Apologies if this is the wrong comm for the question but I've been wanting to move to RSS more again to help me in avoiding doomscrolling, but I've noticed that the NSFW posts don't show up. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to get them included I'm not seeing? like NSFW=true in the get request or something?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/8543124

In anticipation of Lemmy's upcoming 0.19 release, and to work out any final issues, we're going to deploy a test release on lemmy.ml within the next few days.

We're doing this testing on lemmy.ml only, so that we can encounter any issues before the release, and to make sure the upgrade process is smooth for other production servers.

Some of the following will happen during the process:

• Apps will likely break (only for lemmy.ml)
• Lemmy.ml may experience some downtime for the upgrade to complete (ideally no more than an hour).
• If anything goes wrong, we may have to restore from a database backup, meaning content made in between backups may be lost.

If all goes well, we'll have an official announcement for the release after this testing period.

I apologize for the difficulties this might cause. At most this will be a week of hair-pulling, but its vital that we catch any issues before telling other servers to upgrade.

Most nodes have no constitution

In an effort to find places to create communities, I browse lemmyverse.net. There are hundreds of instances. Unfortunately descriptions of instances are either empty or general purpose.

This is a terrible organization. No constitution. It’s like these neighborhoods where all the shops try to sell a bit of everything. E.g. like when a tiny shop sells spices, phones, cheese, hammers, rugs, and speakers. Nothing goes together. We say shops like that lack a constitution which defines the focus of their business. When there’s a whole street of shops like this, you don’t know which shop to enter for what you need. You have to try many different shops arbitrarily until you find what you need. The #threadiverse is like that. Not many venues focused on a defined purpose.

Have I missed something? Is there a service or document that only lists specific-purpose #Lemmy and #Kbin nodes?

Centralization in wolf’s clothes

The other problem with the Lemmyverse site is there is no “cancel Cloudflare” switch that supports filtering out all instances that are centralized on Cloudflare. I always have to open the filters and manually remove:

• lemmy·world
• lemm·ee
• sh·itjust·works
• lemmy·ca
• lemmy·ml (← no longer CF but I still filter it out for other reasons)

The threadiverse exists inherently for the purpose of decentralization. So it’d be sensible for resources for finding nodes to make it trivial to just list decentralized instances.

Centralization - lack of constitution relationship

The lack of constitution effectively exacerbates the centralization problem. That is, when everything is general purpose, this encourages everyone to choose the biggest general purpose venue -- Lemmy·World, the Wal·Mart of the #Lemmyverse.

Looks like the ban was reversed, but lol.

Mondoweiss runs their own instance now. Love to see media orgs embracing fediverse tech properly, not just fleeing back to the Silicon Valley monopolies because they got blindsided by some lib fucking mod.

we also have the most comments. never stop posting

Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.

Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

• tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.

• I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.

• I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.

• The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.

• Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

The Atlantic Council is the US’s premier military-industrial complex think tank, and the fediverse is on their radar. PDF

CNBC: Europe gives Elon Musk 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas war misinformation and violence on X, formerly Twitter

Before long the Global North governments are going to realize the fediverse exists, and they’re going to put pressure on it as they’ve done—and continue to do—on corporate social media platforms. They’re the self-appointed deciders of what is mis-, dis-, & malinformation.

I'm not asking this to bait you. It's not a trick question. I genuinely want to know.

Biden himself has stated multiple times that he wants to "reach across the aisle" (his exact words) and work with Republicans. You know, the same Republicans that are banning abortion and LGBTQ+ people? The same Republican party that has literal white supremacists in its political ranks? I earnestly want to know why you still back a party that openly wants to work with fascists.

The only answer I've ever seen liberals give is that the Republicans are worse... and they are, yeah, but if your choices are pure evil, and the guy who works with pure evil, doesn't that suggest that both of them should be opposed? And as we've seen, a democratic government won't fight to protect marginalized groups from the bigoted laws the Republicans are passing, so even voting for them to protect those groups from fascism just isn't working.

And what do you make of Biden telling his wealthy donors that "nothing will fundamentally change." and Biden boasting about the economy while rent skyrockets people live out of their cars and struggle to feed themselves? How can you call yourself a leftist or a even progressive if you stand by that?

Again, I'm not saying these things to be abrasive, I genuinely want an honest answer.

