option as well as the public domain. Notecards with license texts and, if applicable, links to the original license definitions are added to all assets.
It optionally adds all original content to your inventory, neatly organised into folders. You can choose to get
The AI can also download all the loose components to your computer if you choose so, all the way to raw development files (meshes as Blender files, textures as Photoshop and GIMP files etc.).
And it can even generate git repositories and upload all loose components to these if the license allows, and if you have a git account somewhere, and be it on your own machine.
The AI can do all this within the blink of an eye. All that takes time are the downloads to your computer, the uploads to your computer and/or a git server and, of course, the sim rezzing around you.
By the way, there used to be a time when building your own sim and even crafting your own stuff was part of the fun. Nowadays, not only does using the same mostly ripped buildings as everyone else beat making your own ones, but downloading OARs and leaving them largely unmodified save for the OSW beacon beats building your own sim. And ready-made mesh skyboxes stolen from Second Life beat decorating sims.
New GPU technology creates dynamic 3D worlds
In cooperation with AMD, the Coburg University of Applied Sciences has developed a GPU technology that generates complex virtual scenes in milliseconds.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #QuotePost #QuoteTweet #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #SimBuilding #AI Let's see. Literally.
That's a short version, by the way.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription It didn't end up quite that bad.
Mike has officially retired from Fediverse development. However, he does carry on, also because nobody else does. Much more slowly than until his "retirement", but he does.
He still occasionally works on both the streams repository and Forte. They even get new features.
I think the reason for his retirement announcement could be due to the utterly stressful situation in summer. He had switched the release branch of the streams repository, the code that actually runs on most instances, to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. But what must have worked well under limited lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions to the point of next to nothing federating anymore.
Essentially, he had planted rather experimental code into something which people considered a stable daily driver and used as a stable daily driver. After all, on New Year's Eve 2022, (streams) had superseded and replaced not only four experimental projects (the third Osada, Misty, Redmatrix 2020, Roadhouse), but also Zap which had been declared stable in 2019.
Anyway, Mike had to rush and try to fix people's daily drivers. He didn't even know right off the bat what was wrong, so a whole lot of his spare time must have flown into trying to find the issue. And then he had to find a way to fix it. AFAIK, the issue, by the way, was that (streams) had to deal with so many IDs for the same content that it got them mixed up after DIDs were put on top.
In mid-August, some two weeks before his retirement announcement, he forked Forte from the streams repository and reduced it to only ActivityPub by removing any and all support for both Nomad and Zot6. There could have been three reasons behind this.
One, Mike had realised that he needed to make an experimental code repository to play with instead of playing with people's daily driver, just like he had done in the past.
The reason why he handed Friendica over to the community in 2012, which he had announced in late 2011 already, was so that he could concentrate on nomadic identity, the Zot protocol and Red, later the Red Matrix instead of experimenting with highly volatile new technology on Friendica and, at the same time, maintaining it for its users.
The reason why he handed Hubzilla over to the community in 2018 was so that he could concentrate on Zot6, Osada and Zap instead of experimenting with experimenting with highly volatile new technology on Hubzilla and, at the same time, maintaining it for its users.
What Mike was working on this summer was the implementation of nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. FEP-ef61 and the decentralised IDs were one step towards it. So one reason could be because he realised that putting new technology into people's daily drivers, especially at the very real risk of it turning out to be highly volatile, was not so smart after all. Forte would be his new development sandbox.
Two, in order to efficiently work on the implementation of decentralised IDs and eventually nomadic identity via ActivityPub, he needed stuff out of the way. Namely Zot and Nomad. One of the reasons why Zap only supported Zot for a while: It was easier to tinker with Zot6 without ActivityPub, the diaspora* protocol etc. in the way.
And three, he must have understood why (streams) had blown up, namely the clashing IDs. So he had to rip Nomad and Zot6 out of (streams) to get rid of their specific IDs and clear stuff up a whole lot.
However, after forking Forte, he had two software repositories to tend to, the still half-broken daily driver in the streams repository and the highly experimental Forte. This became too much, so he decided to step down at the end of the month. He wanted the community to take over.
As it turned out, he didn't want to stop entirely. That would have meant that Forte was stillborn, what with there not even being a single known instance of it. As I've said, Mike is carrying on.
But he wanted the community to join in and at least take over maintenance work for (streams) and, as far as that'd be possible at any given time, also Forte. After all, Forte still is a (streams) soft fork that pretty much only differs in branding (which (streams) doesn't have), nodeinfo code (which (streams) doesn't have) and support for other protocols (which was removed from Forte). So anything done on (streams) could just as well do on Forte.
Now, here was the problem: Friendica had thousands of users when Mike passed it on. Hubzilla had thousands of users when Mike passed it on. (streams) only had two dozen active users on October 31st, 2024, probably even fewer. Not a single one of them was a capable coder with both the skills and the spare time.
Mike had been actively advertising (streams) in the Fediverse since 2023. This was in stark contrast to Friendica and Hubzilla which lived on "if you build it, they will come". Still, hardly anyone came. And the few who came either came from Hubzilla, or they came from one of the projects between Hubzilla and (streams) by upgrading their private instance to (streams). To my best knowledge, there was not a single immigrant from Mastodon, not even from Friendica.
That wasn't because, at the end of the day, only Hubzilla users knew about (streams). Again, Mike did advertise it, and Mastodon users noticed it and reacted upon it.
Rather, on Hubzilla's side, it was because Hubzilla users didn't see any advantage in (streams). All they knew about (streams) was that it was allegedly Hubzilla with stuff cut away. So why switch to something that can do less than Hubzilla That's also because nobody ever did a (streams) test drive and wrote about it.
Generally, it was because of some of Mike's decisions for (streams). When he forked Roadhouse into (streams), he took away the name and the branding. This was intentional in order to spite the brand fetishists. Same reason why he still had five other projects cooking, three of them with identical code. However, how do you get people interested in using something that doesn't even have a name
Also, he removed most nodeinfo code, and he did what it took to keep (streams) away from instance lists such as on FediDB and Fediverse Observer. Along with the lack of branding, it's impossible to use crawlers to find (streams) instances.
In combination, however, this made it practically impossible to find a public (streams) instance to join and test (streams). Still today, the only places where (streams) instances are listed are, wait for it, now it comes, (streams) instances. You have to know one to find more.
Still today, the vast majority of (streams) users are Hubzilla veterans on their own instances which they've set up without even testing (streams) on someone else's instances first. The Brazilian public and open-registration instance Diversi Spiritus doesn't have a single active non-admin user. Even the US-based juggernaut that's Rumbly doesn't seem to have a single active user who doesn't administrate a (streams) instance. I think there are not even five (streams) users who aren't instance admins. (streams) is that hard to find.
This also makes it difficult to find new potential developers: You can't use Mastodon and immediately start coding away on (streams). You have to understand (streams) first. It's the polar opposite of Mastodon, so-to-speak. This means that you have to use it as a daily driver for at least a few months until you've gotten used to it, really grokked it and stopped wishing it's more like Twitter and Mastodon.
But it's hard to get new people on board with only one instance to send them to, potential issues still lurking around the corner and only Mike being able to fix them.
Whether (streams) will survive depends on whether it'll find new maintainers when Mike abandons it. Chances are that once Forte is ready for prime time, Mike will abandon (streams). But who's left on it probably won't want to part with it. Still having the Nomad protocol and the ability to turn ActivityPub off, mostly considered an anti-Mastodon measure, will probably still be seen as a killer feature after Mike's recent introduction of an instance-wide filter that can be configured to lock out entire Fediverse projects. After all, the user-agent filter currently only works on an instance level and not on a channel level.
Mike will definitely go on developing at least Forte. Forte is his vision of the Fediverse in 2030, and it's clear to see how disgruntled he is about Mastodon if you follow his posts. Since (streams) is still a Forte soft fork, he'll continue also adding to (streams) what he adds to Forte for the time being.
Currently, Forte has only got one actor on one instance connected to the Fediverse. That's Mike himself on his private instance which he has switched from (streams) to Forte. And three days ago was the very first time a message went out from Forte into the Fediverse. That is, probably the Fediverse minus Mastodon and Threads because I guess Mike's private instance has both Mastodon and Threads blacklisted in the user agent filter. But still, it's another baby step.
Also, Forte is more likely to succeed than (streams). Unlike (streams), Forte is a project, it has a name, it has a branding (which still isn't hard-coded, by the way, AFAIK), and it has nodeinfo. Mike has come to realise that, much to his chagrin, all this is needed for Fediverse software to succeed in what he considers a Mastodon-driven Fediverse. Seriously, it's necessary because an Fediverse server application cannot succeed if there's no way to crawl and list and find its public instances because the maintainer actively, intentionally prevents any of this from happening.
Forte may pretty well become a success. It all depends on who'll be the early adopters, especially the first Fedizens to run public instances of Forte without having seen it first.
Friendica's early adopters came either from Facebook or out of nowhere. Maybe a few came from StatusNet. But they were willing to try something entirely new and revolutionary since it promised to blow everything else there was out of the water. Which it did.
Hubzilla's early adopters came from Friendica. They had ignored the Red Matrix which was not much more than Friendica with nomadic identity, and nomadic identity was deemed useless if you were on your own private instance anyway. Friendica had loads of self-hosters. But Hubzilla with its plethora of CMS and groupware features was more interesting.
I don't know where Forte's early adopters could possibly come from. Only few Hubzilla users have been willing to give (streams) a try, what with all the features they have to give up. If they were to try Forte, they'd have to give up even more, namely protocols that are nomadic by basic design and the per-channel ActivityPub killswitch.
Friendica users would at least have to get used to some differences in handling, nomadic identity, the concept of channels and "channels" meaning something else on Forte than on Friendica. Besides, Friendica is the Island of the Sirens in the Fediverse that you never want to leave again.
Now, Mastodon users would have the best reasons to try Forte. Lots of features that Mastodon users want, but that the Mastodon devs refuse to add, are available on Forte. But let's face it, going from Mastodon to Friendica is a much bigger change than going from to Mastodon. Going from Mastodon to Forte would be an even bigger change. Unexpectedly so for those who expect everything in the Fediverse to be Mastodon with more characters and extra stuff glued on. Mastodon users who set up a Forte instance may give it up within days or weeks because it isn't the dolled-up Mastodon they expected.
Unfortunately, the most likely source of early adopters willling to even run a public Forte instance is the (streams) community at the risk of bleeding out further, especially if Forte should reach a point at which it's more reliable than (streams).
When Forte is ready for prime-time, the vicious circle of no users, no public instances and no public instances, no users will have to be broken. Unfortunately, (streams) itself is on the edge of this vicious circle.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #Forte
Klar, du gehrst ja auch nicht zu ihrer Zielgruppe. Du machst in deren Augen ja auch nichts falsch. Du kannst ja auch nichts falsch machen auf einer Mastodon-Instanz mit maximal 500 Zeichen.
Da es keiner kann, heit nicht, da es keiner versucht. Und versucht wird es durchaus.
Wie gesagt, du auf Standard-Vanilla-Mastodon strst da niemanden. Das kannst du gar nicht. Du hast nur die 500 Zeichen, die im Fediverse als Standard durchgedrckt werden sollen. Du hast keine Textformatierung, du kannst nicht zitieren, du kannst nicht quote-posten und so weiter. Du hast gar nicht die Mglichkeiten, das zu tun, was diese Leute verbieten wollen.
Aber frag mal jemanden, der auf Friendica ist. Oder auf Hubzilla (Fork (eins Forks) von Friendica von Friendicas eigenem Erfinder). Oder auf (streams) (Fork eines Forks dreier Forks eines Forks (eines Forks) von Hubzilla, wieder vom selben Schpfer). Oder auf Forte (Fork von (streams), wieder vom selben Schpfer, der erst seit gut zwei Monaten existiert und erst vorgestern seinen ersten Schritt ins Fediverse getan hat).
Da gibt's im Grunde kein Zeichenlimit. Dafr aber Textformatierung locker auf bestem Blog-Niveau. Ebenso Zitate und Quote-Posts. Und noch so einiges mehr. Und das strt da niemanden. Das ist da ganz normal.
Aber auf Mastodon, da stren sich einige dran. An all dem. Und dann werden die "Eindringlinge in Mastodons Fediverse" aufgefordert, das wieder einzustellen, und zwar mitunter ziemlich unfreundlich. Ich sollte es wissen, ich bin selbst auf Hubzilla.
Nur: Das ist nicht Mastodons Fediverse. War es nie. Und das sind auch keine Eindringlinge. Hubzilla ist zehn Monate lnger im Fediverse als Mastodon. Friendica ist fnfeinhalb Jahre lnger im Fediverse als Mastodon. Und als Mastodon startete, hat es sich sofort mit beiden und mit StatusNet verbunden. Zu dem Zeitpunkt hatten beide lngst eine eigene lebende und funktionierende Kultur.
Und heute, mehr als 14 Jahre, nachdem Friendica gestartet wurde, verlangen Mastodon-Nutzer von Friendica-Nutzern, die selbst schon seit vor dem Mastodon-Start dabei sind, ihre "langen Posts" (= alles ber 500 Zeichen) in Schnipsel von nicht mehr als 500 Zeichen aufzuteilen. Und wehe, die "Posts" nach dem ersten sind nicht auf "Unlisted" geschaltet. Friendica hat gar kein "Unlisted". Und so weiter.
Die fhren sich fast auf wie europische Kolonisten, die versuchen, Ureinwohner auf europische Kultur und das Christentum umzuerziehen, allerdings mit dem Unterschied, da die Kolonisten damals nicht geglaubt haben, die Ureinwohner seien nach ihnen gelandet.
Falls du immer noch glaubst, das seien alles Hirngespinste, hier noch ein paar Dinge:
Zunchst einmal sieh dir mal an, wie , der selbst auf Firefish ist, und seine Kontakte von Pleroma bis Friendica ber Mastodon schreiben. Das ist nicht unbedingt sehr schmeichelhaft. Warum wohl
Hubzilla basiert ja nicht auf ActivityPub, sondern auf Zot. Und selbst wenn nomadische Identitt ber ActivityPub stabil und zuverlssig nutzbar wird, wird Hubzilla am Zot-Protokoll festhalten. Der Grund ist ganz einfach der, da ActivityPub dann weiterhin optional, also auch kanalweise abgeschaltet bleiben kann. Oder zur Not auch auf einem ganzen Hub durch den Admin abgeschaltet werden kann.
Als Hubzilla-Nutzer kann man sich schon durch das Berechtigungssystem Strenfriede gut vom Hals schaffen. Aber Hubzilla will sich weiterhin die Option offenhalten, alles, was auf ActivityPub basiert, mit einem Schalter defderieren zu knnen.
Wenn (streams) weiter bestehen bleibt, drfte genau das der Grund sein. (streams) basiert auf Nomad, und ActivityPub ist auf neuen Kanlen standardmig aktiv, kann aber abgeschaltet werden, obwohl sich Nomad sehr gut mit ActivityPub vertrgt. Grund siehe oben.
(streams) und sein neuer, rein ActivityPub-basierter Fork Forte haben krzlich ein neues Feature bekommen namens "Uafilter", kurz fr "User Agent Filter". Das ist eigentlich fr Forte entwickelt worden, wo ActivityPub nicht mehr abzuschalten geht, weil das das einzige Protokoll ist, das Forte noch spricht. Diese Filterfunktion lscht nicht etwa wie Mastodon-Filter, sondern wie alle anderen Filter in diesem Teil des Fediverse sperrt sie. Sie ist in der Lage, ganze Fediverse-Projekte auszusperren. Sie ist tatschlich auch explizit dafr entwickelt worden, nicht nur Threads, sondern auch Mastodon als Ganzes instanzweit auszusperren. Und ich wage zu behaupten, das hat nicht nur damit zu tun, da Mastodon-Instanzen absurd viele absurd hufige und absurd umfangreiche Anfragen an andere Server stellen und diese damit regelrecht DDoSen.
Sollte dich das immer noch nicht berzeugen: Ich kenne ein ffentliches Forum auf (streams), wo ActivityPub absichtlich abgeschaltet wurde, um Mastodon auszusperren. Da damit auch alles andere auer (streams) selbst und Hubzilla drauen bleiben mu, ist ein in Kauf genommener Kollateralschaden.
Das sollte wohl Zeichen genug dafr sein, da das alles keine Hirngespinste sind.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonKultur #FediverseKultur #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) This could get the more interesting, the farther something is away from Mastodon.
Even if it can cope with Hubzilla which remains to be seen, I expect it to run into trouble when it has to deal with (streams). That's for two reasons:
One, (streams) is actually intentionally nameless and brandless and has next to no nodeinfo code, in case you need it. This also means that it doesn't have a unified instance identifier. Mastodon always identifies as "mastodon", as does Glitch. Pixelfed always identifies as "pixelfed". Lemmy always identifies as "lemmy". And so forth.
(streams) does not always identify as "streams" or "(streams)". (streams) instances may identify as whatever their admins want them to identify. The most important public instance identifies as "get ready to rumbly". Others have identified or still identify as "diversi spiritus" or "theshire" or "mordor" or "gondor" or "nomd". The creator and maintainer himself is on an instance branded "y" (because Y is not X). And so forth.
It's a free-text string that could be anything, including other Fediverse projects. In fact, this has actually happened in the past: (streams) instances can be upgraded from instances of Zap, the third Osada, Misty (a.k.a. Mistpark 2020), Redmatrix 2020 and Roadhouse (all five defunct as of New Year's Eve, 2022), and when this was done, the instances kept their old branding.
Good luck identifying (streams) instances and telling them from instances of everything else by the usual means.
Two, (streams) is one of the first two Fediverse server applications that have introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. Addresses may have "/.well-known/apgateway/did:key:(48 random letters and/or digits)/" in them. Not sure if that'll mess with the Observatory.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Streams #(streams) And yet, there are people trying to talk me out of it. For example, I shouldn't transcribe text that's so tiny that it isn't even recognisable in the image as text because it's only a blob of a dozen pixels. They say that or characters of description and explanations for one image are too much.
The only thing I'm reconsidering myself currently is whether to keep these monster descriptions in the post or put them into external documents and link to them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta It's strange to see what kinds of hardware have problems with Second Life and OpenSim, especially the Firestorm viewer.
I'm mostly on six-year-old upper-mid-range hardware. Ryzen 5 3600X, Radeon RX 590, both on a modest MSI B450 mainboard. This is far from high-end gaming hardware. OS is Debian, graphics driver is open-source and issued by Debian. I don't even have any configuration UI for my graphics hardware. Ask gamers, and they'll tell you I shouldn't be able to do anything with this setup.
And yet, Firestorm 7 gives me much higher frame rates with shadows on and a 256m viewing distance than Firestorm 6 gave me with shadows off and a 128m viewing distance. Even with crazy complex avatars around, I think I never go below 30fps. And I've got a 60fps cap myself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #FirestormViewer There's already a wide-spread eagerness to make alternatives to just about everything in the Fediverse.
It's like an Internet rule: "If it exists, someone wants to clone it into the Fediverse."
In fact, it has become difficult to bring the Fediverse to whip up something truly original that isn't a knock-off of anything outside the Fediverse. I guess both that feature monster Hubzilla and highly advanced (streams) are still too close to Facebook.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse A missed opportunity, a disappointment and actually a menace to the whole Fediverse.
Rochko and his cronies never wanted there to be a Fediverse. From the beginning in 2016 on, they didn't really care for interoperability with anything that wasn't Mastodon, regardless of whether Mastodon used OStatus or ActivityPub. Mind you, at no point in history has Mastodon not been federated with anything else.
Mastodon's goal has always been to be a Twitter clone. All the way to aping Twitter's shortcomings. Sometimes toned down, but still. Mind you, it's perfectly possible to build a decentralised microblogging platform without cloning Twitter, as proven by StatusNet which was launched some eight years before Mastodon, and which Mastodon was federated with from the get-go, by the way. Even then, the way Mastodon worked clashed with StatusNet, not to mention Friendica and Hubzilla which Mastodon federated and still federates with as well.
Mastodon has done little to mitigate these clashes unless they were undeniably bugs and filed in Mastodon's GitHub repository as such.
Its strategy seems to be different, and most of its own users help it: Make sure that everyone who wants to join the Fediverse joins Mastodon. Make it so that as many people and organisations as possible land on mastodon.social, the instance controlled by the gGmbH that's 22% of the whole Fediverse. And hide from them the fact that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon.
Mastodon could have made for a great gateway into the greater Fediverse. And I'm not talking about the Mastodon forks. I'm talking about Misskey and its forks. Pleroma and its forks. Even Friendica and its highly advanced, nomadic descendants.
