[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Should be working now. Occasionally, the server gets a little janky due to post federation and caching, but it should be settled at this point.

16

Today, we dig into the nitty-gritty of Surf, a new app by Flipboard. We document what it is, how it works, and areas where the experience could be improved.

37

For those interested in trying out Loops, you may be wondering: what are good tools or processes for making videos?

We go into detail with some of the tools we're currently using.

18

Meta's microblogging platform and X rival, Threads, has taken another step closer to two-way connectivity to the Fediverse.

33

Loops aims to be an open Fediverse alternative to TikTok, Snapchat, and Vine. We take an early look at the app, and talk about what it's like!

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submitted 2 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

Due to the ongoing strain of trying to write, edit, and publish articles on a consistent basis, and a handful of personal obligations of our founders, We Distribute is officially on temporary hiatus.

This is not the end of our publication or our project, but we need to step back for a while and regroup, if the project hopes to survive.

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submitted 2 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.

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submitted 3 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.

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submitted 3 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

For Fediverse musicians looking for a new Bandcamp alternative, Bandwagon feels extremely promising. It's built on top of the Emissary platform, and offers a robust amount of features for playing, promoting, and discovering music.

3
submitted 3 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

sub.club is an emergent new platform for paid subscriptions in the #Fediverse. It's simple, smooth, and easy to use.

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submitted 3 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.

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submitted 4 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

As the Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today.

Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.

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submitted 4 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

Flipboard continues its rollout of federation capabilities, this time implementing a "soft-follow" system for users to try out federated subscription for the very first time.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 32 points 4 months ago

Regardless of how you feel about it, it's still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it's not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it's substantial.

I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 23 points 7 months ago

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 36 points 9 months ago

He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.

Regardless, he's continues to do a lot of great development work.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 33 points 9 months ago

There's nothing wrong with having good third-party tools, that was not my point. db0 in particular has done some amazing, amazing work.

What's fucked, however, is having a project:

  • whose core infrastructure only offers the most threadbare tools
  • there's zero consideration from development on privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed
  • the devs are stone silent when waves of CSAM crash through instances
  • they openly mock people or say they're "too busy to do this" when it comes to meeting the most basic expectations of how a social platform ought to work.

Like, this is not an attack on Lemmy itself, I think the platform can be a real force for good in the Fediverse. But let's be honest, this project is not going to live very long if nothing changes.

Basic things like having the ability to easily remove images from storage should be part of the core platform. The fact that this still isn't a thing even four years into the project is insane.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 44 points 9 months ago

So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn't actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.

I agree that with federation, it's a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.

The biggest issue I have is that there's really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 57 points 1 year ago

I don't think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure they mean respective to themselves and their own walled garden, but it definitely doesn't scan well.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago

Technically, yes, you save metadata of all of those things. However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 year ago

Did they, though? A bunch of other Fediverse platforms have supported this for literally years, to the point that Mastodon was the butt of jokes for breaking basic search functionality.

Having standard search that just works is a huge deal, and helps solve against the decentralized content discovery problem.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 38 points 1 year ago

Nobody is telling you to use it. This originally spun out of development of a messaging app just for Pixelfed, but evolved when the dev realized it could be made to work with any Fediverse account, not just his own server project.

An optimistic view is that it could end up opening the door for end-to-end encryption to come to private messages in Fediverse servers, over time.

[-] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago

Hi, so I run Spectra, and would like to weigh in.

I wrote this piece a few years back about the content situation on PeerTube.

TL;DR, PeerTube has a significant problem with spam. I'm not just talking about spammy comments, although it has those, too. No, I'm talking about the videos. For example: there's an option within PeerTube that, when enabled, basically just automatically subscribes to every server that subscribes to yours. I let that setting run for a while, and connected to maybe a hundred random instances over time.

It was all garbage. Either you get far-right propaganda videos, actual nazi videos, or super random weird stuff of little value. Want a video in Hindi for a restaurant with a two-second video featuring a French TV commercial transcribed from VHS? How about that, mixed with thousands of random snippets of media that you will never care about or relate to?

A lot of PeerTube admins kind of informally got together and said: you know what, this is crap, no one is ever going to enjoy this. So, we connected our communities together. We have to do our research on which servers are good, and which ones just serve up bullshit. Good community stewardship, in this case, requires us to do our homework on which servers are worth following. Instead of following as many servers as possible, we're more inclined to check and see if the place is putting out original stuff, has decent guidelines, and isn't spouting hateful crap everywhere. To build community organically, we have to do so with intention.

The reason that you're not seeing your videos in any of the places you've listed is because their servers don't follow ours. This doesn't mean that your videos cannot be seen through federation - it's just that, in any of those places, no one is subscribed to you, and that server isn't subscribed to our server. So, your channel and videos aren't likely to show up there, unless somebody actively chooses to subscribe to you.

I agree that PeerTube is seriously lacking in some kind of Community Discovery feature, and would be greatly enhanced by it.

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deadsuperhero

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