To any kbin.social users who aren't a quivering, cowardly , come and have a good faith debate about politics. Is there even a single one among you that has the heart of a poster?

If none of you reply, I'll be forced to conclude that you're too scared to set foot on our turf and want to stay in your pathetic echo chamber rather than engage in manly combat in the marketplace of ideas.

Based on monthly users, Hexbear should be 7th, but we're listed as 9th.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Also, there's no users graph on Hexbear's the-federation.info page, either.

https://the-federation.info/node/details/55154

Lemmy experienced a CSAM attack this week, with some significant ramifications for the entire network. It started early in the week, where new accounts created on lemmy.world posted Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on multiple communities. This prompted the lemmy.world admins on Monday to set the registration to application only, with no more open signup on the server. The next day the CSAM attack continued, this time from accounts made on other servers that posted to communities on lemmy.world. As a response the lemmy.world admins closed the lemmyshitpost community, as that seemed to be the main focus of the attack.

This problem with CSAM on Lemmy differs from the problem that Mastodon has with CSAM, as reported on earlier this summer. When the Stanford Internet Observatory report found CSAM on Mastodon, it often existed below the surface, with the vast majority of users never encountering the material. The attack on Lemmy seems to have been executed with the purpose of getting people to see the material, as quite some people reported seeing the material.

One of the major impacts of this attack relates to technical design choices that Lemmy has made. Images that are posted on server A get send over and stored on server B, when someone on server B follows a community on server A. Images that are posted on lemmy.world, the biggest Lemmy server, exists in the databases of most other Lemmy servers as well. This means that due to the attack on lemmy.world, many Lemmy admins do now have images of CSAM in their database. With it comes liability for the admins, as well as reporting requirements. IFTAS has a good overview of the resources for admins to navigate these requirements.

Other aspects of Lemmy have confounded the issue of third party servers unwittingly hosting CSAM. It is currently not possible to federate with other Lemmy servers, and receive the text of a post, without also receiving and hosting the images of a post. Mastodon for example does allow servers to reject images while not rejecting text. Selective deletion of images in the database on Lemmy is also hard to do, and as a result, servers decided to delete all federated images in their database.

One of the ways admins deal with this new threat is with a new AI scanning tool called Lemmy Safety, created by the admin of the dbzer0 lemmy server. It scans all images in the Lemmy database for potential CSAM, and automatically deletes the images, and can also be used to scan newly incoming images. While this can help in the short term with making sure there is no CSAM material, it might interfere with legal obligations that administrators have. In various jurisdictions, administrators are required to report to the relevant authorities when they become aware of CSAM. Again, this collection of resources by IFTAS is a good start with helpful information.

It is clear that this is a complicated problem for volunteer admins to deal with. Multiple administrators concluded that the risks and complications of continuing to host Lemmy servers is not worth it. Other servers, such as lemm.ee have made extensive plans on how to deal with the situation, such as disabling image uploads, and applying a custom patch to prevent images from other servers to be saved on their server. They also float the idea of an invite-based registration system.

On the Matrix chat channels for Lemmy admins, tension is rising, and people are frustrated with the lack of acknowledgement and communications from the developers @dessalines and @nutomic. The developers have not communicated anything about this on either their Matrix chat channels or on their Lemmy. On their GitHub, the dbzer0 admin proposed to expand his automated CSAM scanning to allow for saving and review potential hits, instead of outright deletion. Developer @dessalines stated that this “is not something we have time for rn.” For servers that are operated under US law however, administrators are mandated to save CSAM they encounter, report it to the authorities, make it not visible for users, and restrict access to the saved material as best as possible. The outright rejection by the main developer to build tools that can admins satisfy these legal requirements does not help the confidence of admins who are worried about their responsibilities.

Meanwhile, new reports are starting to pop up of a new type of CSAM attack. Posts that are titled ‘Tiktok Cringe’, and first show a few seconds of a random tiktok video, and then switch to CSAM material. This makes it really easy for moderators to miss the content, unless they watch the entire video. At this point, it is unclear if this was an isolated incident, or part of a bigger attack. How this situation will develop in the near future is out in the open, but I’m sure we’ll come back to it soon.