Instead, for every single last Fediverse newbie, Mastodon is the Fediverse. Mass media tend to preach the same, and even some tech media talk about the Fediverse as "the Mastodon network" or a "network of Mastodon instances". They don't know better either, and they help miseducate the masses.
Your average Mastodon newbie spends at least several months of thinking the whole Fediverse is his nice, fluffy, cosy woolly mammoth and nothing else. And there are actually, I'm not kidding, people who have joined Mastodon in late October or early November of 2022 and still think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
Even if people discover that there are other things in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon, and these non-Mastodon things are even interacting with them, they've gotten so used to the Fediverse only being Mastodon that this revelation will not necessarily be a pleasant surprise. When they find out about Akkoma or Friendica or whatever, they don't necessarily end up intrigued and willing to jump ships.
Instead, at best, many still think that Rochko has invented the Fediverse and ActivityPub, and everything that isn't Mastodon is either bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or a Mastodon ripoff. They take Mastodon for the ActivityPub gold standard, and whatever is different from Mastodon on something that isn't Mastodon is either a bug or a design fault. Different from Mastodon equals broken.
It certainly doesn't help that the "Fediverse culture" is actually only Mastodon's culture, entirely defined and shaped by Twitter escapees who neither knew much about nor cared for the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. If there's such a thing as a "Fediquette", it's entirely geared towards only Mastodon. It does not acknowledge that other Fediverse projects may be different, may handle differently, may act differently and may actually have had their own culture for longer than Mastodon has been around. Thus, "Fediverse culture" is entirely built against Mastodon's features and Mastodon's shortcomings.
And so you have people who want to force the whole rest of the Fediverse to act exactly like Mastodon. No quote-posts, even if you've had them for longer than Mastodon has even existed. ( And they're all wrong.) No text formatting because it's disturbing, and/or Mastodon doesn't have it. No posts with even only a smidge over 500 characters, even if you've had no character limit at all since long before Mastodon was even made.
Of course, CWs for several hundred different more or less sensitive topics. Not knowing how because you don't have a field for CWs, and you don't know the BBcode tags for that (Friendica, (streams)) is not an excuse. Actually being unable to add Mastodon-style CWs to replies because it doesn't make sense to be able to add summaries for blog comments (Hubzilla) isn't an excuse either. Oh, and don't you dare use the CW field for a summary! Nobody wants to hear your claims that Mastodon's CW field has been a summary field where you are since before Mastodon got its CW field.
Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It's so different from Mastodon that it's almost the diametrical opposite of Mastodon. Being so much older also means that it has its own culture. This culture is much more welcoming towards other projects and platforms, seeing as one important raison d'tre for Friendica is federation with everything out there and then some.
But now there are many Mastodon users who want the Fediverse users, at least those whom they interact with, to abandon Friendica's culture, adopt Mastodon's culture instead and stop using 90% of Friendica's features because Mastodon doesn't have them.
So instead of being a gateway into the greater Fediverse, Mastodon is harbouring and cultivating an ignorant and obnoxious "Make the Fediverse only Mastodon" culture of hostility against anything and everything that's different from Mastodon while not appearing to be an add-on to Mastodon. And nothing is done to stop these tendencies. At least not on Mastodon.
No wonder that people from Pleroma to Firefish to Friendica to (streams) complain about rampant Mastodon-centrism that defines everything that's different from Mastodon as inherently wrong and in need of being "corrected".
No wonder, actually, that some places keep various options ready to lock Mastodon out. For example, one reason why Hubzilla will always keep its old Zot protocol, even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub becomes stable, is so that it can keep ActivityPub optional. This could also be one reason to keep (streams) going even after its ActivityPub-only fork Forte should be ready for prime-time. This is actually the reason why one particular forum on (streams) has turned ActivityPub off.
Speaking of the latter two, they've recently introduced an admin-controlled, instance-level "User Agent Filter" that's capable of locking out all instances of entire Fediverse projects. (streams) and Forte instances can now theoretically lock out and defederate from all Mastodon instances in one fell swoop. And this is not exactly a secret.
It's sad that it had to come to this.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #Fediquette I guess there are enough signs that my image descriptions are hand-written, especially for my original virtual world renderings.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Describing images would be a lot easier if the various Fediverse accessibility activists, the alt-text police and actually blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users had one common place to discuss Fediverse accessibility with each other. With all of each other without mention orgies.
And if "normal" users could go that place and ask them about edge-cases which your typical alt-text guides have no definite solutions for, so that these people can discuss these edge-cases with the asking users and with each other and come to a consensus.
But there's no such place, there are no such discussions, and there's next to no communication about Fediverse accessibility at all, other than, "Just do it, but oh, of course, do it the right way!" For any definition of "the right way" because there are too many such definitions that contradict each other.
Generally, blind and visually-impaired people ask to participate in accessibility decisions. But in the Fediverse, it's exactly that what they don't do, at least not beyond asking for alt-text for images. And I don't buy that they don't care about the content of the alt-text as long as there is something at all, and it seems halfway useful. I don't buy it.
If you've got lot of time to read, .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #A11y #AccessibilityDer Pepe (Hubzilla)
Probably due to the ID chaos.
Federation on (streams) went bellies-up with the introduction of FEP-ef61 DIDs due to the plethora of IDs everything had suddenly. All kinds of different IDs from conventional ActivityPub. Plus at least one Nomad ID. Plus at least one Zot6 ID. And now the DID on top. (streams) ended up being confused about this maze of IDs itself and used all the wrong IDs in all the wrong use-cases.
Remember how federation still was on the fritz in mid-August When Forte was forked off
One of the reasons Mike created Forte was to throw Nomad and Zot6 out without throwing Nomad and Zot6 out of (streams). It was probably a kind of quick fix to assume control over this ID chaos by removing the non-ActivityPub parts and, most importantly, the non-ActivityPub IDs.
That kind of lines up with what Mike did earlier. Like in 2018 when he made Osada and Zap, the two experimental development platforms for Zot6. Why didn't he do that in a development version of Hubzilla with all of Hubzilla's features still in place And, most importantly, only one development version with all the shebang
That's because in 2018, when Zot6 was only an idea, this idea had one big caveat: Mike's earliest concept of Zot6, especially its nomadic identity implementation, clashed with all other protocols.
So he created Zap that only spoke Zot6. Zap was only able to federate with Hubzilla because Zot6 was still sufficiently compatible with Hubzilla's version of Zot. Zap was the platform to develop the nomadic identity side of Zot6.
And he created Osada that spoke a bunch of other things, including ActivityPub and diaspora*. But it had no nomadic identity.
He slimmed both down a great deal. Articles, cards, wikis, webpages etc., it all had to go. Why To also slim down development. Otherwise he would have had to touch much, much more code. Besides, Hubzilla already had all that stuff. Same reason why (streams) can't subscribe to feeds anymore: less code to maintain and upgrade all the time.
The reason why the first Osada was discontinued was because it turned out that a) Zot6 could indeed be made compatible with at least ActivityPub, and b) having Osada as a "bridge" between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse was just plain bonkers. You wanted to use Zap, but you wanted to keep your Mastodon and diaspora* friends You also needed one non-nomadic Osada channel for each one of your nomadic Zap channels. And you had to use Osada to share-post all your Zap posts because Zap had no repeats yet, and you needed Osada to interact with the stuff your non-nomadic friends posted. Oh, did I mention that Osada was non-nomadic, and you'd lose everything if your Osada instance went under
So Mike discontinued the old Osada which next to nobody had used anyway, forked a second Osada from Zap and added ActivityPub to it so he had purist, Zot6-only Zap with no ActivityPub in the way of experimenting with Zot6 plus Osada with which he could test the interaction of ActivityPub and Zot6. Other devs would have strapped ActivityPub onto Zap. Not Mike, though.
Mitra is working on nomadic ActivityPub, too. Very hard so. Since 2022. Silverpill was the very creator of FEP-ef61, and he is even more of a driving force behind adding nomadic identity to ActivityPub than Mike. I wouldn't be surprised if it was him who had nudged Mike into developing ActivityPub-based pan-Fediverse nomadic identity.
Let all this work out. Let Forte become stable. Let Mitra roll out nomadic identity. Let it become possible to clone between the two. Let this hit Fediverse News. And you'll have quite a number of heads turning, including developer heads. Of course, most likely not those of the Mastodon devs. But it isn't unlikely that others will be interested.
And the more things in the Fediverse have working, stable, ActivityPub-based nomadic identity, the more Mastodon users will nag the Mastodon devs to implement it because they're fed up with being stuck on their instances already now. Until the point at which someone forks Mastodon, adds nomadic identity and submits the changes to the Mastodon code repo as a PR.
Sooner or later, Hubzilla, the nomadic identity pioneer, will have to at least learn to understand ActivityPub-based nomadic identity. Once the latter is fully fleshed out, this might not even be that difficult. It can always be tested on development hubs like Zotum first.
Mario already said Hubzilla will hold on to Zot6. This may mean that it won't be possible to clone between Hubzilla and anything else if ActivityPub-based nomadic identity isn't fully implemented. But this wouldn't be much different from what things are like right now.
Well, for each Fediverse project individually that implements it, it's a big step forward.
Let's assume some Forkey implements it. The big news won't be so much that you can now clone your account to (streams) and Mitra. It'll rather be first and foremost that you can clone to another instance of the same Forkey and save your identity from doom by instance shutdown. Cross-border cloning is just a nice extra.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadicIdentity #Forte In theory, yes.
Beware, though: Forte is a super extremely early version. It was forked from (streams) when (streams) itself was buggy.
Nomadic identity via ActivityPub is extremely experimental. It probably uses technology that Mastodon doesn't understand. Yesterday was literally the very first time ever that content from something based on nomadic ActivityPub has hit the Fediverse. The only other implementation is a development version of Mitra whose code is not public, and which is only deployed on non-public instances run by the developer.
Also, like everything else that Mike has made (Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams)), in terms of handling and functionality, Forte is much farther away from Mastodon than Mastodon is from Twitter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fortemorph And so there's exactly one instance, Mike's own private private instance, with Mike, the only developer, being its only user.
Again, it's from mid-August. Mike hasn't declared it stable yet. And yesterday was literally the very very first time a message came from Forte, namely from Mike's private instance, into the Fediverse.
So no, there aren't any public, open-registration instances.
If you want to get to know the basic functionality, except for how Forte federates, the closest thing would be (streams) which Forte was forked from. (streams) may have its own issues, but it has at least one public instance that can theoretically be joined.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #ForteOh, by the way, in case you haven't noticed because chances are that you actually haven't: Forte has entered the Fediverse yesterday.
Mike Macgirvin has rebased his private, semi-secret instance from his own streams repository to his most recent project. Just yesterday, Mike sent the very first message from Forte into the Fediverse, a comment on a post from his public (streams) channel. Unfortunately, the whole thread is private, as is the comment.
So, what is Forte is the very first and currently only Fediverse project that features nomadic identity via only ActivityPub. It's a fork of , created in mid-August this year.
To put it in a nutshell, Forte is (streams) without Nomad and without support for Zot, purely relying on ActivityPub. Also, unlike (streams), Forte has a name, it has a branding (which, however, can be changed on the instance level just like on (streams)), it has nodeinfo, it has a license, and it's a project again.
At least as of now, Forte may have trouble connecting to Mastodon. This may be because Mastodon doesn't understand decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, it may be because Forte also had some non-standard, Mastodon-specific code removed. Or it may be due to the user agent filter that Mike has introduced to (streams) and most likely also Forte a few weeks ago that actually has the capability of, for example, blocking Mastodon in its entirety on an instance level. Whatever it is that may or may not stand in Mastodon's way of connecting with Forte, Mike declared it "intentional".
Speaking of "intentional", I'm intentionally not posting this to Fediverse News. While this may go largely unnoticed outside the Hubzilla/(streams) bubble, maybe plus Friendica, it may just as well prompt people to set up their own instances. People who haven't even laid their hands on Friendica, much less Hubzilla or (streams), and who don't know how the "Facebook-like" side of the Fediverse looks and feels, much less how nomadic identity is handled. They may expect another "Mastodon + more characters + x on top", end up disappointed because nothing on Forte looks, feels or works like Twitter or Mastodon, and declare that Forte objectively sucks.
Also, as long as Mike doesn't at least hint at Forte being stable and daily-driveable for people who don't develop it, it probably isn't.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Streams #(streams) #Forte Hier mal zehn Grnde, warum ich auf Hubzilla bleiben und nicht auf eins der *keys wechseln will:
Erstens: nomadische Identitt.
Meine Identitt ist weder an ein Konto noch an eine Serverinstanz gebunden, sondern in einem Kanal "containerisiert". Ich habe auf einem zweiten Hub einen praktisch identischen Klon dieses Kanals, der mit dem Original in Echtzeit bidirektional synchronisiert wird. Sollte einer der beiden Hubs mal ausfallen, verliere ich nichts und kann weitermachen wie bisher. Nachteil ist nur, da Projekte, die keine nomadische Identitt kennen, nicht erkennen knnen, da da auf den beiden Hubs ein und derselbe Kanal ist. Mastodon, Misskey usw. halten meinen Klon fr ein vllig separates Konto.
Unter den aktuell aktiven Fediverse-Serveranwendungen bieten das nur zwei: das stabile, konstant weiterentwickelte Hubzilla und das gerade nicht so stabile, aktuell kaum bearbeitete (streams), das einen etwas anderen Featuresatz hat (da habe ich auch zwei Kanle).
Zweitens: kein Zeichenlimit.
Mir reichen ein paar tausend Zeichen nicht aus. Ich poste immer mal wieder zigtausende Zeichen auf einmal. Ich mchte die Mglichkeit haben, bis 100.000 Zeichen zu posten, denn darber hinaus lehnt Mastodon Posts ab. Und mein Rekord liegt bei fast 77.000 Zeichen aufgrund drei sehr langer Bildbeschreibungen. Dieser Kommentar ist auch ber 10.000 Zeichen lang.
Drittens: Hubzilla kennt Konversationen sehr gut.
Mein Stream ist nicht in Einzelposts organisiert, sondern in ganzen Threads. Jeder Thread besteht immer nur aus genau einem Post, dem Startpost, und ansonsten Kommentaren, die Hubzilla nicht als Posts ansieht. Das ist genau wie auf Facebook oder Tumblr oder Reddit und wie in jedem Blog.
Wenn ich einen Post im Stream habe, dann empfange ich alle Kommentare. Und die werden mir als ungelesen angezeigt. Im Grunde kann ich Antworten gar nicht verpassen.
Auerdem kann ich einem Thread folgen, bzw. wenn ich mit einem Post oder einem Kommentar in einem Thread interagiere (drauf antworten, Daumen hoch, Daumen runter etc.), dann folge ich dem Thread automatisch. Und dann werde ich sogar ausdrcklich benachrichtigt, wenn in dem Thread etwas passiert ist.
Viertens: der Zhler ungelesener Mitteilungen.
Wenn etwas in meinem Stream passiert, dann wird mir das zunchst einmal als ungelesen markiert, auch wenn z. B. jemand einen Post oder einen Kommentar geboostet/reposted/renoted/wiederholt hat. Und dafr hat Hubzilla einen Zhler. Wenn ich den anklicke, bekomme ich alles aufgelistet, was ich mir noch nicht angesehen habe. Das kann ich dann jeweils anklicken und dann threadweise ansehen. Es wird dann automatisch als gelesen markiert.
Damit verpasse ich nichts.
Fnftens: das Berechtigungssystem.
Hubzilla hat ein sehr komplexes, fortschrittliches, feingegliedertes System von Berechtigungen. So etwas bietet sonst auch nur (streams). Ich glaube, jemandem, der von Mastodon kommt in Erwartung von Mastodon ohne Zeichenlimit mit mehr Textformatierung, ist das viel zu kompliziert. Ich aber habe das System ziemlich durchschaut und nutze es zu meinem Vorteil.
Standardmig z. B. sind meine Verbindungen (auf Hubzilla gibt's grundstzlich nur beidseitige Verbindungen wie Facebook-"Freunde", also nicht Folgende und Gefolgte getrennt wie auf Twitter und Mastodon) nicht berechtigt, mir ihre Posts zu schicken. Das mu ich ihnen erst ausdrcklich erlauben. Und das tue ich auch nur dann, wenn ich das will.
Ich habe ber 550 Verbindungen, von denen die allermeisten nichts posten, was mich im Rahmen dieses Kanals (der Kanal ist thematisch limitiert, das ist kein persnlicher Allzweckkanal) und auch generell nicht die Bohne interessiert. Bevor ich jetzt also 98% nur Mll im Stream habe, durch den ich waten darf, um an den interessanten Content zu kommen, spare ich mir den Aufwand und gebe denen, die nichts Interessantes zu sagen haben, gar nicht erst die Berechtigung, mir ihre Posts zu schicken.
Gleichzeitig haben sie aber sehr wohl die Berechtigung, meine Posts zu kommentieren oder mir DMs zu schicken das ist davon unabhngig.
Insgesamt kennt Hubzilla 17 Berechtigungseinstellungen mit sieben oder acht Berechtigungslevels. Dazu kann ich auch noch bei Posts (und damit ganzen Threads), Bildern, anderen Dateien usw. usf. einstellen, wer sie sehen darf.
Sechstens: zwar nicht perfekte, aber sehr umfassende Filter.
Zunchst einmal erlaubt Hubzilla es mir, individuell pro Kontakt zu filtern. Das heit, ich kann nicht nur kanalweit filtern, sondern auch einzelnen Kontakten jeweils individuelle Filterlisten geben, und zwar jeweils eine Whitelist und eine Blacklist pro Kontakt.
Dann kann ich beim Filtern regulre Ausdrcke verwenden. Wenn ich z. B. ein Schlsselwort auch als Wortbestandteil filtern will, ein anderes aber nur als ganzes Wort, kann ich das mit einer und derselben Filterliste erschlagen.
Und letztlich hat Hubzilla auch eine Filtersyntax, wobei die sich leider in Whitelists mit reinen Schlsselwrtern noch nicht vertrgt, sonst wren Hubzillas Filter noch mchtiger. Mit der Filtersyntax kann ich beispielsweise Boosts rausfiltern. Wenn also jemand manchmal interessante Sachen postet, dazwischen aber dutzendweise uninteressanten Mll boostet, kann ich mir die Boosts vom Hals schaffen, aber die Posts kommen weiterhin durch. Ich hoffe immer noch auf Verbesserungen, die es mir z. B. mglich machen wrden, eine Whitelist nur auf Posts anzuwenden, nicht aber auf Kommentare und DMs.
Siebtens: das volle Programm der Textformatierung, das einem eine Blog-Engine bietet. Und zwar nicht einfach nur WYSIWYG, sondern ich kann direkt mit rohem Code arbeiten.
Die ganzen Twitter-Klone, und dazu zhle ich auch Misskey und alle Forkeys, erlauben mir z. B. nicht, Bilder in den Post-Text einzubetten. Also Text, dann ein Bild, dann mehr Text, dann noch ein Bild, dann noch mehr Text. Auf Hubzilla geht das problemlos, weil Hubzilla eben nicht versucht, Twitter nachzuffen. Mastodon kann das nicht mal darstellen und die ganzen *keys auch nicht.
Ich wei auch nicht, ob die *keys eine Begrenzung haben, wieviele Bilder man an einen Post anhngen kann. Hubzilla hat beim Einbetten von Bildern keine Begrenzung.
Hubzilla kann ansonsten mit BBcode das hier alles:
In Verbindung mit OpenWebAuth ("magisches" Single Sign-On, das auch von Mike Macgirvin erfunden wurde) geht auerdem:
Wenn im Kanal bestimmte Erweiterungen aktiviert sind (Hubzilla ist sehr modular und jeder Kanal fr sich auch), geht auerdem:
brigens hat Hubzilla sogar eine Vorschau fr Posts, DMs und Kommentare. Man kann sie sich anzeigen lassen, bevor man sie versendet, um noch einmal nachzubessern.
Achtens: Kategorien fr Posts.
Ich kann meine eigenen Posts nicht nur mit Hashtags organisieren, sondern auch in Kategorien, von denen ich jedem Post eine oder mehrere zuweisen kann. Die dienen nur der internen Organisation und werden nicht nach auen fderiert. So finde ich meine eigenen Posts schneller und leichter wieder.
Neuntens: Speichern von Posts, Kommentaren etc. in Ordnern.
Sowohl eigene Posts, Kommentare usw. als auch die anderer Nutzer kann ich nicht einfach nur mit Lesezeichen markieren, sondern auf diesem Wege in Ordnern einsortieren. Das sind quasi Lesezeichenkategorien.
Zehntens: Zusatzfeatures, die so fast nirgendwo oder tatschlich nirgendwo verfgbar sind.
