Sean Tilley
I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.
- 78 Posts
- 105 Comments
2·6 days agoYeah, I was a long-term Hubzilla user some years back. There’s some really cool stuff that it can do, but it seems to get slower and more bloated the longer you run it.
Yeah, it’s not great. Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to describe this stuff without either leaning into abstract terms, or using oversimplifications.
The short of it is: only half of the ActivityPub protocol really got adopted by most of the Fediverse: the stuff that lets servers talk to each other. The other half would allow for a lot of cool things to be built, with not everything being its own Fediverse server.
Honestly, it would be kind of cool if you just had a simple app to log in with your Fediverse identity, and it rendered your existing profile on the page and allowed you to put additional links.
I don’t think it necessarily needs to federate.
Actually, there’s a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there’s literally no reason not to.
Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.
Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.
Probably not, but the tradeoff is that you’re limiting audience reach. Occasionally, this can also break context in public conversations, where someone might follow someone else who responds to you, but can’t see your original post.
OwnCast is wonderful. It’s dead simple to set up and use, and works great with OBS.
I tend to prefer streaming through PeerTube, simply because the platform has more features. But for simplicity, OwnCast can’t be beat!
A significant portion of the code is available, I think it’s just a matter of getting the latest code pushed out to public release status. Judging by the server repo, seems like a lot of development is happening out in the open.
Yes
Oh nice!
I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.
Posting from another thread:
Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.
It wasn’t just “I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree”, it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.
my view of homeless people changed forever when I learned that more than half of them were foster kids who aged out of the system and were left with no family or resources.
Jesus, that’s dark.
You’d be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There’s a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it’s a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.
Technically, SoapBox and Rebased were forks of the Mastodon frontend and Pleroma backend by an alt-right dev that found some level of success in the alt-right part of the Fediverse. So, it’s not completely unheard of.
It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.
Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I’m also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you’d never see replies from anybody.
It’s like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn’t really finish the transition.
Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
You might want to check out Bandwagon. It’s ActivityPub-based, and you can use it to submit your music to The Indie Beat Radio: https://bandwagon.fm/
Honestly, it’s a tough choice. Hubzilla can theoretically do everything you want, but there’s a steep learning curve.
One thing that might help is to narrow down what kind of features you want. What I’m seeing so far from your description is:
Friendica and Hubzilla] (and everything derived from them) are theoretically right up your alley, but each interface is kind of janky and introduces a learning curve of some kind. Misskey is extremely good, and often feels like the most polished option for long-form stuff. You’re kind of limited on clients, though, as most mobile apps use the Mastodon API. Some Misskey forks add support for it, though.
I know you said you didn’t like WordPress, and I get it. However, the actual ActivityPub integration is really really good, and continues to improve. If you self-host WordPress, there’s hypothetically enough extensibility there to build everything you want. However, WordPress as a platform can be extremely janky. We tried doing it for We Distribute, and there’s a bunch of stuff under the hood that doesn’t quite work right with Fediverse integration. Then again, we’ve been doing a lot of experimental stuff over the years, so it might be different with a fresh install.