Social network Minds has been working on implementing ActivityPub, and are now mostly connected to the fediverse. Minds, which launched in 2015, has a strong focus on free speech and cryptocurrency. As such, multiple outlets report the far-right nature of its user base. Minds reported that they joined the fediverse in a not particularly clear post. So far it seems like posts made on Minds are visible on Mastodon, but comments made by Mastodon users on a post made by Minds, are not visible on the Minds’ platform itself. The culture and ethics of Minds seems to differ significantly from that of most fediverse servers, and if Minds becomes more prominently visible within the fediverse, this will likely lead to friction and conversations around defederation. On the other hand, it does give another indication that ActivityPub is becoming the standard protocol for other social networks to implement.

A contributor to the Tusky project (an open source Android client for Mastodon) leaves the project, and writes a blog post alleging financial mismanagement. The other contributors write an extensive explanation of the situation, denying the allegations. While the situation itself is not particularly impactful for the fediverse, it is a good illustration of how difficult the organisational aspect of collectively building software on the fediverse is.

cross-posted from: https://lemmyloves.art/post/49728

I posted a bit ago on a different account, and yeah here we are. I actually set it up!

Federation Policy

There are some instances that have been initially defederated from, most of which are just are either toxic or host illegal content across the fediverse. Defederation will only be reserved for spaces that present consistent moderation problems, host illegal content, or are hate filled. Whenever a defederation is considered a post will be made to discuss and gather community input.

Instance Management

So, same deal as over on literature.cafe. If this instance ever needs to go down, I will give at least a 30 day warning prior and make a good faith attempt to keep the instance online as well as be transparent as to why a shutdown is being considered. A financial statement will be posted monthly. This instance will likely cost more than literature.cafe long term, so if you are planning on joining and are able to donate it is greatly appreciated. I also take daily secure backups.

I am attempting to find at least one extra admin for the instance as well, but I at least plan on having a backup "break the glass" admin account like I do have on literature.cafe

Community Creation

Community creation is currently disabled and is only for admins. This may be reconsidered in the future, but if you want a new community to be made please go to !requests@lemmyloves.art and request there. For those on other instances who want to view a current list of communities go to !411@lemmyloves.art

Right now due email functionality on the instance is busted due to the host blocking the ports temporarily until the first invoice is generated for the instance. So, remember your password if you sign up for the time being or just ask to have your password reset if you forget it.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2178314

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/3715524

The beta for groups will release later this week, which won't be federated initially. Federation will be added afterwards.

Looks like it will have some interesting features like videos, polls, and events, as well as moderator tools like limiting what a user can do.

Some links:

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110931821965407984

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931868347117511

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931984467276917

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110932004988109773

Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier

Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit.

1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking

There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this:

Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.

This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.

2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance

I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.

Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.

With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be.

While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.

3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature

Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.

So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.

Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.

Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.

thanks to nutomic for the follow-thru on this

more info on my previous post (see UPDATE in body):

https://hexbear.net/post/363393

if you have reason to believe there are still alts that are not banned, please contact nutomic via DM with info

The system ultimately worked!

Welcome! It’s been a somewhat slower news week, over on the microblogging side of the fediverse, but that makes it up for a busy week of community drama on the threadiverse. Being a young platform that has recently had a massive inflow of new people means figuring out as a group of communities on how to interact together. Lemmy is now seeing this process play out, with multiple ongoing conversations and issues around defederation. Let’s dive right in!

Defederation drama on Lemmy

Over the last few weeks, multiple Lemmy servers have either defederated from each other, or held discussions about defederation. These decisions and conversations have been for quite different reasons, but there is some underlying common threads in the conversations around it. Decisions by individual servers to defederate is usually something I prefer not to report on, but in this case its worth noting the community’s response to it.

A quick rundown of the different events: A Lemmy server decided to defederate from Lemmynsfw.com, a Lemmy server that is dedicated to porn. The NSFW community made a thread (here, but might be down) to complain about the defederation decision. Lemmy’s largest server, Lemmy.world has defederated from a large server that is dedicated to piracy, citing regulatory reasons. The decision was originally published in their discord, leading to pushback from their own community over both the decision itself as well as their communication methods. Finally, multiple servers have held open discussions about whether to defederate from Hexbear, with the end result that Hexbear in turn decided to defederate from one the involved servers. Hexbear is an active Lemmy server that has existed for multiple years seperated from the rest of the fediverse, and only in the last few weeks have turned on federation. The community is strong leftist, and formed after the ChapTrapHouse community got banned from Reddit.