Ich nutze auf Hubzilla einiges an Zusatzfeatures, die teilweise optional sind, die mir weder Misskey noch einer der Forkeys so bieten kann:
Selbst wenn ich nach Sharkey oder CherryPick wechseln wrde, mte ich sehr, sehr viel dafr aufgeben.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadischeIdentitt #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #Konversationen #Berechtigungen #Filter #Textformatierung #Hubzilla
Firefish ist Calckey. Oder war es.
Ich versuche mal, die Geschichte nachzuzeichnen:
Calckey entstand, indem Kainoa Kanter einen Soft-Fork von Misskey angelegt hat. Damals war es noch blich, da jeder Forkey einen Namen mit "-key" am Ende hat (FoundKey, Meisskey, Tanukey etc.).
Das war im Grunde immer ein Soloprojekt. Es gab noch ein paar Extra-Entwickler. Aber: Nur Kainoa durfte in den Release-Code einpflegen und neue Versionen rausbringen, auerdem gehrten Kainoa die Domain der Website, die Domain des Code-Repository und die Domain der Leuchtturminstanz, die auch nur Kainoa administrierte.
Anfang 2023, eigentlich war Akkoma gerade der heie Schei, schob ein einzelner Calckey-Fan mit massiver Werbung einen Calckey-Hype an. Weil sich die Leute reihenweise auf Calckey strzten, kam der Gedanke auf, fr ein so populres Projekt ist "Calckey" eigentlich ein doofer Name. Also wurde Calckey in Firefish umbenannt.
Im Oktober 2023 ist Kainoa dann ziemlich komplett von der Bildflche verschwunden, jedenfalls komplett aus dem Fediverse. Monatelang berhaupt gar nichts. Zu dem Zeitpunkt war Firefish noch einigermaen synchron mit Misskey, das auf Version 12 war.
Zwischenzeitlich ging Misskey auf Version 13, dann auf Version 14. Aber Firefish zog nicht nach, weil Kainoa nicht da war. Die anderen Devs konnten Patches einreichen, aber nur Kainoa durfte die in den Produktivcode einpflegen.
Anfang 2024 war Firefish allmhlich kritisch veraltet. Nicht nur das, sondern die Leuchtturminstanz, die mit Abstand grte Instanz kackte komplett ab und funktionierte berhaupt nicht mehr. Auer Kainoa konnte sich da aber niemand drum kmmern.
An diesem Punkt wurde Firefish fr tot erklrt.
Leute sprangen reihenweise ab. Ganze Instanzen migrierten von Firefish zu Sharkey, einem anderen, jngeren Misskey-Soft-Fork, der vor allem aktueller und aktiv gepflegt war. Ganze Firefish-Instanzen wurden auf Sharkey umgestellt.
Meines Wissens waren es die anderen Firefish-Entwickler, die das sinkende Schiff verlieen. Sie forkten Firefish zu Iceshrimp, um zumindest ein paar Firefish-Features behalten zu knnen. Es war ein Hard Fork, weil sie eh nicht damit rechneten, da mit Firefish noch irgendwas passiert. Und sie haben Iceshrimp praktisch unmittelbar nach den Fork nach Misskey rebaset, um den "Unterbau" vom asbach-uralten Misskey 12 auf Misskey 14 hochziehen zu knnen.
Im Frhjahr ist Kainoa wieder aufgetaucht. Der Grund fr die Auszeit war ein Abschlu und ein Jobeinstieg. Und jetzt sollte es mit Firefish weitergehen. Nur war vom alten Firefish nicht mehr viel brig. Und wohl erst jetzt erfuhr Kainoa, da alle anderen Entwickler abgesprungen waren und nicht gedachten zurckzukehren.
Letztlich gab Kainoa den Quellcode an eine neue Entwicklerin ab, Naskya. Aber nur den Code. Die drei Domains mitsamt dranhngenden Websites zu bertragen, war wohl zuviel Aufwand. Kainoa hat alle drei abgeschaltet, weshalb die meisten Leute glauben, Firefish sei tot, weil die ganzen alten Weblinks nicht mehr funktionieren.
Naskya hat vorher den Quellcode auf ein neues Repository gesichert. Das aktuelle Firefish ist also rein technisch gesprochen ein Fork des alten Firefish unter demselben Namen. Auerdem hat Naskya eine neue Leuchtturminstanz gestartet auf einer Unterdomain des Repository.
Letzten Monat hat sie dann bekanntgegeben, da es viel zuviel Aufwand ist, Firefish ganz alleine zu pflegen, und Hilfe hat sie ja keine. So kann sie das unmglich weiterfhren. Also hat sie die Weiterentwicklung von Firefish gestoppt. Es wird jetzt nur noch gewartet und auch das nur bis Jahresende, dann ist mit Entwicklung Schlu. Und im Februar 2025 werden Code-Repository und Leuchtturminstanz abgeschaltet.
Absolut nicht.
Im allgemeinen sind Forkeys, die direkt von Misskey geforkt wurden, entstanden, um mehr Features an Misskey dranzukleben. So auch Calckey.
Die Idee hinter Sharkey war wohl quasi, den ultimativen Forkey zu bauen. Sharkey ist ein Misskey-Soft-Fork, wo teilweise Sachen aus Calckey/Firefish drangebaut wurden und zustzlich noch Eigengezchtetes.
Iceshrimp startete als der Versuch, einen stabilen Ersatz fr Firefish zu haben. Es wurde von Firefish hartgeforkt, dann zwecks Aktualisierung der Basis auf das viel aktuellere Misskey rebaset. Dann hat man gemerkt, da viele Probleme von Misskey selbst geerbt worden waren und es zu aufwendig wre, die zu flicken. Ich meine, sonst htte Firefish selbst das gemacht, sonst htte Sharkey das gemacht oder wer auch immer. Also haben die Entwickler Iceshrimp auf Wartung gesetzt, die Weiterentwicklung komplett gestoppt und sich drangesetzt, das ganze Iceshrimp von Grund auf neu zu schreiben. Und zwar nicht mehr in TypeScript und Node.js, weil JavaScript fr Serveranwendungen Kse ist, sondern in C#.
Zwischenzeitlich ist von Iceshrimp Catodon geforkt worden. Das hat wieder einen anderen Fokus, und zwar will es ein Forkey fr Mastodon-Umsteiger sein. Mit einem hnlichen Featuresatz wie Mastodon, also mit viel Firefish- und sogar Misskey-Klimbim rausgeschmissen und mit Mastodons Standard-Weboberflche. Catodons Entwicklung ist meines Wissens auch gestoppt, ich glaube, die warten darauf, da Iceshrimp.NET fertig wird, damit sie Catodon darauf rebasen knnen.
Dann gibt's noch CherryPick, einen japanischen Sharkey-Fork. Der hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die Macken, die das vllig berzchtete Sharkey hat, auszubgeln. Das ist wohl zu groen Teilen auch schon gelungen. Schtze, die CherryPick-Entwickler haben es auch geschafft, Sharkeys legendr grottenschlechte Mastodon-API-Implementation durch die neue zu ersetzen, auf die die Sharkey-Entwickler schon ewig warten.
Markdown geht bei Misskey und den Forkeys noch weiter.
Zeichenbegrenzung haben sie alle, nur nicht auf 500 Zeichen. Je nach Projekt hast du 3000 hartgecodete Zeichen (Misskey) oder ein paar tausend, aber durch den Admin einstellbar.
(Fast) ganz ohne Zeichenbegrenzung sind nur die Sachen von Mike Macgirvin, also Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und das wohl noch experimentelle noch gar nicht richtig gestartete Forte. Die letzteren beiden haben nur eine durch die Serverdatenbank bedingte Zeichenbegrenzung von ber 24.000.000 Zeichen.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp.NET #Catodon #CherryPick #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte The second one is a link to the only post on my meme-themed (streams) channel in which I've explained everything right in the post instead of linking to external explanations because I thought that's what the majority wanted.
If this link doesn't work, this one will:
And for your convenience, here is a full, verbatim quote-post of the entire post (yes, Hubzilla has had quote-posts since its inception in 2015) unfortunately, the spoiler tag breaks when Hubzilla imports posts from (streams):
It's my first attempt at my new meme-posting format with extensive explanations in the post which, I hope, are independent from any external information.
Image related.
spoiler=Caution: Image hidden due to eye contact
It is referring to the difficulties this (streams) channel of mine had in interacting with Hubzilla and connecting to anything non-nomadic and ActivityPub-based in late July and early August. I have registered my (streams) account on version 24.07.20 which was the version that rolled out the new address scheme as per FEP-ef61 plus a few extra features on the way to the implementation of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Thus, my channels were among the first with the new address scheme and these new features. However, while I could establish a connection to my main Hubzilla channel, communication between these channels was between limited and impossible. And when I tried to follow Mastodon users from (streams), they didn't even notice.
Version 24.08.08 is said to have largely fixed these issues. I don't know because this instance has been upgraded straight from 24.08.03 which I haven't extensively tested to 24.08.12 on which these issues are largely fixed.
Find the following background explanations right below:
The quote in question is from the scene in which Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, explains the only possible way the One Ring can be destroyed which becomes the very mission of the novel and the film trilogy. Boromir, one of the Fellowship, played by Sean Bean, replies how utterly impossible this is to carry out.
Elrond
The ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Gloin, by any craft that we here possess. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade. The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. One of you must do this.
Boromir
One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.
The first sentence said by Boromir was turned into a snowclone, and image macros based on the scene have traces of an advice animal.
Its early form as a snowclone was "One does not simply X into Mordor" with X standing for ways of locomotion or similar actions. It was followed by the variant "One does not simply walk into X" with X standing for destinations. Logically, "One does not simply X into Y" evolved.
This particular image macro uses another, later form, "One does not simply X" which generally describes actions that are difficult, nigh-impossible or actually impossible to carry out.
It had been around for decades when the American linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum discovered it and wrote in which he also laments the lack of a name for this phenomenon. The blog post was originally titled "Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit Form", and the phrase "some-assembly-required adaptable clich frames for lazy journalists" used in the blog post was accurate, but similarly unwieldy.
Pullum's linguist colleague Glen Whitman eventually suggested the term "snow clone" which he had invented himself, and which was first exposed to the public in .
The term itself was based on what would become : The phrase "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy" had been snowcloned into "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, X have N words for Y" where X stands for a nation or a group of people, N stands for a number, and Y stands for what X allegedly have N of.
Over the following years, Pullum collected over 70 snowclones which had existed then already. These included:
In the meantime, the age of Internet memes began. A whole lot of snowclones, often catalogued by Pullum as well, started out as these, for example:
A more extensive list of snowclones, partially already described and explained, can be found in , created by linguistics student Erin O'Connor and launched in November, 2007.
On the World Wide Web, the Something Awful forums were one of the earliest places where image macros were regularly used. It was there where the term "image macro" was invented in early 2004. On February 12th, 2004, a user named Eclipse posted the first definition of the term. The definition is only accessible to logged-in users, so there is no link to it.
From 2005 on, image macros started spreading elsewhere, including the imageboard 4chan. It was there where the definite shape of image macros was created, namely including text in bold white letters using Monotype's Impact type face, pre-installed on Microsoft Windows, with black outlines. The most notable exception are demotivational posters, parodies of motivational posters that first came up in 1998, also because they have the text below the picture rather than on it.
A key element of advice animals is that they usually have text at the top and at the bottom which either automatically fit or are made to fit the character in the centre. It's usually a short joke with the setup at the top and the punchline at the bottom.
The foundation of the advice animal genre was laid at The Mushroom Kingdom, a fan forum for the Super Mario video game franchise, on September 7th, 2006. A user named TEM posted an edited version of a picture of his dog he had posted three days earlier, but with only the dog's head surrounded by a colour wheel with six colours. It wasn't used as an image macro with text yet back then, though. Even though the image is gone now, .
On July 5th, 2008, the image first appeared on the imageboard 4chan as image no. 76000000. After that, it was quickly turned into the Advice Dog image macro template. It was named "Advice Dog" because these image macros give "advice", but always of a kind that doesn't make much sense, and/or that should not really be followed. For example, the texts could be "Hire clowns" and "For funerals" respectively. From then on, an ever-increasing number of advice animals were created with or without a colour wheel.
The Something Awful forums were the place where image macros were first culturally exploited online in larger quantities, and where they received that name.
An imageboard is a special form of a Web forum which specialises in posting images and then commenting on the image posts. Sometimes the posts are actually about the images, sometimes the images are mere decoration for a post which inevitably required an image. Thus, images are key elements of imageboard culture, and imageboards are natural breeding-grounds for image memes. 4chan, in particular, was the driving force between many memes, meme genres and entire memetic fandoms throughout the 2000s and 2010s, also due to its extremely high activity.
Originally, imageboards were a Japanese invention. Early imageboards in English language were focused on Japanese media, particularly manga and anime, but they would also cover other topics later.
One feature that sets *chan imageboards apart from other online communities is that they can be used completely anonymously. Many don't even have user accounts which makes it difficult for users to identify themselves if they so desire. This is also the background of the collective and movement known as Anonymous: It started out on 4chan, and everyone who partook in it, like practically all 4chan users of course, "identified" themselves as "Anonymous". Thus, a swarm was born which is Anonymous because everyone in it is Anonymous.
FEP-ef61 in particular is a proposal for implementing something also known as nomadic identity in ActivityPub.
Nomadic identity is a Fediverse technology that detaches the Fediverse identity with everything that belongs to it from the underlying server, from the underlying login and account. It makes it possible for the same Fediverse identity to simultaneously reside on multiple servers.
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by Mike Macgirvin, an experienced developer with a particular skill for communication protocols. In 2010, he had already created a protocol named DFRN, short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network, and used it to build a very powerful, free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative first known as Mistpark, then renamed Friendika with a "K" in late 2010, and eventually renamed Friendica with a "C" in early 2012. Friendica still exists, and it is part of the Fediverse.
Early on, Mike noticed one issue of decentralised projects: Server instances, even public ones with open registration, were generally run by private people. And not always were they long-lived. Sometimes admins of Friendika nodes announced the impending end of their nodes. Other nodes would shut down for good with no prior notice. Everyone who had an account on one of these nodes would always lose everything and have to start over elsewhere from scratch. The introduction of account export and import made moving possible, but it had its limitations, and it was of little protection against unannounced node shutdowns.
The only feasible solution was for online identities to no longer be bound to any one account on any one server, to simultaneously exist on multiple server instances. An entire ecosystem would have to be built around this feature so that user identities would know and understand that other user identities are spread across more than one server instance.
And so Mike conceived the idea of nomadic identity which should achieve just that. In order to uncouple a user's identity from the account, the user's data from connections to posts to files etc. was uncoupled from the account and placed into a container known as a channel. The account no longer had any control over identity or content it only served to grant access to the channel. This channel would then be possible to be cloned onto an account on another server instance. The original, called the main instance, would supply the domain that would still be part of the ID.
The main instance and each clone would then be live, real-time, hot backups of each other. Anything that would happen on one of them, a post being sent, a post being received, a new contact being established, a file being uploaded, would be almost immediately synchronised to the others to keep all of them identical.
A key element of nomadic identity was for the user to be able to log onto any server where they had a clone of their channel and use it there. One or several servers with instances of the channel on them could be offline, but with any one of them still being online and accessible, the channel would remain active. Also, it would be possible to make one of the clones the new main instance. The ID would switch to the domain of the server with the main instance on it, and all connections would be modified accordingly, including on remote servers.
Still in 2011, Mike implemented nomadic identity in a new protocol named Zot. In early 2012, Mike forked his own project Friendica, named the fork Red, after Spanish "la red" which means "the network", and re-wrote the entire backend and large parts of the frontend against Zot.
Today, nomadic identity is available on Hubzilla, which evolved from Red or, as it was called from 2013 on, the Red Matrix in 2015, and in what is commonly called (streams) from 2021. Hubzilla is based on the latest stable version of the Zot protocol, Zot6, and (streams) is based on an incompatible descendant of Zot named Nomad. Nomadic identity in ActivityPub is still in an early stage of development and not available to regular users.
is an open-source code repository on Codeberg which contains a distant descendant of Hubzilla, created and still being developed by Mike Macgirvin and focusing on secure, private, nomadic social networking. This server application is intentionally without a name and without branding in any shape or form, and it was just as intentionally released into the public domain.
The history of both began in 2010 when it had been revealed that Facebook spied on its users and made money off their private data without their consent, in fact, without even telling them. From March to July, Mike built a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark. It had some extra features such as full long-form blogging capability, no character limit, multiple profiles per account which could be assigned to specific contacts, groups of contacts which pre-dated diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles, built-in file storage and an event calendar.
It was built on top of Mike's own protocol DFRN which is short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network. In addition, it supported other protocols such as OpenMicroBlogging, later OStatus, the protocol created by Evan Prodromou in 2008 for Laconi.ca, meanwhile StatusNet, which was later merged into GNU social, and it both could subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and produced Atom feeds itself. It would later gain the ability to connect to diaspora*, the crowd-funded, highly anticipated decentralised "Facebook killer" whose first early alpha version came out two months after Mistpark.
Later the same year, a German user told Mike that "Mistpark" sounds like German for "manure park" whereupon it was renamed "Friendika" with a "K". The spelling would finally be changed to "Friendica" with a "C" in early 2012.
As a countermeasure against people losing their online identities whenever a Friendika node shut down, Mike conceived nomadic identity and created a new protocol named Zot in 2011. In early 2012, he forked recently renamed Friendica into a new project named Red after the Spanish word for "network" and mostly rebuilt it into a Zot testbed. As the name didn't work well enough, it was renamed "Red Matrix" before seeing its first stable release in 2013. Along with the rebuild, it received support for nomadic identity and multiple channels on one account as well as a new permissions system.
But Friendica was mostly targetted at self-hosters of personal instances which made nomadic identity largely superfluous, and the Red Matrix didn't have any significant advantages otherwise that would justify the switch from Friendica for node admins. So in early 2015, the Red Matrix was redesigned to be more attractive to public server admins. It was turned into a multi-purpose system and received features such as a CalDAV calendar server which shares a GUI with the calendar inherited from Friendica, a CardDAV address book server, long-form articles, a wiki engine and a Web page server. And thus, Hubzilla was born in March.
In order to further develop the Zot protocol, Mike created two new forks in 2018, Osada and Zap. Both lost many of Hubzilla's content management system features. Zap was reduced to only Zot as the remaining supported protocol to keep interference from non-nomadic protocols out, also because Mike expected the new protocol version Zot6 to be incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Osada, in the meantime, kept many of Hubzilla's connection features, but lost nomadic identity. It was intended as a gateway between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse.
As this didn't work out, and Zot6 turned out to be compatible with ActivityPub, Osada was discontinued and re-created as a soft fork of Zap which received ActivityPub capabilities. Now, the only differences between the two were ActivityPub and the branding, and in 2019, after Zap had received ActivityPub support itself, it was just whether ActivityPub was on or off by default, next to the branding. So Osada, which had seen a stable release along with Zap, was discontinued yet again. But along with Zap, Zot6 had matured and brought a new feature along with itself, namely a magic single sign-on system named OpenWebAuth which automatically detects users logged in on other instances.
In 2020, Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6 and equipped with OpenWebAuth. Also, Mike made three new forks based on Zap to work on Zot8, another Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Mistpark 2020, also known as Misty. The intention appeared to be to have three states of development, but in fact, all three always shared the same code, save for the branding. Mike would later admit that the actual reason why he made three forks was to confuse the brand fetishists. Crossgrading between all three and Zap was possible.
Probably because the new Osada and Misty were actually used for public instances, Mike forked one of the three into a new project named Roadhouse in early 2021. Zot was about to reach a point at which it would become incompatible with previous Zot versions. So Zot11, which Roadhouse was based upon, was renamed Nomad. Zap, the third Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Misty could be upgraded to Roadhouse by rebasing the server code.
In October of 2021, Mike forked Roadhouse into a successor which he intentionally left nameless and brandless. He released most of it into the public domain with the exception of some contributions to official add-ons whose licenses he left untouched. This combination made it unfeasible for commercial software companies to try and relicense the whole thing to something proprietary and non-free. It also had most nodeinfo code removed, it doesn't transmit any statistics, and it is intentionally kept away from Fediverse project and instance listing sites. These probably couldn't crawl for and discover instances anyway because this server application is the only one in the Fediverse with an easily customisable and therefore not unified identifier for server instances.
The code repository with this software inside needed a name, though, and so it was named streams.
When the word about this software spread, enthusiasts decided they needed something to call this software by instead of just referring to the repository. So they started calling it (streams) in parentheses. It was originally intended for other developers to fork and use in their own work, but people started running vanilla (streams) instances.
(streams) was simplified further in order to make development and maintenance easier. In addition to its own Nomad protocol and Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, it only supports ActivityPub. But ActivityPub support was moved from an add-on into the core because Nomad allowed for a closer integration of ActivityPub than Zot6 for which non-nomadic protocols are a hindrance. Even the RSS and Atom aggregator was removed, as well as support for multiple profiles per channel. On the other hand, the permissions system was improved further over Hubzilla's.
Unlike its four predecessors, (streams) was considered a stable release, as was its Nomad protocol. On New Year's Eve of 2022, Mike officially discontinued Zap, Osada, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 and Roadhouse. Instances of all five could be upgraded to (streams).
In 2023, Mike began to work on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub itself. One goal was to one day make Nomad and Zot superfluous. The other goal was to make it possible for the whole Fediverse to become nomadic beyond project borders. FEP-ef61 was to become a key element in this work, and (streams) became the development platform.
In August of 2024, Mike forked a new project named Forte off the streams repository, the first and so far only (streams) fork. Its exact goal is still unclear, but it might be what Mike will use to experiment with new features and developments, seeing as (streams) has unexpectedly become a daily driver for a few dozen users already.
# # # # # # # # #
(2/2)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuoteTweet #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost Well, there are essentially four options.
One, links, and you click them. You can choose yourself what information to look up, and you can get all information you need in a nicely short post.
Two, I serve you all explanations that you may need on a silver platter in my post. That may be 25,000 characters of explanation then which everyone will have to endure. This poll which I've run two months ago, hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/aeb3fcf9-48d4-44c8-88e0-b70c2336a512, has shown me that people do not want me to explain things in 25,000 characters in my meme posts.
Three, links, but you don't click on them. And you won't understand the image macro because you've got no idea what e.g. FEP-ef61 is. Or (streams) or Hubzilla or whatever else I've memed about.
Four, no links. Outcome see three, but this time, I'm to blame.
For completion's sake, I'll reveal the links in my previous comment. And since you don't want to open links, I'll have to explain everything myself right here.
First link: https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemesonstreamscat=Memes
This link leads to the (streams) channel which I've created to meme the Fediverse.
(streams) is the colloquial name of an intentionally nameless, brandless Fediverse server application created by Mike Macgirvin in 2021. While it is federated with Mastodon, it works a whole lot different from Mastodon. Its fork history can be traced back to two more of Mike's creations which still exist today, Friendica from 2010 and Hubzilla from 2015 which I'm replying to you from right now.
A "channel" on Hubzilla and (streams) is akin to an account on Mastodon, i.e. a Fediverse identity with everything that belongs to it. Posts, connections, settings, stored files etc. Hubzilla and (streams) refer to them as "channels" because they are independent from the actual accounts. Hubzilla and (streams) do not store your identity directly in your account like Mastodon does. Instead, they put it into a container called "channel" of which you can have multiple independent ones on the same account.
The third link is a mention of the self-same channel.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
And nomadic identity is not a vague concept. It isn't futuristic technology either. It has been reality in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon has been around. It was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 and then implemented in his own Zot protocol. Zot, in turn, was first implemented in 2012 in a project named Red, later the Red Matrix, known since 2015 as . And almost everything that Mike has made after Hubzilla had or still has nomadic identity implemented.
I'm writing to you from Hubzilla right now, so yes, it's very much part of the Fediverse. It's a rock-solid daily driver with a stable release (9.4.3).
Nomadic identity does not do away with a domain being part of your ID. What it does away with is the connection between account and identity and the connection between server and identity.
Nomadic identity means that your identity with everything that belongs to it (profile, posts, comments, DMs, connections, files, settings etc. etc. pp.) is no longer bound to any one Fediverse server. It can exist on multiple servers simultaneously. Not as dumb copies, but as clones. Bidirectional, live, hot backups in near-real-time.
Your identity always has one main instance which also lends the domain name. In addition, it can have one or multiple copies on different servers of your choice. Your accounts only serve to grant you access to the instances of your identity on a specific server. The main instance and the clones are constantly sync'd against each other in both directions. For example, after I've sent this comment, it was mirrored over to my clone.
Notice how I've written "bidirectional". For I can also log into my clone and use it just the same as my main instance. This is useful for when the server with my main instance on it is offline. When it comes back online, everything that has happened on my clone in the meantime is being sync'd to the main instance.
Granted, Mastodon and most of the rest of the Fediverse don't understand nomadic identity. When I post from my clone, they take my clone as an independent account with the ID
Even "moving instances" is greatly facilitated. For example, if the server with the main instance of my channel shuts down permanently, I can make my clone my new main instance. That's easy-peasy: two mouse clicks and some 15 minutes of letting things settle, also because Hubzilla will have to go around and change all my connections from
You've read that right: If you move, nomadic identity makes your nomadic followers automatically follow you at your new home. What's beyond science-fiction on Mastodon has been daily-driven reality on Hubzilla since its inception in 2015.
While nomadic identity currently only has stable support via Mike's Zot and Nomad protocols and on Hubzilla and (streams), its implementation using only ActivityPub has been in the making since last year.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #DecentralizedIdentity #DecentralisedIdentity #NomadicIdentity #ActivityPub #Zot #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Well, Or do you think I should stop relying on external links for explanations and go back to explaining everything myself, regardless of the ensuing
Oh, by the way: Yes, what's behind the links is still very much the Fediverse, even though it isn't Mastodon. Yes, Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams) is federated with Mastodon. And I'm trying to comply with Mastodon's idea of how meme pics and other images should be described.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
That's what I already do.
But first of all, my original images are an edge-case not covered by accessibility rules. They are from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Nobody knows anything about them. Non-sighted people don't know what anything in them looks like. But they may want to know, also because I expect this topic to make at least a few people curious.
Sighted people may completely ignore the context and start exploring this new and unknown universe by looking around in the image, especially if it is more detailed. I mean, I'm not talking about simplified, cartoonish worlds like Meta Horizons. Non-sighted people may want to do the same, but they can't, and yet, they've got the right to do it. So they need my help: I have to explain details that don't matter in the context of the post.
More often, actually, the whole image matters because the post is either about the image itself or about everything in it. To repeat myself: Everything in the image is unknown and unfamiliar to both sighted and non-sighted people. But both sighted and non-sighted people may be very curious about everything. And so I have to describe everything and explain it if necessary. In contrast to real-life photographs, I can hardly assume anything to be already known and skip it in my descriptions.
Lastly, as I've already said: Mastodon is different from the rest of the Fediverse, from all other social media and from blogs and static websites. The rest of the Fediverse doesn't care for image descriptions. The rest of the Web is all geared towards alt-text that's as short as possible, also because HTML allows stuff like captions in special places in addition to alt-text and such. If your alt-text is over 200 characters long, you're doing it wrong.
Mastodon, on the other hand, loves long, detailed image descriptions to bits and pieces. It loves, loves, loves them. A real-life photo of one blossom in front of a blurry background, 800 characters of alt-text, and Mastodon applauds. Add another 200 characters of whimsy, and the blind Mastodon users applaud even more.
I'm not even kidding. Let the same image be described by an average human and an AI. The whimsical 750-character alt-text from the AI makes accessibility professionals scream in agony, but it makes blind Mastodon users cheer with joy, regardless of how accurate it is. The 200-character human-written alt-text makes accessibility professionals give thumbs up, but it makes blind Mastodon users yawn and fire up the AI on their phones for something more detailed and more whimsical.
Not few Mastodon users like image descriptions the more, the longer and more detailed they are. I'm still not kidding. And I'm still talking about real-life photos where lots of things are correctly assumed to be familiar, don't matter or both.
As I've already said, my virtual world renderings require even more detailed descriptions because nothing in them is familiar. And so my strategy has to be a little bit different: I describe each one of my original images twice.
The first description is the long description: a full, detailed description that goes into the post itself where I don't have any character limits. It contains visual descriptions of everything. It contains transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, regardless of whether the text is readable at the given image resolution or not. And it contains all necessary explanations, starting with well over 1,000 characters which explain where the image is from. This long description regularly grows several tens of thousands of characters long.
The second description is the "short" one which goes into the alt-text. The alt-text always mentions that there is a long, detailed description in the post, hidden behind a summary of the post plus a content warning due to the length of the post and maybe other things.
But I expect there to be alt-text extremists on Mastodon who absolutely insist in there being a useful image description in the alt-text even if there are already (caution: these descriptions are outdated), and even if the alt-text itself mentions these descriptions. And so I have to give this second description.
I have to shorten it dramatically so that it fits into the 1,500-character limit imposed by Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks. Granted, I have to cut the explanations because explanations do not belong into alt-text because not everyone can access alt-text. But I also have to cut most visual details. I have to cut the mere mentions of many elements in the image. I usually also have to cut the text transcripts, for one, because the visual details that mention where these bits of text are had to be cut, and besides, because all text in the image combined may exceed the 1,500 characters itself already or at least take up way too much space.
As of late, my alt-texts tend to be either exactly 1,500 characters or only missing one or two characters.
Even get lengthy descriptions. In this case, one alt-text measures 1,500 characters, the other one is one character short. The long descriptions are over 20,000 characters combined, i.e. almost 11,000 characters for the common preamble for both images, over 2,800 characters for the first image and almost 6,600 characters for the second image.
My personal record is : Again, 1,500 characters of alt-text of which a bit over 1,400 characters are actual image description and over 60,000 characters of long image description.
Oh, and by the way, in case you're unfamiliar with the places I've linked to: They're both part of the Fediverse. They're all federated with Mastodon. And yet, they both have no character limits and support for inline images.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #VirtualWorlds When I check alt-text at all, it's to see how others write it. It can help me extrapolate what kinds of image descriptions Mastodon wants with what kinds of visual details in it. Mastodon still seems to love long and detailed alt-texts whereas the whole rest of the Fediverse doesn't care for image descriptions at all.
But I think the last new thing I've picked up from other users' alt-texts is the camera position and angle which I only put into the long description, and that was a while ago.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta I do both. A "short" description (1,200-1,400 characters) in the alt-text, purely visual, sometimes with text transcripts if they still fit in. And a long, highy detailed description (often tens of thousands of characters) with transcripts of all text within the borders of the image and all explanations that I deem necessary.
After all, one can never know who needs to know what, or who is curious about what, especially when you post images about a very obscure but potentially interesting topic.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Sooner or later, Letterbook will encounter content coming in from instances of software created by Mike Macgirvin , namely , (these two are actually older than Mastodon), or . For reference: I am on Hubzilla.
You/it will have to expect and be able to deal with the following:
- Enclosed one-post-many-comments conversations instead of threads that consist of posts loosely tied together
- Permissions of all comments/replies firmly defined by the start post permissions/visibility can't be changed within a running conversation
- "Monster posts" of any length because none of them has a character limit
- Not just Note-type objects, but also Article-type objects (from Friendica right now, the others may implement them once Mastodon introduces sensible support for them)
- Full HTML text formatting, up to and including numbered lists, tables, horizontal lines, character size and character colour
- Both quotes (as done in bulletin-board forums) and quote-posts (posts fully embedded in other posts like quote-tweets)
- Embedded links (this comment makes a whole lot of use of them)
- Inline images embedded within the text, and more than four of these in one post
- Inline audio streams embedded within the text
- Inline videos embedded within the text
- "Weird" mentions and hashtags with the or the # not part of the link (look at the mentions and the hashtags in this comment, then look at mentions and hashtags on Mastodon and compare them)
- "Summaries in the CW field" (because Mastodon repurposed StatusNet's summary field, which was used by StatusNet, Friendica and Hubzilla as an actual summary field, for content warnings in 2017 several Fediverse server apps continue to use it for summaries)
- All four support titles in addition to summaries
Some of the above may also come in from elsewhere, e.g. a wider range of text formatting than Mastodon allows itself to render is fully supported by just about everything that isn't Mastodon.
Also, ActivityPub is currently evolving. New FEPs are being put to use and bringing in new features far away from how Mastodon is working. In particular, (streams) and Forte and 's use decentralised identifiers as per . Forte has fully implemented via ActivityPub while (streams) at least supports it. And all three have implemented, silverpill wants to make them , and Hubzilla is planning to implement them with version 10.
This means three things. One, weird identifiers. Two, weird actor identities: What looks like one user automatically cross-posting to another account on another instance to non-nomadic ActivityPub implementations is actually the very same actor residing simultaneously on multiple server instances. Three, again, conversations work drastically different from Twitter and Mastodon.
Lastly, it may be a good idea to implement a little server type display from the get-go so that the user knows what kind of Fediverse instance something comes from. Misskey and its forks have it, Friendica has it, (streams) has it, Forte has it. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea not to have it. Besides, if content from certain server applications malfunctions on Letterbook, users can pinpoint right away what server application causes that trouble when submitting a bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #ConversationContainers #FEPef61 #NomadicIdentity
For example, nomadic identity has been in Zot Protocol before Bluesky even started. It might be older than Mastodon too, I am not sure.
Nomadic identity is older than Mastodon. By some four years.
Mastodon is from 2016. Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 and first implemented on Red in 2012. First implementation in a stable release was in 2013 when the Red Matrix got stable. Oh, and Hubzilla itself is from 2015 it pre-dates Mastodon by ten months AFAIR.
It's fair to mention that has had since before the Twitter Migration and before Bluesky was launched.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NomadicIdentity
Long Covid - stuff that helps me
I guess this is many OpenSim users' wet dream:One click of a button, maybe a bit of configuration first, and within a split-second, your flat and barren land turns into a meticulously AI-crafted sim. No matter how big your land may be, even if it's a 16x16 varsim (that's 256 standard regions for you Second Life users for those of you who don't know either, that's a square of 4x4 km or 2.5x2.5 miles) which is not the biggest you can have, but the biggest you should have. The land is neatly, sensibly and precisely organised in parcels.
Of course, it isn't just one non-functional textured blob of mesh that's nice to behold. It's actually built like a typical sim in OpenSim, namely out of single assets with neatly terraformed land underneath. The vast majority of these assets were created on-the-fly specifically for this sim.
All objects have perfectly optimised meshes with LODs and support for both BulletSim and ubODE physics, regardless of what physics you have on the sim. All of them have super-realistic PBR textures at whatever resolution makes the most sense with Blinn-Phong fallbacks that look as close to the PBR textures as Blinn-Phong can possibly look to PBR. Optionally, the non-PBR textures don't even feature Blinn-Phong normal and specular maps instead, they have highlights, shadows, reflections etc. baked on for people on toasters with on-board graphics.
The quality of everything is beyond anything you can buy in Second Life nowadays, it's also beyond any free or commercial content available in OpenSim, and still, it lacks any AI-typical quirks.
All doors have the same lightweight script that still provides realistic motion, including individual opening and closing sounds for each kind of door. The same goes even for windows, curtains and blinds where it makes sense. Certain doors can even be configured to limit access.
Also, everything that's made to sit or lie on is scripted. You can even choose the script: either by default an improved version of SFposer that makes it possible to save individual positions and orientations or, if you prefer that because you're more familiar with it, AVsitter with a bunch of plug-ins. Likewise, lots of other objects are scripted to be interactive if it makes sense.
Many things that would be light sources in real life are light sources in-world. They're mostly point light sources, but a very few ones are projectors. They all emit realistic tones of light and not white #FFFFFF. Some light sources may be controlled by scripts to turn on and off depending on the position of the Sun. Others may be timer-controlled. In residential buildings, lights can be switched between off, on and a configurable timer with individual default values. All light control scripts also change full-bright and glowing settings or even replace entire textures if necessary. Still, they're all very lightweight.
The AI also takes care of EEP. At the very least, it generates a custom EEP daycycle for the sim with realistic Sun and Moon movements, depending on where the sim is supposed to be located. But it can also define a whole number of daycycles and add a script that switches between them monthly, weekly or even daily. If you want to, even the weather can change. Sunny, cloudy, overcast, you can optionally even have rain or snow all over the whole sim.
Speaking of which, if the EEP daycycles change over the year, so do the objects on the sim. Most objects outside have at least one snowy version. Snowdrifts and piles of snow pop up in winter. While we're at it, plants change over the year. Flowers start and stop blooming, trees gradually change the colours of their leaves in autumn and shed them in late autumn, not to have any leaves on them until well into spring. That is, of course, everything depending on where you want your sim to be located.
The sim in general and certain parcels individually can be configured to rez and de-rez decoration for certain holidays at certain times in the year. Holidays from all over the world are supported. This can go all the way to a whole German-style Christmas market rezzing in a certain area and de-rezzing after Christmas.
You want public transit Buses Streetcars Trains Ferries No problem: The AI crafts the vehicles, it builds the tracks if necessary, it defines the keyframes for vehicle motion, and it puts custom scripts into the vehicles that control not only vehicle motion, but also doors, sounds, even lights and rezzing and de-rezzing personnel if necessary.
Speaking of which, the AI can bring the sim to life with animesh and, where they work better, NPCs. The latter can even be interactive. Of course, there can be scripted sources of various ambient noises all over the place to make it more immersive.
If you want your sim listed on OpenSimWorld, the AI can do that for you. It can install one of the current official beacons, an older-style beacon running up-to-date code or a completely custom beacon running up-to-date code. In this case, it also assumes control over your OpenSimWorld account, or it creates one if you don't have one, it generates the entry on the website, it configures it correctly and even writes a description. It either matches the rating in the listing with that on your sim, or it figures out which rating the sim should have and adjusts it both in-world an in the listing.
By the way: AI means "Artificial Intelligence". If you don't want child avatars on your sim, the AI will put up signs that say that child avatars are not allowed or even install an improved, optimised childgate script. But it will not rate your sim Adult just to keep kids out even though the sim itself would work perfectly well with a Moderate or even General rating.
Things really get interesting if you want the AI to build a freebie sim for you. A fully stocked one, of course, no matter if you want some small boutiques on a town sim or a sim that's nothing else than a huge mall.
For starters, there'll be avatar stuff. The AI can stock your body shop with
- what few actually legal mesh bodies there are
- the usual full-perm suspects in their most recent versions
- bodies, heads and other things that are exclusive to another sim, copybotted and god-moded by the AI for your convenience and hung up either full-perm or no-transfer
- any of the above, but improved and optimised by the AI with a remark on the box art, either full-perm or no-transfer, optionally even re-branded as your original creation with all-new box art (the AI will resist being asked to do so with legal, open-source bodies)
- scratch-made mesh bodies, heads etc. that outclass all of the above, and again, no-transfer by default and optionally full-perm
Most items are probably clothes. The AI can whip up more boxes of these than even Grimm offers. The clothes are rigged for whichever bodies you have in your body shop. And they're rigged so perfectly for all of them that nobody will ever need alphas for these clothes in combination with the bodies from this sim. The same clothes come in several variants for example, certain female clothes in particular are rigged skin-tight, with enough room for mesh underwear, with enough room for mesh bodysuits and even with enough room for mesh hosiery. Styles can range from practical to retro to historical to futuristic to cosplay to badass to formal to partywear to bridalwear to chic to bling-bling to sexy to racy to fetishwear and outright NSFW, depending on what avatars they're for, and they're all optional.
Of course, all clothes, footwear, jewellery, accessories etc. support PBR with a fallback that you can choose, either Blinn-Phong or everything baked on.
The original, AI-generated decoration on the sim, the buildings, the streets and paths, the plants etc. and the scripts can optionally be boxed up and offered in stores itself. If you want to, the AI can generate even more similar content to fill up the stores some more.
The wholly original content in the stores can be offered
- for free and copy/transfer
- for free, but no-transfer
- for in-game currencies, if available, and no-transfer (the prices will be calculated from prices in other payware stores, the Kitely Market and the Second Life Marketplace, and they can be adjusted within a small margin prior to generation)
- in all three cases, optionally no-modify or with loose textures
- free and full-perm content can optionally come with full dev kits including raw meshes and UV maps
The AI puts all original content under a license of your choice, even helping you choose. Copyright/all rights reserved is an option as well as the public domain. Notecards with license texts and, if applicable, links to the original license definitions are added to all assets.
It optionally adds all original content to your inventory, neatly organised into folders. You can choose to get
- everything boxed
- everything unboxed
- both
- plus boxes with the loose parts (meshes, textures and maps, scripts, license notecards etc.)
The AI can also download all the loose components to your computer if you choose so, all the way to raw development files (meshes as Blender files, textures as Photoshop and GIMP files etc.).
And it can even generate git repositories and upload all loose components to these if the license allows, and if you have a git account somewhere, and be it on your own machine.
The AI can do all this within the blink of an eye. All that takes time are the downloads to your computer, the uploads to your computer and/or a git server and, of course, the sim rezzing around you.