What stands out in these separate events is the wider community involvements and opinion regarding the defederation decisions. On the microblogging side of the fediverse, drama between servers that leads to defederation is usually treated more as a something that only really affects the people on both servers, and people on servers that are not part of the drama either staying out of it, or offering commentary from the sideline.

In the threads on Lemmy dedicated to these decisions, lots of people from who are not directly impacted by the decisions chimed in. Part of this is the affordances of the software, which accentuates the idea that everyone can centrally respond to a specific topic. Another part of it is that defederation on Lemmy has a different and broader impact on the entire community than it has on, let’s say Mastodon. This is most visible in the case of Lemmy.world defederating from the large piracy community dbzer0. For the Lemmy community at large, the piracy community is more valuable the more people are contributing to it. So when the largest Lemmy community cannot contribute anymore, this decision meaningfully impacts the people who are not part of neither the lemmy.world or dbzer0 community.

Community culture on Lemmy also differs from the culture that is more dominant on other parts of the fediverse. On microblogging platforms, defederation and blocking is framed in terms of safety and protection. On Lemmy and Kbin safety also plays a role, especially in the case of defederation between Hexbear and Blahaj.zone. However, defederation tend to also be framed in the context of censorship. The Lemm.ee server, a proposal to defederate from Hexbear was viewed much more critical, with comments focusing more on individual responsibility. In the other cases regarding piracy or NSFW content, people’s hesitation towards defederation gets framed even more in terms of censorship. Overall it feels like the broader Lemmy community is still searching for a shared communal attitude towards when defederation is a proper tool to be used, if such consensus can even be found.

In other news

The Nivenly foundation announced that Kris Nóva has passed away. She was the driving force behind the hachyderm.io server as an admin. She stepped back from that role and became the president of the Nivenly foundation, the ‘nonprofit on a mission to bring sustainable governance and autonomy to open source projects’. Her contributions and work with Hachyderm and Nivenly have made a significant positive contribution on the fediverse.

Bean, a Lemmy app for iOS has officially launched. One of it’s standout features is the ability to group communities into a single feed, although this is locked behind the paid version. The Lemmy developers relegated the decision on how to approach duplicate communities to well, the community, and this grouping in the client is one potential way of dealing with the duplication. In a short conversation with the developer, he said he expects to add Kbin support as well, once the Kbin API officially releasesand that other Lemmy apps will do so too. This might hopefully avoid the microblogging problems of the fediverse, where the vast majority of apps only support Mastodon and rarely the other microblogging platforms.

Red Planet Lab, a VC-backed startup, has released a demo of a Mastodon clone with a completely rewritten backend, in order to have it handle Twitter-sized audience (500M+ users). Their demo is done to showcase their product Rama, their new programming platform. Red Planet Lab promises to open source release their ActivityPub server next week. Backend architecture is not the only necessary requirement to have a success product however, as the recent shuttering of Cloudflare’s Wildebeest project indicates. It also has sparked a renewed conversation on the fediverse regarding server sizes: ‘what is a good size for fediverse servers, and can servers be too large?’

other

A Threads engineer posts about ActivityPub, specifically about putting in effort to learn about the protocol. From the thread, it seems there is a team of at least four engineers at Meta who are working on what they call ‘fediverse workstream from threads’. They express an interest in joining the Fediverse Developer Network as well.

Mozilla.social, the Mastodon server of Mozilla that is currently in closed beta testing, seems to be using a front end client based on Elk as a user interface.

A new cross poster that allows you to automatically post your fediverse posts to Bluesky as well. An update by Robert W. Gehl on his upcoming book “Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media”.

Firefish continues its professionalisation steps with a new paid developer, sponsored by Spacehost. Spacehost is a new hosting service for fediverse software, with Chris Trottier being involved in both Spacehost and Firefish. The Verifiedjournalist.org project is looking for someone to take over the project.

The University of Innsbruck has set up their own Mastodon server. (h/t for the tip @gunchleoc)

WeDistribute has a great article on IFTAS, the organisation for Independent Federated Trust and Safety.

An extensive article on hashtags by Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag. The article goes into detail on Mastodon’s proposed changes to hashtags.

She was one of the more respectable big instance admins IMO. She became kind of a celebrity on the platform, in no small part due to the transparency she ran the instance with, posting regular updates about the finances and technical goings-on. It wasn't an explicitly radical space, but it was quite progressive as far as large tech forums go.