By the way, there used to be a time when building your own sim and even crafting your own stuff was part of the fun. Nowadays, not only does using the same mostly ripped buildings as everyone else beat making your own ones, but downloading OARs and leaving them largely unmodified save for the OSW beacon beats building your own sim. And ready-made mesh skyboxes stolen from Second Life beat decorating sims.
New GPU technology creates dynamic 3D worlds
In cooperation with AMD, the Coburg University of Applied Sciences has developed a GPU technology that generates complex virtual scenes in milliseconds.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #QuotePost #QuoteTweet #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #SimBuilding #AI Let's see. Literally.
- The "cat" in quotation marks is an anthropomorphic creature with a head somewhere between a cat and a wolf and a muscle-packed, human-like body which is nonetheless covered in grey fur. It doesn't have paws either but human-like hands with fingernails, or rather, whatever the image-generating AI thought cartoonish human hands look like. It does not have any recognisable hind legs.
- The creature isn't grinning. It has its mouth wide open.
- The Empire State Building was identified accurately. The buildings on both of its sides, however, are not the skyline of New York City. Rather, it's generic buildings of various sizes, approaching a point in the distance somewhere behind the Empire State Building. Also, they aren't in the background many
- The "smoke" is just some orange clouds behind these buildings that have no logical explanation to itself. They're just there for dramatic effect. There are more layers of clouds behind these clouds, mostly even behind the cat. The first row is only orange at the top for no reason at all and otherwise grey, the others very light grey at the top.
- Nothing in the image is actually being destroyed.
That's a short version, by the way.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription It didn't end up quite that bad.
Mike has officially retired from Fediverse development. However, he does carry on, also because nobody else does. Much more slowly than until his "retirement", but he does.
He still occasionally works on both the streams repository and Forte. They even get new features.
I think the reason for his retirement announcement could be due to the utterly stressful situation in summer. He had switched the release branch of the streams repository, the code that actually runs on most instances, to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. But what must have worked well under limited lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions to the point of next to nothing federating anymore.
Essentially, he had planted rather experimental code into something which people considered a stable daily driver and used as a stable daily driver. After all, on New Year's Eve 2022, (streams) had superseded and replaced not only four experimental projects (the third Osada, Misty, Redmatrix 2020, Roadhouse), but also Zap which had been declared stable in 2019.
Anyway, Mike had to rush and try to fix people's daily drivers. He didn't even know right off the bat what was wrong, so a whole lot of his spare time must have flown into trying to find the issue. And then he had to find a way to fix it. AFAIK, the issue, by the way, was that (streams) had to deal with so many IDs for the same content that it got them mixed up after DIDs were put on top.
In mid-August, some two weeks before his retirement announcement, he forked Forte from the streams repository and reduced it to only ActivityPub by removing any and all support for both Nomad and Zot6. There could have been three reasons behind this.
One, Mike had realised that he needed to make an experimental code repository to play with instead of playing with people's daily driver, just like he had done in the past.
The reason why he handed Friendica over to the community in 2012, which he had announced in late 2011 already, was so that he could concentrate on nomadic identity, the Zot protocol and Red, later the Red Matrix instead of experimenting with highly volatile new technology on Friendica and, at the same time, maintaining it for its users.
The reason why he handed Hubzilla over to the community in 2018 was so that he could concentrate on Zot6, Osada and Zap instead of experimenting with experimenting with highly volatile new technology on Hubzilla and, at the same time, maintaining it for its users.
What Mike was working on this summer was the implementation of nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. FEP-ef61 and the decentralised IDs were one step towards it. So one reason could be because he realised that putting new technology into people's daily drivers, especially at the very real risk of it turning out to be highly volatile, was not so smart after all. Forte would be his new development sandbox.
Two, in order to efficiently work on the implementation of decentralised IDs and eventually nomadic identity via ActivityPub, he needed stuff out of the way. Namely Zot and Nomad. One of the reasons why Zap only supported Zot for a while: It was easier to tinker with Zot6 without ActivityPub, the diaspora* protocol etc. in the way.
And three, he must have understood why (streams) had blown up, namely the clashing IDs. So he had to rip Nomad and Zot6 out of (streams) to get rid of their specific IDs and clear stuff up a whole lot.
However, after forking Forte, he had two software repositories to tend to, the still half-broken daily driver in the streams repository and the highly experimental Forte. This became too much, so he decided to step down at the end of the month. He wanted the community to take over.
As it turned out, he didn't want to stop entirely. That would have meant that Forte was stillborn, what with there not even being a single known instance of it. As I've said, Mike is carrying on.
But he wanted the community to join in and at least take over maintenance work for (streams) and, as far as that'd be possible at any given time, also Forte. After all, Forte still is a (streams) soft fork that pretty much only differs in branding (which (streams) doesn't have), nodeinfo code (which (streams) doesn't have) and support for other protocols (which was removed from Forte). So anything done on (streams) could just as well do on Forte.
Now, here was the problem: Friendica had thousands of users when Mike passed it on. Hubzilla had thousands of users when Mike passed it on. (streams) only had two dozen active users on October 31st, 2024, probably even fewer. Not a single one of them was a capable coder with both the skills and the spare time.
Mike had been actively advertising (streams) in the Fediverse since 2023. This was in stark contrast to Friendica and Hubzilla which lived on "if you build it, they will come". Still, hardly anyone came. And the few who came either came from Hubzilla, or they came from one of the projects between Hubzilla and (streams) by upgrading their private instance to (streams). To my best knowledge, there was not a single immigrant from Mastodon, not even from Friendica.
That wasn't because, at the end of the day, only Hubzilla users knew about (streams). Again, Mike did advertise it, and Mastodon users noticed it and reacted upon it.
Rather, on Hubzilla's side, it was because Hubzilla users didn't see any advantage in (streams). All they knew about (streams) was that it was allegedly Hubzilla with stuff cut away. So why switch to something that can do less than Hubzilla That's also because nobody ever did a (streams) test drive and wrote about it.
Generally, it was because of some of Mike's decisions for (streams). When he forked Roadhouse into (streams), he took away the name and the branding. This was intentional in order to spite the brand fetishists. Same reason why he still had five other projects cooking, three of them with identical code. However, how do you get people interested in using something that doesn't even have a name
Also, he removed most nodeinfo code, and he did what it took to keep (streams) away from instance lists such as on FediDB and Fediverse Observer. Along with the lack of branding, it's impossible to use crawlers to find (streams) instances.
In combination, however, this made it practically impossible to find a public (streams) instance to join and test (streams). Still today, the only places where (streams) instances are listed are, wait for it, now it comes, (streams) instances. You have to know one to find more.
Still today, the vast majority of (streams) users are Hubzilla veterans on their own instances which they've set up without even testing (streams) on someone else's instances first. The Brazilian public and open-registration instance Diversi Spiritus doesn't have a single active non-admin user. Even the US-based juggernaut that's Rumbly doesn't seem to have a single active user who doesn't administrate a (streams) instance. I think there are not even five (streams) users who aren't instance admins. (streams) is that hard to find.
This also makes it difficult to find new potential developers: You can't use Mastodon and immediately start coding away on (streams). You have to understand (streams) first. It's the polar opposite of Mastodon, so-to-speak. This means that you have to use it as a daily driver for at least a few months until you've gotten used to it, really grokked it and stopped wishing it's more like Twitter and Mastodon.
But it's hard to get new people on board with only one instance to send them to, potential issues still lurking around the corner and only Mike being able to fix them.
Whether (streams) will survive depends on whether it'll find new maintainers when Mike abandons it. Chances are that once Forte is ready for prime time, Mike will abandon (streams). But who's left on it probably won't want to part with it. Still having the Nomad protocol and the ability to turn ActivityPub off, mostly considered an anti-Mastodon measure, will probably still be seen as a killer feature after Mike's recent introduction of an instance-wide filter that can be configured to lock out entire Fediverse projects. After all, the user-agent filter currently only works on an instance level and not on a channel level.
Mike will definitely go on developing at least Forte. Forte is his vision of the Fediverse in 2030, and it's clear to see how disgruntled he is about Mastodon if you follow his posts. Since (streams) is still a Forte soft fork, he'll continue also adding to (streams) what he adds to Forte for the time being.
Currently, Forte has only got one actor on one instance connected to the Fediverse. That's Mike himself on his private instance which he has switched from (streams) to Forte. And three days ago was the very first time a message went out from Forte into the Fediverse. That is, probably the Fediverse minus Mastodon and Threads because I guess Mike's private instance has both Mastodon and Threads blacklisted in the user agent filter. But still, it's another baby step.
Also, Forte is more likely to succeed than (streams). Unlike (streams), Forte is a project, it has a name, it has a branding (which still isn't hard-coded, by the way, AFAIK), and it has nodeinfo. Mike has come to realise that, much to his chagrin, all this is needed for Fediverse software to succeed in what he considers a Mastodon-driven Fediverse. Seriously, it's necessary because an Fediverse server application cannot succeed if there's no way to crawl and list and find its public instances because the maintainer actively, intentionally prevents any of this from happening.
Forte may pretty well become a success. It all depends on who'll be the early adopters, especially the first Fedizens to run public instances of Forte without having seen it first.
Friendica's early adopters came either from Facebook or out of nowhere. Maybe a few came from StatusNet. But they were willing to try something entirely new and revolutionary since it promised to blow everything else there was out of the water. Which it did.
Hubzilla's early adopters came from Friendica. They had ignored the Red Matrix which was not much more than Friendica with nomadic identity, and nomadic identity was deemed useless if you were on your own private instance anyway. Friendica had loads of self-hosters. But Hubzilla with its plethora of CMS and groupware features was more interesting.
I don't know where Forte's early adopters could possibly come from. Only few Hubzilla users have been willing to give (streams) a try, what with all the features they have to give up. If they were to try Forte, they'd have to give up even more, namely protocols that are nomadic by basic design and the per-channel ActivityPub killswitch.
Friendica users would at least have to get used to some differences in handling, nomadic identity, the concept of channels and "channels" meaning something else on Forte than on Friendica. Besides, Friendica is the Island of the Sirens in the Fediverse that you never want to leave again.
Now, Mastodon users would have the best reasons to try Forte. Lots of features that Mastodon users want, but that the Mastodon devs refuse to add, are available on Forte. But let's face it, going from Mastodon to Friendica is a much bigger change than going from to Mastodon. Going from Mastodon to Forte would be an even bigger change. Unexpectedly so for those who expect everything in the Fediverse to be Mastodon with more characters and extra stuff glued on. Mastodon users who set up a Forte instance may give it up within days or weeks because it isn't the dolled-up Mastodon they expected.
Unfortunately, the most likely source of early adopters willling to even run a public Forte instance is the (streams) community at the risk of bleeding out further, especially if Forte should reach a point at which it's more reliable than (streams).
When Forte is ready for prime-time, the vicious circle of no users, no public instances and no public instances, no users will have to be broken. Unfortunately, (streams) itself is on the edge of this vicious circle.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #Forte
schiet wie erwartet durch die Decke. Diesen Trade knnt ihr bei jeder US-Prsidentschaftswahl machen.
Find the latitdue and longitude of any placeDolphins In Depth: Dolphins seasons on life support heading into Bills week
Ich wei nichts von diesen "Hooligans", zu denen offenbar die wenigsten hier gehren mich sprechen sie nicht an, deshalb kann ich ihnen nicht antworten, so wie damals den Leuten, die ihr Twitter vermissten.
Klar, du gehrst ja auch nicht zu ihrer Zielgruppe. Du machst in deren Augen ja auch nichts falsch. Du kannst ja auch nichts falsch machen auf einer Mastodon-Instanz mit maximal 500 Zeichen.
Niemand kann im Fediverse allgemein gltige Regeln einfhren. Schon gar keine User:innen.
Da es keiner kann, heit nicht, da es keiner versucht. Und versucht wird es durchaus.
Wie gesagt, du auf Standard-Vanilla-Mastodon strst da niemanden. Das kannst du gar nicht. Du hast nur die 500 Zeichen, die im Fediverse als Standard durchgedrckt werden sollen. Du hast keine Textformatierung, du kannst nicht zitieren, du kannst nicht quote-posten und so weiter. Du hast gar nicht die Mglichkeiten, das zu tun, was diese Leute verbieten wollen.
Aber frag mal jemanden, der auf Friendica ist. Oder auf Hubzilla (Fork (eins Forks) von Friendica von Friendicas eigenem Erfinder). Oder auf (streams) (Fork eines Forks dreier Forks eines Forks (eines Forks) von Hubzilla, wieder vom selben Schpfer). Oder auf Forte (Fork von (streams), wieder vom selben Schpfer, der erst seit gut zwei Monaten existiert und erst vorgestern seinen ersten Schritt ins Fediverse getan hat).
Da gibt's im Grunde kein Zeichenlimit. Dafr aber Textformatierung locker auf bestem Blog-Niveau. Ebenso Zitate und Quote-Posts. Und noch so einiges mehr. Und das strt da niemanden. Das ist da ganz normal.
Aber auf Mastodon, da stren sich einige dran. An all dem. Und dann werden die "Eindringlinge in Mastodons Fediverse" aufgefordert, das wieder einzustellen, und zwar mitunter ziemlich unfreundlich. Ich sollte es wissen, ich bin selbst auf Hubzilla.
Nur: Das ist nicht Mastodons Fediverse. War es nie. Und das sind auch keine Eindringlinge. Hubzilla ist zehn Monate lnger im Fediverse als Mastodon. Friendica ist fnfeinhalb Jahre lnger im Fediverse als Mastodon. Und als Mastodon startete, hat es sich sofort mit beiden und mit StatusNet verbunden. Zu dem Zeitpunkt hatten beide lngst eine eigene lebende und funktionierende Kultur.
Und heute, mehr als 14 Jahre, nachdem Friendica gestartet wurde, verlangen Mastodon-Nutzer von Friendica-Nutzern, die selbst schon seit vor dem Mastodon-Start dabei sind, ihre "langen Posts" (= alles ber 500 Zeichen) in Schnipsel von nicht mehr als 500 Zeichen aufzuteilen. Und wehe, die "Posts" nach dem ersten sind nicht auf "Unlisted" geschaltet. Friendica hat gar kein "Unlisted". Und so weiter.
Die fhren sich fast auf wie europische Kolonisten, die versuchen, Ureinwohner auf europische Kultur und das Christentum umzuerziehen, allerdings mit dem Unterschied, da die Kolonisten damals nicht geglaubt haben, die Ureinwohner seien nach ihnen gelandet.
Falls du immer noch glaubst, das seien alles Hirngespinste, hier noch ein paar Dinge:
Zunchst einmal sieh dir mal an, wie , der selbst auf Firefish ist, und seine Kontakte von Pleroma bis Friendica ber Mastodon schreiben. Das ist nicht unbedingt sehr schmeichelhaft. Warum wohl
Hubzilla basiert ja nicht auf ActivityPub, sondern auf Zot. Und selbst wenn nomadische Identitt ber ActivityPub stabil und zuverlssig nutzbar wird, wird Hubzilla am Zot-Protokoll festhalten. Der Grund ist ganz einfach der, da ActivityPub dann weiterhin optional, also auch kanalweise abgeschaltet bleiben kann. Oder zur Not auch auf einem ganzen Hub durch den Admin abgeschaltet werden kann.
Als Hubzilla-Nutzer kann man sich schon durch das Berechtigungssystem Strenfriede gut vom Hals schaffen. Aber Hubzilla will sich weiterhin die Option offenhalten, alles, was auf ActivityPub basiert, mit einem Schalter defderieren zu knnen.
Wenn (streams) weiter bestehen bleibt, drfte genau das der Grund sein. (streams) basiert auf Nomad, und ActivityPub ist auf neuen Kanlen standardmig aktiv, kann aber abgeschaltet werden, obwohl sich Nomad sehr gut mit ActivityPub vertrgt. Grund siehe oben.
(streams) und sein neuer, rein ActivityPub-basierter Fork Forte haben krzlich ein neues Feature bekommen namens "Uafilter", kurz fr "User Agent Filter". Das ist eigentlich fr Forte entwickelt worden, wo ActivityPub nicht mehr abzuschalten geht, weil das das einzige Protokoll ist, das Forte noch spricht. Diese Filterfunktion lscht nicht etwa wie Mastodon-Filter, sondern wie alle anderen Filter in diesem Teil des Fediverse sperrt sie. Sie ist in der Lage, ganze Fediverse-Projekte auszusperren. Sie ist tatschlich auch explizit dafr entwickelt worden, nicht nur Threads, sondern auch Mastodon als Ganzes instanzweit auszusperren. Und ich wage zu behaupten, das hat nicht nur damit zu tun, da Mastodon-Instanzen absurd viele absurd hufige und absurd umfangreiche Anfragen an andere Server stellen und diese damit regelrecht DDoSen.
Sollte dich das immer noch nicht berzeugen: Ich kenne ein ffentliches Forum auf (streams), wo ActivityPub absichtlich abgeschaltet wurde, um Mastodon auszusperren. Da damit auch alles andere auer (streams) selbst und Hubzilla drauen bleiben mu, ist ein in Kauf genommener Kollateralschaden.
Das sollte wohl Zeichen genug dafr sein, da das alles keine Hirngespinste sind.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonKultur #FediverseKultur #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) This could get the more interesting, the farther something is away from Mastodon.
Even if it can cope with Hubzilla which remains to be seen, I expect it to run into trouble when it has to deal with (streams). That's for two reasons:
One, (streams) is actually intentionally nameless and brandless and has next to no nodeinfo code, in case you need it. This also means that it doesn't have a unified instance identifier. Mastodon always identifies as "mastodon", as does Glitch. Pixelfed always identifies as "pixelfed". Lemmy always identifies as "lemmy". And so forth.
(streams) does not always identify as "streams" or "(streams)". (streams) instances may identify as whatever their admins want them to identify. The most important public instance identifies as "get ready to rumbly". Others have identified or still identify as "diversi spiritus" or "theshire" or "mordor" or "gondor" or "nomd". The creator and maintainer himself is on an instance branded "y" (because Y is not X). And so forth.
It's a free-text string that could be anything, including other Fediverse projects. In fact, this has actually happened in the past: (streams) instances can be upgraded from instances of Zap, the third Osada, Misty (a.k.a. Mistpark 2020), Redmatrix 2020 and Roadhouse (all five defunct as of New Year's Eve, 2022), and when this was done, the instances kept their old branding.
Good luck identifying (streams) instances and telling them from instances of everything else by the usual means.
Two, (streams) is one of the first two Fediverse server applications that have introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. Addresses may have "/.well-known/apgateway/did:key:(48 random letters and/or digits)/" in them. Not sure if that'll mess with the Observatory.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Streams #(streams) And yet, there are people trying to talk me out of it. For example, I shouldn't transcribe text that's so tiny that it isn't even recognisable in the image as text because it's only a blob of a dozen pixels. They say that or characters of description and explanations for one image are too much.
The only thing I'm reconsidering myself currently is whether to keep these monster descriptions in the post or put them into external documents and link to them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta It's strange to see what kinds of hardware have problems with Second Life and OpenSim, especially the Firestorm viewer.
I'm mostly on six-year-old upper-mid-range hardware. Ryzen 5 3600X, Radeon RX 590, both on a modest MSI B450 mainboard. This is far from high-end gaming hardware. OS is Debian, graphics driver is open-source and issued by Debian. I don't even have any configuration UI for my graphics hardware. Ask gamers, and they'll tell you I shouldn't be able to do anything with this setup.
And yet, Firestorm 7 gives me much higher frame rates with shadows on and a 256m viewing distance than Firestorm 6 gave me with shadows off and a 128m viewing distance. Even with crazy complex avatars around, I think I never go below 30fps. And I've got a 60fps cap myself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #FirestormViewer There's already a wide-spread eagerness to make alternatives to just about everything in the Fediverse.
It's like an Internet rule: "If it exists, someone wants to clone it into the Fediverse."
In fact, it has become difficult to bring the Fediverse to whip up something truly original that isn't a knock-off of anything outside the Fediverse. I guess both that feature monster Hubzilla and highly advanced (streams) are still too close to Facebook.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse A missed opportunity, a disappointment and actually a menace to the whole Fediverse.
Rochko and his cronies never wanted there to be a Fediverse. From the beginning in 2016 on, they didn't really care for interoperability with anything that wasn't Mastodon, regardless of whether Mastodon used OStatus or ActivityPub. Mind you, at no point in history has Mastodon not been federated with anything else.
Mastodon's goal has always been to be a Twitter clone. All the way to aping Twitter's shortcomings. Sometimes toned down, but still. Mind you, it's perfectly possible to build a decentralised microblogging platform without cloning Twitter, as proven by StatusNet which was launched some eight years before Mastodon, and which Mastodon was federated with from the get-go, by the way. Even then, the way Mastodon worked clashed with StatusNet, not to mention Friendica and Hubzilla which Mastodon federated and still federates with as well.
Mastodon has done little to mitigate these clashes unless they were undeniably bugs and filed in Mastodon's GitHub repository as such.
Its strategy seems to be different, and most of its own users help it: Make sure that everyone who wants to join the Fediverse joins Mastodon. Make it so that as many people and organisations as possible land on mastodon.social, the instance controlled by the gGmbH that's 22% of the whole Fediverse. And hide from them the fact that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon.
Mastodon could have made for a great gateway into the greater Fediverse. And I'm not talking about the Mastodon forks. I'm talking about Misskey and its forks. Pleroma and its forks. Even Friendica and its highly advanced, nomadic descendants.
Instead, for every single last Fediverse newbie, Mastodon is the Fediverse. Mass media tend to preach the same, and even some tech media talk about the Fediverse as "the Mastodon network" or a "network of Mastodon instances". They don't know better either, and they help miseducate the masses.
Your average Mastodon newbie spends at least several months of thinking the whole Fediverse is his nice, fluffy, cosy woolly mammoth and nothing else. And there are actually, I'm not kidding, people who have joined Mastodon in late October or early November of 2022 and still think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
Even if people discover that there are other things in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon, and these non-Mastodon things are even interacting with them, they've gotten so used to the Fediverse only being Mastodon that this revelation will not necessarily be a pleasant surprise. When they find out about Akkoma or Friendica or whatever, they don't necessarily end up intrigued and willing to jump ships.
Instead, at best, many still think that Rochko has invented the Fediverse and ActivityPub, and everything that isn't Mastodon is either bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or a Mastodon ripoff. They take Mastodon for the ActivityPub gold standard, and whatever is different from Mastodon on something that isn't Mastodon is either a bug or a design fault. Different from Mastodon equals broken.
It certainly doesn't help that the "Fediverse culture" is actually only Mastodon's culture, entirely defined and shaped by Twitter escapees who neither knew much about nor cared for the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. If there's such a thing as a "Fediquette", it's entirely geared towards only Mastodon. It does not acknowledge that other Fediverse projects may be different, may handle differently, may act differently and may actually have had their own culture for longer than Mastodon has been around. Thus, "Fediverse culture" is entirely built against Mastodon's features and Mastodon's shortcomings.
And so you have people who want to force the whole rest of the Fediverse to act exactly like Mastodon. No quote-posts, even if you've had them for longer than Mastodon has even existed. ( And they're all wrong.) No text formatting because it's disturbing, and/or Mastodon doesn't have it. No posts with even only a smidge over 500 characters, even if you've had no character limit at all since long before Mastodon was even made.
Of course, CWs for several hundred different more or less sensitive topics. Not knowing how because you don't have a field for CWs, and you don't know the BBcode tags for that (Friendica, (streams)) is not an excuse. Actually being unable to add Mastodon-style CWs to replies because it doesn't make sense to be able to add summaries for blog comments (Hubzilla) isn't an excuse either. Oh, and don't you dare use the CW field for a summary! Nobody wants to hear your claims that Mastodon's CW field has been a summary field where you are since before Mastodon got its CW field.
Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It's so different from Mastodon that it's almost the diametrical opposite of Mastodon. Being so much older also means that it has its own culture. This culture is much more welcoming towards other projects and platforms, seeing as one important raison d'tre for Friendica is federation with everything out there and then some.
But now there are many Mastodon users who want the Fediverse users, at least those whom they interact with, to abandon Friendica's culture, adopt Mastodon's culture instead and stop using 90% of Friendica's features because Mastodon doesn't have them.
So instead of being a gateway into the greater Fediverse, Mastodon is harbouring and cultivating an ignorant and obnoxious "Make the Fediverse only Mastodon" culture of hostility against anything and everything that's different from Mastodon while not appearing to be an add-on to Mastodon. And nothing is done to stop these tendencies. At least not on Mastodon.
No wonder that people from Pleroma to Firefish to Friendica to (streams) complain about rampant Mastodon-centrism that defines everything that's different from Mastodon as inherently wrong and in need of being "corrected".
No wonder, actually, that some places keep various options ready to lock Mastodon out. For example, one reason why Hubzilla will always keep its old Zot protocol, even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub becomes stable, is so that it can keep ActivityPub optional. This could also be one reason to keep (streams) going even after its ActivityPub-only fork Forte should be ready for prime-time. This is actually the reason why one particular forum on (streams) has turned ActivityPub off.
Speaking of the latter two, they've recently introduced an admin-controlled, instance-level "User Agent Filter" that's capable of locking out all instances of entire Fediverse projects. (streams) and Forte instances can now theoretically lock out and defederate from all Mastodon instances in one fell swoop. And this is not exactly a secret.
It's sad that it had to come to this.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #Fediquette I guess there are enough signs that my image descriptions are hand-written, especially for my original virtual world renderings.
- Alt-texts which lately keep reaching exactly 1,500 characters or only few characters short of that limit.
- Alt-texts that also mention an even longer image description in the post. And there is an even longer image description in the post. Who asks an AI to describe an image in lots of details and then again in even more details
- No AI can produce image descriptions with five-digit character counts like the long one in the post.
- Excessive detail information about an absolutely obscure niche topic in the long description.
- Description of visual details that aren't visible at the image's resolution.
- Transcripts of text that isn't legible or not even visible at the image's resolution.
- Sometimes I run an extra thread with an image-describing log.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Describing images would be a lot easier if the various Fediverse accessibility activists, the alt-text police and actually blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users had one common place to discuss Fediverse accessibility with each other. With all of each other without mention orgies.
And if "normal" users could go that place and ask them about edge-cases which your typical alt-text guides have no definite solutions for, so that these people can discuss these edge-cases with the asking users and with each other and come to a consensus.
But there's no such place, there are no such discussions, and there's next to no communication about Fediverse accessibility at all, other than, "Just do it, but oh, of course, do it the right way!" For any definition of "the right way" because there are too many such definitions that contradict each other.
Generally, blind and visually-impaired people ask to participate in accessibility decisions. But in the Fediverse, it's exactly that what they don't do, at least not beyond asking for alt-text for images. And I don't buy that they don't care about the content of the alt-text as long as there is something at all, and it seems halfway useful. I don't buy it.
If you've got lot of time to read, .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #A11y #AccessibilityDer Pepe (Hubzilla)
What I don't understand: Why did Zot/Nomad have to be kicked out
Probably due to the ID chaos.
Federation on (streams) went bellies-up with the introduction of FEP-ef61 DIDs due to the plethora of IDs everything had suddenly. All kinds of different IDs from conventional ActivityPub. Plus at least one Nomad ID. Plus at least one Zot6 ID. And now the DID on top. (streams) ended up being confused about this maze of IDs itself and used all the wrong IDs in all the wrong use-cases.
Remember how federation still was on the fritz in mid-August When Forte was forked off
One of the reasons Mike created Forte was to throw Nomad and Zot6 out without throwing Nomad and Zot6 out of (streams). It was probably a kind of quick fix to assume control over this ID chaos by removing the non-ActivityPub parts and, most importantly, the non-ActivityPub IDs.
That kind of lines up with what Mike did earlier. Like in 2018 when he made Osada and Zap, the two experimental development platforms for Zot6. Why didn't he do that in a development version of Hubzilla with all of Hubzilla's features still in place And, most importantly, only one development version with all the shebang
That's because in 2018, when Zot6 was only an idea, this idea had one big caveat: Mike's earliest concept of Zot6, especially its nomadic identity implementation, clashed with all other protocols.
So he created Zap that only spoke Zot6. Zap was only able to federate with Hubzilla because Zot6 was still sufficiently compatible with Hubzilla's version of Zot. Zap was the platform to develop the nomadic identity side of Zot6.
And he created Osada that spoke a bunch of other things, including ActivityPub and diaspora*. But it had no nomadic identity.
He slimmed both down a great deal. Articles, cards, wikis, webpages etc., it all had to go. Why To also slim down development. Otherwise he would have had to touch much, much more code. Besides, Hubzilla already had all that stuff. Same reason why (streams) can't subscribe to feeds anymore: less code to maintain and upgrade all the time.
The reason why the first Osada was discontinued was because it turned out that a) Zot6 could indeed be made compatible with at least ActivityPub, and b) having Osada as a "bridge" between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse was just plain bonkers. You wanted to use Zap, but you wanted to keep your Mastodon and diaspora* friends You also needed one non-nomadic Osada channel for each one of your nomadic Zap channels. And you had to use Osada to share-post all your Zap posts because Zap had no repeats yet, and you needed Osada to interact with the stuff your non-nomadic friends posted. Oh, did I mention that Osada was non-nomadic, and you'd lose everything if your Osada instance went under
So Mike discontinued the old Osada which next to nobody had used anyway, forked a second Osada from Zap and added ActivityPub to it so he had purist, Zot6-only Zap with no ActivityPub in the way of experimenting with Zot6 plus Osada with which he could test the interaction of ActivityPub and Zot6. Other devs would have strapped ActivityPub onto Zap. Not Mike, though.
But... if he now develops Forte exclusively with AP into a functioning platform, the nomadic identity will again be limited to the resulting Forte Grid, because I expect a number <1 that will implement AP nomadics in a new or existing AP Fediverse service.
Mitra is working on nomadic ActivityPub, too. Very hard so. Since 2022. Silverpill was the very creator of FEP-ef61, and he is even more of a driving force behind adding nomadic identity to ActivityPub than Mike. I wouldn't be surprised if it was him who had nudged Mike into developing ActivityPub-based pan-Fediverse nomadic identity.
Let all this work out. Let Forte become stable. Let Mitra roll out nomadic identity. Let it become possible to clone between the two. Let this hit Fediverse News. And you'll have quite a number of heads turning, including developer heads. Of course, most likely not those of the Mastodon devs. But it isn't unlikely that others will be interested.
And the more things in the Fediverse have working, stable, ActivityPub-based nomadic identity, the more Mastodon users will nag the Mastodon devs to implement it because they're fed up with being stuck on their instances already now. Until the point at which someone forks Mastodon, adds nomadic identity and submits the changes to the Mastodon code repo as a PR.
But it would have given you the opportunity to operate nomadically with the Hubzilla grid and thus have a much larger base.
Sooner or later, Hubzilla, the nomadic identity pioneer, will have to at least learn to understand ActivityPub-based nomadic identity. Once the latter is fully fleshed out, this might not even be that difficult. It can always be tested on development hubs like Zotum first.
Mario already said Hubzilla will hold on to Zot6. This may mean that it won't be possible to clone between Hubzilla and anything else if ActivityPub-based nomadic identity isn't fully implemented. But this wouldn't be much different from what things are like right now.
It is exciting. But the advantages of nomadic identity are very limited until the majority of other AP-based Fediverse services also implement it.
Well, for each Fediverse project individually that implements it, it's a big step forward.
Let's assume some Forkey implements it. The big news won't be so much that you can now clone your account to (streams) and Mitra. It'll rather be first and foremost that you can clone to another instance of the same Forkey and save your identity from doom by instance shutdown. Cross-border cloning is just a nice extra.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadicIdentity #Forte In theory, yes.
Beware, though: Forte is a super extremely early version. It was forked from (streams) when (streams) itself was buggy.
Nomadic identity via ActivityPub is extremely experimental. It probably uses technology that Mastodon doesn't understand. Yesterday was literally the very first time ever that content from something based on nomadic ActivityPub has hit the Fediverse. The only other implementation is a development version of Mitra whose code is not public, and which is only deployed on non-public instances run by the developer.
Also, like everything else that Mike has made (Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams)), in terms of handling and functionality, Forte is much farther away from Mastodon than Mastodon is from Twitter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fortemorph And so there's exactly one instance, Mike's own private private instance, with Mike, the only developer, being its only user.
Again, it's from mid-August. Mike hasn't declared it stable yet. And yesterday was literally the very very first time a message came from Forte, namely from Mike's private instance, into the Fediverse.
So no, there aren't any public, open-registration instances.
If you want to get to know the basic functionality, except for how Forte federates, the closest thing would be (streams) which Forte was forked from. (streams) may have its own issues, but it has at least one public instance that can theoretically be joined.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #ForteOh, by the way, in case you haven't noticed because chances are that you actually haven't: Forte has entered the Fediverse yesterday.
Mike Macgirvin has rebased his private, semi-secret instance from his own streams repository to his most recent project. Just yesterday, Mike sent the very first message from Forte into the Fediverse, a comment on a post from his public (streams) channel. Unfortunately, the whole thread is private, as is the comment.
So, what is Forte is the very first and currently only Fediverse project that features nomadic identity via only ActivityPub. It's a fork of , created in mid-August this year.
To put it in a nutshell, Forte is (streams) without Nomad and without support for Zot, purely relying on ActivityPub. Also, unlike (streams), Forte has a name, it has a branding (which, however, can be changed on the instance level just like on (streams)), it has nodeinfo, it has a license, and it's a project again.
At least as of now, Forte may have trouble connecting to Mastodon. This may be because Mastodon doesn't understand decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, it may be because Forte also had some non-standard, Mastodon-specific code removed. Or it may be due to the user agent filter that Mike has introduced to (streams) and most likely also Forte a few weeks ago that actually has the capability of, for example, blocking Mastodon in its entirety on an instance level. Whatever it is that may or may not stand in Mastodon's way of connecting with Forte, Mike declared it "intentional".
Speaking of "intentional", I'm intentionally not posting this to Fediverse News. While this may go largely unnoticed outside the Hubzilla/(streams) bubble, maybe plus Friendica, it may just as well prompt people to set up their own instances. People who haven't even laid their hands on Friendica, much less Hubzilla or (streams), and who don't know how the "Facebook-like" side of the Fediverse looks and feels, much less how nomadic identity is handled. They may expect another "Mastodon + more characters + x on top", end up disappointed because nothing on Forte looks, feels or works like Twitter or Mastodon, and declare that Forte objectively sucks.
Also, as long as Mike doesn't at least hint at Forte being stable and daily-driveable for people who don't develop it, it probably isn't.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Streams #(streams) #Forte Hier mal zehn Grnde, warum ich auf Hubzilla bleiben und nicht auf eins der *keys wechseln will:
Erstens: nomadische Identitt.
Meine Identitt ist weder an ein Konto noch an eine Serverinstanz gebunden, sondern in einem Kanal "containerisiert". Ich habe auf einem zweiten Hub einen praktisch identischen Klon dieses Kanals, der mit dem Original in Echtzeit bidirektional synchronisiert wird. Sollte einer der beiden Hubs mal ausfallen, verliere ich nichts und kann weitermachen wie bisher. Nachteil ist nur, da Projekte, die keine nomadische Identitt kennen, nicht erkennen knnen, da da auf den beiden Hubs ein und derselbe Kanal ist. Mastodon, Misskey usw. halten meinen Klon fr ein vllig separates Konto.
Unter den aktuell aktiven Fediverse-Serveranwendungen bieten das nur zwei: das stabile, konstant weiterentwickelte Hubzilla und das gerade nicht so stabile, aktuell kaum bearbeitete (streams), das einen etwas anderen Featuresatz hat (da habe ich auch zwei Kanle).
Zweitens: kein Zeichenlimit.
Mir reichen ein paar tausend Zeichen nicht aus. Ich poste immer mal wieder zigtausende Zeichen auf einmal. Ich mchte die Mglichkeit haben, bis 100.000 Zeichen zu posten, denn darber hinaus lehnt Mastodon Posts ab. Und mein Rekord liegt bei fast 77.000 Zeichen aufgrund drei sehr langer Bildbeschreibungen. Dieser Kommentar ist auch ber 10.000 Zeichen lang.
Drittens: Hubzilla kennt Konversationen sehr gut.
Mein Stream ist nicht in Einzelposts organisiert, sondern in ganzen Threads. Jeder Thread besteht immer nur aus genau einem Post, dem Startpost, und ansonsten Kommentaren, die Hubzilla nicht als Posts ansieht. Das ist genau wie auf Facebook oder Tumblr oder Reddit und wie in jedem Blog.
Wenn ich einen Post im Stream habe, dann empfange ich alle Kommentare. Und die werden mir als ungelesen angezeigt. Im Grunde kann ich Antworten gar nicht verpassen.
Auerdem kann ich einem Thread folgen, bzw. wenn ich mit einem Post oder einem Kommentar in einem Thread interagiere (drauf antworten, Daumen hoch, Daumen runter etc.), dann folge ich dem Thread automatisch. Und dann werde ich sogar ausdrcklich benachrichtigt, wenn in dem Thread etwas passiert ist.
Viertens: der Zhler ungelesener Mitteilungen.
Wenn etwas in meinem Stream passiert, dann wird mir das zunchst einmal als ungelesen markiert, auch wenn z. B. jemand einen Post oder einen Kommentar geboostet/reposted/renoted/wiederholt hat. Und dafr hat Hubzilla einen Zhler. Wenn ich den anklicke, bekomme ich alles aufgelistet, was ich mir noch nicht angesehen habe. Das kann ich dann jeweils anklicken und dann threadweise ansehen. Es wird dann automatisch als gelesen markiert.
Damit verpasse ich nichts.
Fnftens: das Berechtigungssystem.
Hubzilla hat ein sehr komplexes, fortschrittliches, feingegliedertes System von Berechtigungen. So etwas bietet sonst auch nur (streams). Ich glaube, jemandem, der von Mastodon kommt in Erwartung von Mastodon ohne Zeichenlimit mit mehr Textformatierung, ist das viel zu kompliziert. Ich aber habe das System ziemlich durchschaut und nutze es zu meinem Vorteil.
Standardmig z. B. sind meine Verbindungen (auf Hubzilla gibt's grundstzlich nur beidseitige Verbindungen wie Facebook-"Freunde", also nicht Folgende und Gefolgte getrennt wie auf Twitter und Mastodon) nicht berechtigt, mir ihre Posts zu schicken. Das mu ich ihnen erst ausdrcklich erlauben. Und das tue ich auch nur dann, wenn ich das will.
Ich habe ber 550 Verbindungen, von denen die allermeisten nichts posten, was mich im Rahmen dieses Kanals (der Kanal ist thematisch limitiert, das ist kein persnlicher Allzweckkanal) und auch generell nicht die Bohne interessiert. Bevor ich jetzt also 98% nur Mll im Stream habe, durch den ich waten darf, um an den interessanten Content zu kommen, spare ich mir den Aufwand und gebe denen, die nichts Interessantes zu sagen haben, gar nicht erst die Berechtigung, mir ihre Posts zu schicken.
Gleichzeitig haben sie aber sehr wohl die Berechtigung, meine Posts zu kommentieren oder mir DMs zu schicken das ist davon unabhngig.
Insgesamt kennt Hubzilla 17 Berechtigungseinstellungen mit sieben oder acht Berechtigungslevels. Dazu kann ich auch noch bei Posts (und damit ganzen Threads), Bildern, anderen Dateien usw. usf. einstellen, wer sie sehen darf.
Sechstens: zwar nicht perfekte, aber sehr umfassende Filter.
Zunchst einmal erlaubt Hubzilla es mir, individuell pro Kontakt zu filtern. Das heit, ich kann nicht nur kanalweit filtern, sondern auch einzelnen Kontakten jeweils individuelle Filterlisten geben, und zwar jeweils eine Whitelist und eine Blacklist pro Kontakt.
Dann kann ich beim Filtern regulre Ausdrcke verwenden. Wenn ich z. B. ein Schlsselwort auch als Wortbestandteil filtern will, ein anderes aber nur als ganzes Wort, kann ich das mit einer und derselben Filterliste erschlagen.
Und letztlich hat Hubzilla auch eine Filtersyntax, wobei die sich leider in Whitelists mit reinen Schlsselwrtern noch nicht vertrgt, sonst wren Hubzillas Filter noch mchtiger. Mit der Filtersyntax kann ich beispielsweise Boosts rausfiltern. Wenn also jemand manchmal interessante Sachen postet, dazwischen aber dutzendweise uninteressanten Mll boostet, kann ich mir die Boosts vom Hals schaffen, aber die Posts kommen weiterhin durch. Ich hoffe immer noch auf Verbesserungen, die es mir z. B. mglich machen wrden, eine Whitelist nur auf Posts anzuwenden, nicht aber auf Kommentare und DMs.
Siebtens: das volle Programm der Textformatierung, das einem eine Blog-Engine bietet. Und zwar nicht einfach nur WYSIWYG, sondern ich kann direkt mit rohem Code arbeiten.
Die ganzen Twitter-Klone, und dazu zhle ich auch Misskey und alle Forkeys, erlauben mir z. B. nicht, Bilder in den Post-Text einzubetten. Also Text, dann ein Bild, dann mehr Text, dann noch ein Bild, dann noch mehr Text. Auf Hubzilla geht das problemlos, weil Hubzilla eben nicht versucht, Twitter nachzuffen. Mastodon kann das nicht mal darstellen und die ganzen *keys auch nicht.
Ich wei auch nicht, ob die *keys eine Begrenzung haben, wieviele Bilder man an einen Post anhngen kann. Hubzilla hat beim Einbetten von Bildern keine Begrenzung.
Hubzilla kann ansonsten mit BBcode das hier alles:
- Fettdruck
- Kursivschrift
- Unterstreichung
- Durchstreichung
- Textgre
- Schriftart, und zwar auch mal mehrere, und die erste davon, die gefunden wird, wird angezeigt
- Schriftfarbe
- Hintergrundfarbe
- berschriften in sechs Stufen
- zentrierten Text
- Inline-Code mit und ohne Syntaxhervorhebung
- Codeblcke mit und ohne Syntaxhervorhebung
- Listen, und zwar mit Stichpunkten, Zahlen, rmischen Zahlen, rmischen Zahlen in Kleinbuchstaben, Grobuchstaben oder Kleinbuchstaben
- horizontale Linie zur Unterteilung
- Tabellen
- Links, auch ohne sichtbare URL
- Spoiler
- Zusammenfassungen (= CWs auf Mastodon) (theoretisch in der Praxis werden sie zumindest in Kommentaren ber ActivityPub nicht korrekt exportiert)
- an beliebiger Stelle im Post eingebettete Bilder, auch inline, optional wahlweise auf eine bestimmte Gre skaliert oder mit Alt-Text Bilder knnen auch Links sein
- an beliebiger Stelle im Post eingebettetes Audio
- an beliebiger Stelle im Post eingebettete Videos
In Verbindung mit OpenWebAuth ("magisches" Single Sign-On, das auch von Mike Macgirvin erfunden wurde) geht auerdem:
- Instanzadresse des Betrachters
- komplette Kanaladresse des Betrachters
- Kurzname des Betrachters (z. B. chbmeyer)
- Langname des Betrachters (z. B. Ch Maeiyer )
- ID des Betrachters
- Profilbild (Avatar) des Betrachters
- Anzeige von Text in Abhngigkeit davon, ob der Login des Betrachters per OpenWebAuth erkannt wird (Login erkannt, Login nicht erkannt)
- Anzeige von Text in Abhngigkeit davon, welche Sprache der Betrachter hat (z. B. Deutsch, Englisch, nicht Englisch, kann auch verschachtelt werden zu nicht Deutsch und nicht Englisch)
Wenn im Kanal bestimmte Erweiterungen aktiviert sind (Hubzilla ist sehr modular und jeder Kanal fr sich auch), geht auerdem:
- Darstellung eines beliebigen Text als eingebetteter QR-Code
- Einbettung einer OpenStreetMap-Karte, die auf die erkannte Browser-Position zentriert ist
- Einbettung einer OpenStreetMap-Karte, die auf bestimmte Koordinaten zentriert ist
- Einbettung einer OpenStreetMap-Karte, die auf einen Ort mit einem bestimmten Namen zentriert ist
brigens hat Hubzilla sogar eine Vorschau fr Posts, DMs und Kommentare. Man kann sie sich anzeigen lassen, bevor man sie versendet, um noch einmal nachzubessern.
Achtens: Kategorien fr Posts.
Ich kann meine eigenen Posts nicht nur mit Hashtags organisieren, sondern auch in Kategorien, von denen ich jedem Post eine oder mehrere zuweisen kann. Die dienen nur der internen Organisation und werden nicht nach auen fderiert. So finde ich meine eigenen Posts schneller und leichter wieder.
Neuntens: Speichern von Posts, Kommentaren etc. in Ordnern.
Sowohl eigene Posts, Kommentare usw. als auch die anderer Nutzer kann ich nicht einfach nur mit Lesezeichen markieren, sondern auf diesem Wege in Ordnern einsortieren. Das sind quasi Lesezeichenkategorien.
Zehntens: Zusatzfeatures, die so fast nirgendwo oder tatschlich nirgendwo verfgbar sind.
Ich nutze auf Hubzilla einiges an Zusatzfeatures, die teilweise optional sind, die mir weder Misskey noch einer der Forkeys so bieten kann:
- eingebauter Filespace pro Kanal mit Organisation in Verzeichnissen, mit Zugriffsberechtigungssteuerung pro Datei und pro Verzeichnis und mit Erkennung von Bilddateien als solche ber einen speziellen Uploader
- WebDAV-Zugriff auf den Filespace
- Eventkalender, in den ich mit einem Klick auch Events anderer Nutzer eintragen kann
- CalDAV-Kalenderserver, der die Oberflche des Eventkalenders mitbenutzt (es gibt auch einen optionalen CardDAV-Server, den ich hier aber nicht nutze)
- (optional) , die so aufgebaut sind wie Posts, aber nicht an meine Kontakte rausgehen
- (optional) , und zwar mehrere Wikis pro Kanal mit mehreren Seiten pro Wiki
Selbst wenn ich nach Sharkey oder CherryPick wechseln wrde, mte ich sehr, sehr viel dafr aufgeben.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadischeIdentitt #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #Konversationen #Berechtigungen #Filter #Textformatierung #Hubzilla
Dolphins In Depth: Dolphins challenged by the loss of defensive pillar
Heat Check: Reacting to Heats ugly season-opening loss to Magic
Heat Check: Reacting to Heats ugly season-opening loss to Magic
Die Misskey-Familie ist am leistungsfhigsten, aber stark fragmentiert. Firefish und Calkey sind "tot"
Firefish ist Calckey. Oder war es.
Ich versuche mal, die Geschichte nachzuzeichnen:
Calckey entstand, indem Kainoa Kanter einen Soft-Fork von Misskey angelegt hat. Damals war es noch blich, da jeder Forkey einen Namen mit "-key" am Ende hat (FoundKey, Meisskey, Tanukey etc.).
Das war im Grunde immer ein Soloprojekt. Es gab noch ein paar Extra-Entwickler. Aber: Nur Kainoa durfte in den Release-Code einpflegen und neue Versionen rausbringen, auerdem gehrten Kainoa die Domain der Website, die Domain des Code-Repository und die Domain der Leuchtturminstanz, die auch nur Kainoa administrierte.
Anfang 2023, eigentlich war Akkoma gerade der heie Schei, schob ein einzelner Calckey-Fan mit massiver Werbung einen Calckey-Hype an. Weil sich die Leute reihenweise auf Calckey strzten, kam der Gedanke auf, fr ein so populres Projekt ist "Calckey" eigentlich ein doofer Name. Also wurde Calckey in Firefish umbenannt.
Im Oktober 2023 ist Kainoa dann ziemlich komplett von der Bildflche verschwunden, jedenfalls komplett aus dem Fediverse. Monatelang berhaupt gar nichts. Zu dem Zeitpunkt war Firefish noch einigermaen synchron mit Misskey, das auf Version 12 war.
Zwischenzeitlich ging Misskey auf Version 13, dann auf Version 14. Aber Firefish zog nicht nach, weil Kainoa nicht da war. Die anderen Devs konnten Patches einreichen, aber nur Kainoa durfte die in den Produktivcode einpflegen.
Anfang 2024 war Firefish allmhlich kritisch veraltet. Nicht nur das, sondern die Leuchtturminstanz, die mit Abstand grte Instanz kackte komplett ab und funktionierte berhaupt nicht mehr. Auer Kainoa konnte sich da aber niemand drum kmmern.
An diesem Punkt wurde Firefish fr tot erklrt.
Leute sprangen reihenweise ab. Ganze Instanzen migrierten von Firefish zu Sharkey, einem anderen, jngeren Misskey-Soft-Fork, der vor allem aktueller und aktiv gepflegt war. Ganze Firefish-Instanzen wurden auf Sharkey umgestellt.
Meines Wissens waren es die anderen Firefish-Entwickler, die das sinkende Schiff verlieen. Sie forkten Firefish zu Iceshrimp, um zumindest ein paar Firefish-Features behalten zu knnen. Es war ein Hard Fork, weil sie eh nicht damit rechneten, da mit Firefish noch irgendwas passiert. Und sie haben Iceshrimp praktisch unmittelbar nach den Fork nach Misskey rebaset, um den "Unterbau" vom asbach-uralten Misskey 12 auf Misskey 14 hochziehen zu knnen.
Im Frhjahr ist Kainoa wieder aufgetaucht. Der Grund fr die Auszeit war ein Abschlu und ein Jobeinstieg. Und jetzt sollte es mit Firefish weitergehen. Nur war vom alten Firefish nicht mehr viel brig. Und wohl erst jetzt erfuhr Kainoa, da alle anderen Entwickler abgesprungen waren und nicht gedachten zurckzukehren.
Letztlich gab Kainoa den Quellcode an eine neue Entwicklerin ab, Naskya. Aber nur den Code. Die drei Domains mitsamt dranhngenden Websites zu bertragen, war wohl zuviel Aufwand. Kainoa hat alle drei abgeschaltet, weshalb die meisten Leute glauben, Firefish sei tot, weil die ganzen alten Weblinks nicht mehr funktionieren.
Naskya hat vorher den Quellcode auf ein neues Repository gesichert. Das aktuelle Firefish ist also rein technisch gesprochen ein Fork des alten Firefish unter demselben Namen. Auerdem hat Naskya eine neue Leuchtturminstanz gestartet auf einer Unterdomain des Repository.
Letzten Monat hat sie dann bekanntgegeben, da es viel zuviel Aufwand ist, Firefish ganz alleine zu pflegen, und Hilfe hat sie ja keine. So kann sie das unmglich weiterfhren. Also hat sie die Weiterentwicklung von Firefish gestoppt. Es wird jetzt nur noch gewartet und auch das nur bis Jahresende, dann ist mit Entwicklung Schlu. Und im Februar 2025 werden Code-Repository und Leuchtturminstanz abgeschaltet.
Gibt es da irgendwelche Tendenzen, das zu Einen
Absolut nicht.
Im allgemeinen sind Forkeys, die direkt von Misskey geforkt wurden, entstanden, um mehr Features an Misskey dranzukleben. So auch Calckey.
Die Idee hinter Sharkey war wohl quasi, den ultimativen Forkey zu bauen. Sharkey ist ein Misskey-Soft-Fork, wo teilweise Sachen aus Calckey/Firefish drangebaut wurden und zustzlich noch Eigengezchtetes.
Iceshrimp startete als der Versuch, einen stabilen Ersatz fr Firefish zu haben. Es wurde von Firefish hartgeforkt, dann zwecks Aktualisierung der Basis auf das viel aktuellere Misskey rebaset. Dann hat man gemerkt, da viele Probleme von Misskey selbst geerbt worden waren und es zu aufwendig wre, die zu flicken. Ich meine, sonst htte Firefish selbst das gemacht, sonst htte Sharkey das gemacht oder wer auch immer. Also haben die Entwickler Iceshrimp auf Wartung gesetzt, die Weiterentwicklung komplett gestoppt und sich drangesetzt, das ganze Iceshrimp von Grund auf neu zu schreiben. Und zwar nicht mehr in TypeScript und Node.js, weil JavaScript fr Serveranwendungen Kse ist, sondern in C#.
Zwischenzeitlich ist von Iceshrimp Catodon geforkt worden. Das hat wieder einen anderen Fokus, und zwar will es ein Forkey fr Mastodon-Umsteiger sein. Mit einem hnlichen Featuresatz wie Mastodon, also mit viel Firefish- und sogar Misskey-Klimbim rausgeschmissen und mit Mastodons Standard-Weboberflche. Catodons Entwicklung ist meines Wissens auch gestoppt, ich glaube, die warten darauf, da Iceshrimp.NET fertig wird, damit sie Catodon darauf rebasen knnen.
Dann gibt's noch CherryPick, einen japanischen Sharkey-Fork. Der hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die Macken, die das vllig berzchtete Sharkey hat, auszubgeln. Das ist wohl zu groen Teilen auch schon gelungen. Schtze, die CherryPick-Entwickler haben es auch geschafft, Sharkeys legendr grottenschlechte Mastodon-API-Implementation durch die neue zu ersetzen, auf die die Sharkey-Entwickler schon ewig warten.
Markdown (Fett, Links, unterstrichen), keine Zeichenbegrenzung und flexiblere Umfragen. Sonst noch was wichtiges
Markdown geht bei Misskey und den Forkeys noch weiter.
Zeichenbegrenzung haben sie alle, nur nicht auf 500 Zeichen. Je nach Projekt hast du 3000 hartgecodete Zeichen (Misskey) oder ein paar tausend, aber durch den Admin einstellbar.
(Fast) ganz ohne Zeichenbegrenzung sind nur die Sachen von Mike Macgirvin, also Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und das wohl noch experimentelle noch gar nicht richtig gestartete Forte. Die letzteren beiden haben nur eine durch die Serverdatenbank bedingte Zeichenbegrenzung von ber 24.000.000 Zeichen.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp.NET #Catodon #CherryPick #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte The second one is a link to the only post on my meme-themed (streams) channel in which I've explained everything right in the post instead of linking to external explanations because I thought that's what the majority wanted.
If this link doesn't work, this one will:
And for your convenience, here is a full, verbatim quote-post of the entire post (yes, Hubzilla has had quote-posts since its inception in 2015) unfortunately, the spoiler tag breaks when Hubzilla imports posts from (streams):
One does not simply implement FEP-ef61
I guess my channel and its Fediverse connectivity is reliable enough now for a test post. The federation issues I had when the channel was new should be fixed.It's my first attempt at my new meme-posting format with extensive explanations in the post which, I hope, are independent from any external information.
Image related.
spoiler=Caution: Image hidden due to eye contact
Explanation
In this use of the image macro version of the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme, Boromir refers to how difficult it is to implement FEP-ef61 and ActivityPub-based nomadic identity into an existing Fediverse server application while developing both at the same time.It is referring to the difficulties this (streams) channel of mine had in interacting with Hubzilla and connecting to anything non-nomadic and ActivityPub-based in late July and early August. I have registered my (streams) account on version 24.07.20 which was the version that rolled out the new address scheme as per FEP-ef61 plus a few extra features on the way to the implementation of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Thus, my channels were among the first with the new address scheme and these new features. However, while I could establish a connection to my main Hubzilla channel, communication between these channels was between limited and impossible. And when I tried to follow Mastodon users from (streams), they didn't even notice.
Version 24.08.08 is said to have largely fixed these issues. I don't know because this instance has been upgraded straight from 24.08.03 which I haven't extensively tested to 24.08.12 on which these issues are largely fixed.
Find the following background explanations right below:
- One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor
- Snowclone
- Image macro
- Advice animal
- Something Awful
- 4chan and imageboards
- Nomadic identity and FEP-ef61
- Hubzilla, the streams repository and the Zot and Nomad protocols
Meme template explanation: One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor
"One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" is a meme based on a quote from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson's 2001 film adaptation of the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.The quote in question is from the scene in which Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, explains the only possible way the One Ring can be destroyed which becomes the very mission of the novel and the film trilogy. Boromir, one of the Fellowship, played by Sean Bean, replies how utterly impossible this is to carry out.
Elrond
The ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Gloin, by any craft that we here possess. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade. The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. One of you must do this.
Boromir
One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.
The first sentence said by Boromir was turned into a snowclone, and image macros based on the scene have traces of an advice animal.
Its early form as a snowclone was "One does not simply X into Mordor" with X standing for ways of locomotion or similar actions. It was followed by the variant "One does not simply walk into X" with X standing for destinations. Logically, "One does not simply X into Y" evolved.
This particular image macro uses another, later form, "One does not simply X" which generally describes actions that are difficult, nigh-impossible or actually impossible to carry out.
Digression: Snowclone
A snowclone is a phrase which has been turned into a template that can be and already has been used with its meaning slightly changed by replacing one or a few specific words in it.It had been around for decades when the American linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum discovered it and wrote in which he also laments the lack of a name for this phenomenon. The blog post was originally titled "Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit Form", and the phrase "some-assembly-required adaptable clich frames for lazy journalists" used in the blog post was accurate, but similarly unwieldy.
Pullum's linguist colleague Glen Whitman eventually suggested the term "snow clone" which he had invented himself, and which was first exposed to the public in .
The term itself was based on what would become : The phrase "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy" had been snowcloned into "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, X have N words for Y" where X stands for a nation or a group of people, N stands for a number, and Y stands for what X allegedly have N of.
Over the following years, Pullum collected over 70 snowclones which had existed then already. These included:
- "In space, no-one can hear you X." ("In space, no-one can hear you scream", a poster slogan in the 1979 science-fiction film Alien)
- "X is the new Y." (Probably derived from pink being "the navy blue of India" as said by fashion columnist Diana Vreeland in 1962 originally "X is the new black")
- "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords." ("I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords", said by Kent Brockman in the animated television series The Simpsons)
- "Have X, will travel" ("Have gun, will travel", a decades-old stock phrase discovered by comedian Bob Hope)
- "X are from Mars, Y are from Venus" ("Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" by author John Gray)
In the meantime, the age of Internet memes began. A whole lot of snowclones, often catalogued by Pullum as well, started out as these, for example:
- "Im in ur X Y-ing ur Z" (Variants of "I am in your base killing your d00ds", allegedly first posted on the Web on the Something Awful forums in 2003)
- "X-ers gonna X" ("Haters gonna hate" from the song "Playas Gon' Play" by 3LW from 2000 which itself turned the phrase into a snowclone already)
- "Brace yourselves, X is coming" ("Brace yourselves, winter is coming", said by Ned Stark in the television series Game of Thrones)
- "I don't always X, but when I do, I Y" ("I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis", said by the actor John Goldsmith in a television commercial for Dos Equis beer from 2006)
- "My 'X' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" ("My 'Not involved in human trafficking' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", posted by comedian Mike McGinn on Twitter on November 20th, 2013)
- "I sell X and X accessories" ("I sell propane and propane accessories", said by Hank Hill in the animated televisionseries King of the Hill)
- "I've got N problems but X ain't one" ("I've got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one" from the rap song "99 Problems" by Jay-Z from 2004, itself a quote from the rap song "99 Problems" by Ice-T from 1993)
A more extensive list of snowclones, partially already described and explained, can be found in , created by linguistics student Erin O'Connor and launched in November, 2007.
Digression: Image macro
An image macro is an image with one or multiple witty pieces of text or catchphrases edited in, similar to captions. They were invented as early as 1905 by the photographer Harry Whitter Frees who took photographs of dressed-up cats and added captions, the first being, "What's delaying my dinner"On the World Wide Web, the Something Awful forums were one of the earliest places where image macros were regularly used. It was there where the term "image macro" was invented in early 2004. On February 12th, 2004, a user named Eclipse posted the first definition of the term. The definition is only accessible to logged-in users, so there is no link to it.
From 2005 on, image macros started spreading elsewhere, including the imageboard 4chan. It was there where the definite shape of image macros was created, namely including text in bold white letters using Monotype's Impact type face, pre-installed on Microsoft Windows, with black outlines. The most notable exception are demotivational posters, parodies of motivational posters that first came up in 1998, also because they have the text below the picture rather than on it.
Digression: Advice animal
An advice animal is a style of image macro that is usually built around a picture of a human, an animal or the like. Sometimes the picture is reduced to the character in the centre, and the background is replaced with a colour wheel which is individual for each template. In other cases, the image is only cropped around the character in the centre, and the background is left in.A key element of advice animals is that they usually have text at the top and at the bottom which either automatically fit or are made to fit the character in the centre. It's usually a short joke with the setup at the top and the punchline at the bottom.
The foundation of the advice animal genre was laid at The Mushroom Kingdom, a fan forum for the Super Mario video game franchise, on September 7th, 2006. A user named TEM posted an edited version of a picture of his dog he had posted three days earlier, but with only the dog's head surrounded by a colour wheel with six colours. It wasn't used as an image macro with text yet back then, though. Even though the image is gone now, .
On July 5th, 2008, the image first appeared on the imageboard 4chan as image no. 76000000. After that, it was quickly turned into the Advice Dog image macro template. It was named "Advice Dog" because these image macros give "advice", but always of a kind that doesn't make much sense, and/or that should not really be followed. For example, the texts could be "Hire clowns" and "For funerals" respectively. From then on, an ever-increasing number of advice animals were created with or without a colour wheel.
Digression: Something Awful
is a comedy Web site created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999. Amongst other things, it includes a blog and bulletin-board forums which have become the most influential part of Something Awful. These forums, whose users are rather known as Goons, were very active and influential in the creation and spreading of memes especially in the 2000s, maintaining a culture not quite unlike that of parts of the imageboard 4chan.The Something Awful forums were the place where image macros were first culturally exploited online in larger quantities, and where they received that name.
Digression: 4chan and imageboards
4chan is an imageboard created by Christopher "moot" Poole in late 2003 as an English-speaking alternative to the Japanese imageboards 2channel (2ch in short) from 1999 and Futaba Channel (2chan in short) from 2001.An imageboard is a special form of a Web forum which specialises in posting images and then commenting on the image posts. Sometimes the posts are actually about the images, sometimes the images are mere decoration for a post which inevitably required an image. Thus, images are key elements of imageboard culture, and imageboards are natural breeding-grounds for image memes. 4chan, in particular, was the driving force between many memes, meme genres and entire memetic fandoms throughout the 2000s and 2010s, also due to its extremely high activity.
Originally, imageboards were a Japanese invention. Early imageboards in English language were focused on Japanese media, particularly manga and anime, but they would also cover other topics later.
One feature that sets *chan imageboards apart from other online communities is that they can be used completely anonymously. Many don't even have user accounts which makes it difficult for users to identify themselves if they so desire. This is also the background of the collective and movement known as Anonymous: It started out on 4chan, and everyone who partook in it, like practically all 4chan users of course, "identified" themselves as "Anonymous". Thus, a swarm was born which is Anonymous because everyone in it is Anonymous.
Context explanation: Nomadic identity and FEP-ef61
is a so-called Fediverse Enhancement Proposal, FEP in short, a suggestion for an addition to the ActivityPub protocol upon which most of the Fediverse is built. As a suggestion, it already has a certain validity, and it can be implemented by Fediverse software.FEP-ef61 in particular is a proposal for implementing something also known as nomadic identity in ActivityPub.
Nomadic identity is a Fediverse technology that detaches the Fediverse identity with everything that belongs to it from the underlying server, from the underlying login and account. It makes it possible for the same Fediverse identity to simultaneously reside on multiple servers.
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by Mike Macgirvin, an experienced developer with a particular skill for communication protocols. In 2010, he had already created a protocol named DFRN, short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network, and used it to build a very powerful, free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative first known as Mistpark, then renamed Friendika with a "K" in late 2010, and eventually renamed Friendica with a "C" in early 2012. Friendica still exists, and it is part of the Fediverse.
Early on, Mike noticed one issue of decentralised projects: Server instances, even public ones with open registration, were generally run by private people. And not always were they long-lived. Sometimes admins of Friendika nodes announced the impending end of their nodes. Other nodes would shut down for good with no prior notice. Everyone who had an account on one of these nodes would always lose everything and have to start over elsewhere from scratch. The introduction of account export and import made moving possible, but it had its limitations, and it was of little protection against unannounced node shutdowns.
The only feasible solution was for online identities to no longer be bound to any one account on any one server, to simultaneously exist on multiple server instances. An entire ecosystem would have to be built around this feature so that user identities would know and understand that other user identities are spread across more than one server instance.
And so Mike conceived the idea of nomadic identity which should achieve just that. In order to uncouple a user's identity from the account, the user's data from connections to posts to files etc. was uncoupled from the account and placed into a container known as a channel. The account no longer had any control over identity or content it only served to grant access to the channel. This channel would then be possible to be cloned onto an account on another server instance. The original, called the main instance, would supply the domain that would still be part of the ID.
The main instance and each clone would then be live, real-time, hot backups of each other. Anything that would happen on one of them, a post being sent, a post being received, a new contact being established, a file being uploaded, would be almost immediately synchronised to the others to keep all of them identical.
A key element of nomadic identity was for the user to be able to log onto any server where they had a clone of their channel and use it there. One or several servers with instances of the channel on them could be offline, but with any one of them still being online and accessible, the channel would remain active. Also, it would be possible to make one of the clones the new main instance. The ID would switch to the domain of the server with the main instance on it, and all connections would be modified accordingly, including on remote servers.
Still in 2011, Mike implemented nomadic identity in a new protocol named Zot. In early 2012, Mike forked his own project Friendica, named the fork Red, after Spanish "la red" which means "the network", and re-wrote the entire backend and large parts of the frontend against Zot.
Today, nomadic identity is available on Hubzilla, which evolved from Red or, as it was called from 2013 on, the Red Matrix in 2015, and in what is commonly called (streams) from 2021. Hubzilla is based on the latest stable version of the Zot protocol, Zot6, and (streams) is based on an incompatible descendant of Zot named Nomad. Nomadic identity in ActivityPub is still in an early stage of development and not available to regular users.
Digression: Hubzilla, the streams repository and the Zot and Nomad protocols
() is a Fediverse server application that is a multi-purpose combination of a social network, a cloud server and a content management system. It was derived from the Facebook alternative Friendica by Friendica's own creator, Mike Macgirvin. It has been around since March, 2015, ten months before Mastodon was launched. It is based on the Zot6 protocol which provides nomadic identity, but it can also use a number of other protocols, including but not limited to ActivityPub, OStatus and the diaspora* protocol.is an open-source code repository on Codeberg which contains a distant descendant of Hubzilla, created and still being developed by Mike Macgirvin and focusing on secure, private, nomadic social networking. This server application is intentionally without a name and without branding in any shape or form, and it was just as intentionally released into the public domain.
The history of both began in 2010 when it had been revealed that Facebook spied on its users and made money off their private data without their consent, in fact, without even telling them. From March to July, Mike built a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark. It had some extra features such as full long-form blogging capability, no character limit, multiple profiles per account which could be assigned to specific contacts, groups of contacts which pre-dated diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles, built-in file storage and an event calendar.
It was built on top of Mike's own protocol DFRN which is short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network. In addition, it supported other protocols such as OpenMicroBlogging, later OStatus, the protocol created by Evan Prodromou in 2008 for Laconi.ca, meanwhile StatusNet, which was later merged into GNU social, and it both could subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and produced Atom feeds itself. It would later gain the ability to connect to diaspora*, the crowd-funded, highly anticipated decentralised "Facebook killer" whose first early alpha version came out two months after Mistpark.
Later the same year, a German user told Mike that "Mistpark" sounds like German for "manure park" whereupon it was renamed "Friendika" with a "K". The spelling would finally be changed to "Friendica" with a "C" in early 2012.
As a countermeasure against people losing their online identities whenever a Friendika node shut down, Mike conceived nomadic identity and created a new protocol named Zot in 2011. In early 2012, he forked recently renamed Friendica into a new project named Red after the Spanish word for "network" and mostly rebuilt it into a Zot testbed. As the name didn't work well enough, it was renamed "Red Matrix" before seeing its first stable release in 2013. Along with the rebuild, it received support for nomadic identity and multiple channels on one account as well as a new permissions system.
But Friendica was mostly targetted at self-hosters of personal instances which made nomadic identity largely superfluous, and the Red Matrix didn't have any significant advantages otherwise that would justify the switch from Friendica for node admins. So in early 2015, the Red Matrix was redesigned to be more attractive to public server admins. It was turned into a multi-purpose system and received features such as a CalDAV calendar server which shares a GUI with the calendar inherited from Friendica, a CardDAV address book server, long-form articles, a wiki engine and a Web page server. And thus, Hubzilla was born in March.
In order to further develop the Zot protocol, Mike created two new forks in 2018, Osada and Zap. Both lost many of Hubzilla's content management system features. Zap was reduced to only Zot as the remaining supported protocol to keep interference from non-nomadic protocols out, also because Mike expected the new protocol version Zot6 to be incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Osada, in the meantime, kept many of Hubzilla's connection features, but lost nomadic identity. It was intended as a gateway between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse.
As this didn't work out, and Zot6 turned out to be compatible with ActivityPub, Osada was discontinued and re-created as a soft fork of Zap which received ActivityPub capabilities. Now, the only differences between the two were ActivityPub and the branding, and in 2019, after Zap had received ActivityPub support itself, it was just whether ActivityPub was on or off by default, next to the branding. So Osada, which had seen a stable release along with Zap, was discontinued yet again. But along with Zap, Zot6 had matured and brought a new feature along with itself, namely a magic single sign-on system named OpenWebAuth which automatically detects users logged in on other instances.
In 2020, Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6 and equipped with OpenWebAuth. Also, Mike made three new forks based on Zap to work on Zot8, another Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Mistpark 2020, also known as Misty. The intention appeared to be to have three states of development, but in fact, all three always shared the same code, save for the branding. Mike would later admit that the actual reason why he made three forks was to confuse the brand fetishists. Crossgrading between all three and Zap was possible.
Probably because the new Osada and Misty were actually used for public instances, Mike forked one of the three into a new project named Roadhouse in early 2021. Zot was about to reach a point at which it would become incompatible with previous Zot versions. So Zot11, which Roadhouse was based upon, was renamed Nomad. Zap, the third Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Misty could be upgraded to Roadhouse by rebasing the server code.
In October of 2021, Mike forked Roadhouse into a successor which he intentionally left nameless and brandless. He released most of it into the public domain with the exception of some contributions to official add-ons whose licenses he left untouched. This combination made it unfeasible for commercial software companies to try and relicense the whole thing to something proprietary and non-free. It also had most nodeinfo code removed, it doesn't transmit any statistics, and it is intentionally kept away from Fediverse project and instance listing sites. These probably couldn't crawl for and discover instances anyway because this server application is the only one in the Fediverse with an easily customisable and therefore not unified identifier for server instances.
The code repository with this software inside needed a name, though, and so it was named streams.
When the word about this software spread, enthusiasts decided they needed something to call this software by instead of just referring to the repository. So they started calling it (streams) in parentheses. It was originally intended for other developers to fork and use in their own work, but people started running vanilla (streams) instances.
(streams) was simplified further in order to make development and maintenance easier. In addition to its own Nomad protocol and Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, it only supports ActivityPub. But ActivityPub support was moved from an add-on into the core because Nomad allowed for a closer integration of ActivityPub than Zot6 for which non-nomadic protocols are a hindrance. Even the RSS and Atom aggregator was removed, as well as support for multiple profiles per channel. On the other hand, the permissions system was improved further over Hubzilla's.
Unlike its four predecessors, (streams) was considered a stable release, as was its Nomad protocol. On New Year's Eve of 2022, Mike officially discontinued Zap, Osada, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 and Roadhouse. Instances of all five could be upgraded to (streams).
In 2023, Mike began to work on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub itself. One goal was to one day make Nomad and Zot superfluous. The other goal was to make it possible for the whole Fediverse to become nomadic beyond project borders. FEP-ef61 was to become a key element in this work, and (streams) became the development platform.
In August of 2024, Mike forked a new project named Forte off the streams repository, the first and so far only (streams) fork. Its exact goal is still unclear, but it might be what Mike will use to experiment with new features and developments, seeing as (streams) has unexpectedly become a daily driver for a few dozen users already.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuoteTweet #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost Well, there are essentially four options.
One, links, and you click them. You can choose yourself what information to look up, and you can get all information you need in a nicely short post.
Two, I serve you all explanations that you may need on a silver platter in my post. That may be 25,000 characters of explanation then which everyone will have to endure. This poll which I've run two months ago, hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/aeb3fcf9-48d4-44c8-88e0-b70c2336a512, has shown me that people do not want me to explain things in 25,000 characters in my meme posts.
Three, links, but you don't click on them. And you won't understand the image macro because you've got no idea what e.g. FEP-ef61 is. Or (streams) or Hubzilla or whatever else I've memed about.
Four, no links. Outcome see three, but this time, I'm to blame.
For completion's sake, I'll reveal the links in my previous comment. And since you don't want to open links, I'll have to explain everything myself right here.
First link: https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemesonstreamscat=Memes
This link leads to the (streams) channel which I've created to meme the Fediverse.
(streams) is the colloquial name of an intentionally nameless, brandless Fediverse server application created by Mike Macgirvin in 2021. While it is federated with Mastodon, it works a whole lot different from Mastodon. Its fork history can be traced back to two more of Mike's creations which still exist today, Friendica from 2010 and Hubzilla from 2015 which I'm replying to you from right now.
A "channel" on Hubzilla and (streams) is akin to an account on Mastodon, i.e. a Fediverse identity with everything that belongs to it. Posts, connections, settings, stored files etc. Hubzilla and (streams) refer to them as "channels" because they are independent from the actual accounts. Hubzilla and (streams) do not store your identity directly in your account like Mastodon does. Instead, they put it into a container called "channel" of which you can have multiple independent ones on the same account.
The third link is a mention of the self-same channel.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Oh my gosh: THEY BOUGHT IT BACK!
My favorite bought back the latex I asked them about...
This really is a stunning piece, as there are rarely made out of latex on the market.
And yes it does have (abeit flat) steel bones...
R0008791 by samjstone
What Bluesky is planning to do with the AT protocol looks like as ordered from Temu.And nomadic identity is not a vague concept. It isn't futuristic technology either. It has been reality in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon has been around. It was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 and then implemented in his own Zot protocol. Zot, in turn, was first implemented in 2012 in a project named Red, later the Red Matrix, known since 2015 as . And almost everything that Mike has made after Hubzilla had or still has nomadic identity implemented.
I'm writing to you from Hubzilla right now, so yes, it's very much part of the Fediverse. It's a rock-solid daily driver with a stable release (9.4.3).
Nomadic identity does not do away with a domain being part of your ID. What it does away with is the connection between account and identity and the connection between server and identity.
Nomadic identity means that your identity with everything that belongs to it (profile, posts, comments, DMs, connections, files, settings etc. etc. pp.) is no longer bound to any one Fediverse server. It can exist on multiple servers simultaneously. Not as dumb copies, but as clones. Bidirectional, live, hot backups in near-real-time.
Your identity always has one main instance which also lends the domain name. In addition, it can have one or multiple copies on different servers of your choice. Your accounts only serve to grant you access to the instances of your identity on a specific server. The main instance and the clones are constantly sync'd against each other in both directions. For example, after I've sent this comment, it was mirrored over to my clone.
Notice how I've written "bidirectional". For I can also log into my clone and use it just the same as my main instance. This is useful for when the server with my main instance on it is offline. When it comes back online, everything that has happened on my clone in the meantime is being sync'd to the main instance.
Granted, Mastodon and most of the rest of the Fediverse don't understand nomadic identity. When I post from my clone, they take my clone as an independent account with the ID
jupiterrowlandhub.hubzilla.de. But Hubzilla and (streams) do understand nomadic identity. Whatever comes from my clone, they'll correctly identify as being sent by jupterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu in spite of not coming from hub.netzgemeinde.eu.Even "moving instances" is greatly facilitated. For example, if the server with the main instance of my channel shuts down permanently, I can make my clone my new main instance. That's easy-peasy: two mouse clicks and some 15 minutes of letting things settle, also because Hubzilla will have to go around and change all my connections from
jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu to jupiterrowlandhub.hubzilla.de. On the remote side, on people's Hubzilla and (streams) servers.You've read that right: If you move, nomadic identity makes your nomadic followers automatically follow you at your new home. What's beyond science-fiction on Mastodon has been daily-driven reality on Hubzilla since its inception in 2015.
While nomadic identity currently only has stable support via Mike's Zot and Nomad protocols and on Hubzilla and (streams), its implementation using only ActivityPub has been in the making since last year.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #DecentralizedIdentity #DecentralisedIdentity #NomadicIdentity #ActivityPub #Zot #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Well, Or do you think I should stop relying on external links for explanations and go back to explaining everything myself, regardless of the ensuing
Oh, by the way: Yes, what's behind the links is still very much the Fediverse, even though it isn't Mastodon. Yes, Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams) is federated with Mastodon. And I'm trying to comply with Mastodon's idea of how meme pics and other images should be described.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
I think you should consider the needs of users who need alt text before the preference of any social media platform for SEO or other reasons.
That's what I already do.
But first of all, my original images are an edge-case not covered by accessibility rules. They are from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Nobody knows anything about them. Non-sighted people don't know what anything in them looks like. But they may want to know, also because I expect this topic to make at least a few people curious.
Sighted people may completely ignore the context and start exploring this new and unknown universe by looking around in the image, especially if it is more detailed. I mean, I'm not talking about simplified, cartoonish worlds like Meta Horizons. Non-sighted people may want to do the same, but they can't, and yet, they've got the right to do it. So they need my help: I have to explain details that don't matter in the context of the post.
More often, actually, the whole image matters because the post is either about the image itself or about everything in it. To repeat myself: Everything in the image is unknown and unfamiliar to both sighted and non-sighted people. But both sighted and non-sighted people may be very curious about everything. And so I have to describe everything and explain it if necessary. In contrast to real-life photographs, I can hardly assume anything to be already known and skip it in my descriptions.
Lastly, as I've already said: Mastodon is different from the rest of the Fediverse, from all other social media and from blogs and static websites. The rest of the Fediverse doesn't care for image descriptions. The rest of the Web is all geared towards alt-text that's as short as possible, also because HTML allows stuff like captions in special places in addition to alt-text and such. If your alt-text is over 200 characters long, you're doing it wrong.
Mastodon, on the other hand, loves long, detailed image descriptions to bits and pieces. It loves, loves, loves them. A real-life photo of one blossom in front of a blurry background, 800 characters of alt-text, and Mastodon applauds. Add another 200 characters of whimsy, and the blind Mastodon users applaud even more.
I'm not even kidding. Let the same image be described by an average human and an AI. The whimsical 750-character alt-text from the AI makes accessibility professionals scream in agony, but it makes blind Mastodon users cheer with joy, regardless of how accurate it is. The 200-character human-written alt-text makes accessibility professionals give thumbs up, but it makes blind Mastodon users yawn and fire up the AI on their phones for something more detailed and more whimsical.
Not few Mastodon users like image descriptions the more, the longer and more detailed they are. I'm still not kidding. And I'm still talking about real-life photos where lots of things are correctly assumed to be familiar, don't matter or both.
As I've already said, my virtual world renderings require even more detailed descriptions because nothing in them is familiar. And so my strategy has to be a little bit different: I describe each one of my original images twice.
The first description is the long description: a full, detailed description that goes into the post itself where I don't have any character limits. It contains visual descriptions of everything. It contains transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, regardless of whether the text is readable at the given image resolution or not. And it contains all necessary explanations, starting with well over 1,000 characters which explain where the image is from. This long description regularly grows several tens of thousands of characters long.
The second description is the "short" one which goes into the alt-text. The alt-text always mentions that there is a long, detailed description in the post, hidden behind a summary of the post plus a content warning due to the length of the post and maybe other things.
But I expect there to be alt-text extremists on Mastodon who absolutely insist in there being a useful image description in the alt-text even if there are already (caution: these descriptions are outdated), and even if the alt-text itself mentions these descriptions. And so I have to give this second description.
I have to shorten it dramatically so that it fits into the 1,500-character limit imposed by Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks. Granted, I have to cut the explanations because explanations do not belong into alt-text because not everyone can access alt-text. But I also have to cut most visual details. I have to cut the mere mentions of many elements in the image. I usually also have to cut the text transcripts, for one, because the visual details that mention where these bits of text are had to be cut, and besides, because all text in the image combined may exceed the 1,500 characters itself already or at least take up way too much space.
As of late, my alt-texts tend to be either exactly 1,500 characters or only missing one or two characters.
Even get lengthy descriptions. In this case, one alt-text measures 1,500 characters, the other one is one character short. The long descriptions are over 20,000 characters combined, i.e. almost 11,000 characters for the common preamble for both images, over 2,800 characters for the first image and almost 6,600 characters for the second image.
My personal record is : Again, 1,500 characters of alt-text of which a bit over 1,400 characters are actual image description and over 60,000 characters of long image description.
Oh, and by the way, in case you're unfamiliar with the places I've linked to: They're both part of the Fediverse. They're all federated with Mastodon. And yet, they both have no character limits and support for inline images.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #VirtualWorlds When I check alt-text at all, it's to see how others write it. It can help me extrapolate what kinds of image descriptions Mastodon wants with what kinds of visual details in it. Mastodon still seems to love long and detailed alt-texts whereas the whole rest of the Fediverse doesn't care for image descriptions at all.
But I think the last new thing I've picked up from other users' alt-texts is the camera position and angle which I only put into the long description, and that was a while ago.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta I do both. A "short" description (1,200-1,400 characters) in the alt-text, purely visual, sometimes with text transcripts if they still fit in. And a long, highy detailed description (often tens of thousands of characters) with transcripts of all text within the borders of the image and all explanations that I deem necessary.
After all, one can never know who needs to know what, or who is curious about what, especially when you post images about a very obscure but potentially interesting topic.
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Last updated: 2024-11-04
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