She was big on the governance and contingencies thing, so I am sure the operations of the instance itself will continue smoothly (as smoothly as any organization can continue with the loss of a founder).

Rest in Peace.

I for one was excited to see you folks' weird ass posting breaching containment on my normal timeline.

But from my home instance feddit.it it seems I can only see your posts to other instances, not any content from Hexbear itself. I can see some comms like CTH but they haven't been updated in weeks.

I'm guessing you guys switched to whitelist federation and stopped sending us new slop. Can we reopen the slop valves please? Having to switch accounts makes my dumb brain tired.

Anyway welcome to the Fediverse!

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure of my personal answer. I enjoy my time here, but I also see lots of opportunities for how things could be better. There have been some interesting projects this week of people working on structural improvements within the fediverse, on safety, testing and search. Plus, we take a look at how the Japanese side of the fediverse is doing.

Search, and the lack thereof, on Mastodon has been a hotly contested issue for a long time. There are some technical challenges with implementing search in a federated contest, but the main limitation has always been social: how do you make sure that you have consent of the people who you are indexing? One option is to take the setting ‘Discoverable’, which indicates that your profile can be found by search engines and other discoverability services, and take all the posts by accounts that use the (opt-in) setting Discoverable, and return all public posts by that account. This is the approach taken by a custom patch created by @vyr, which as been used on the Universeodon server for a while.

Now, Eugen Rochko has proposed a similar change for Mastodon proper (without mentioning the previous work by @vyr), stating “It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience.”

The definiteness of the statement, and the lack of discussion (Eugen Rochko closed the comment section soon after) as well as the implementation itself lead to quite a bit of discussion from the community. These responses got taken up upon, and a new implementation got proposed a few days later. The current proposal for search is to have two separate opt-in options, one for the discoverability of your profile, and one for the discoverability of your posts.

This seems like a fairly optimal outcome, with full granular control and opt-in to get people’s consent. The process to get there though is more of a mixed bag. The way it is implemented also indicates that Mastodon struggles with its role as a community leader; a significant group of long-term Mastodon users also has feelings that are at best ambivalent about how the Mastodon organisation is run. By not crediting earlier work by others, and making unilateral executive decisions about controversial topics without community input runs the risk of eroding community trust and support in the project.

Official announcement of the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP). The goal of the FSEP is “to reduce the administration burden for Mastodon admins, and increase safety for Mastodon users, by providing tools that will make it easy and convenient for admins and moderation teams to consistently discover harmful instances and protect their communities”. It is an interesting collaboration between multiple actors who are working on improving safety within the fediverse. Expect a more extensive report on this soon. For now, the proposal itself is worth reading.

The fediverse promotes interoperability between platforms and products and services via ActivityPub, but putting this in practice can be hard. For developers, there are scant little tools available to make sure that the product they are making is actually interoperable in practice. To help with this, the Social Web Incubator Community Group held a meeting about organising towards testing tools that developers can use to test is their platform is indeed interoperable with the other platforms. For non-developers who are interested in the fediverse, the most important takeaway is that for all its lofty ideals, getting full interoperability on the fediverse is really difficult. There is a lack of tools, documentation, but also knowledge of what tools actually are available is often lacking or hard to find. For developers, it’s worth checking the notes here, and the presentation by Johannes Ernst (@J12t)

The Misskey flagship server misskey.io reorganises themselves into a company, Nikkei Asia reports. Misskey continues to grow rapidly, especially in Japan. Misskey.io has recently restricted new signups to only people from Japan in order to be able to handle all the growth. I published a more extensive report on Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse this week, here.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA, and I wrote a report on the major themes in their answers, which you can read here. Much has been said about the political views of the developers, who explicitly identify themselves as Marxist-Leninist. What interested me was their views on software and the fediverse. And here they are surprisingly hands-off, something I did not expect beforehand. At some point they explicitly state that the fediverse “will grow whether we want it or not”, which surprised me, considering they developer the third most popular software on the fediverse. This gives them significant influence in whether and how the fediverse growth, but so far they seem reluctant to admit to this power.

Mastodon starts selling merchandise, with most of the items already being sold out again.

IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust And Safety, has written a blog post to introduce themselves, and launch another survey for a Needs Assessment.

Wired has posted an extensive description of how to migrate your posts from Instagram to Pixelfed.

Threads has added support for “rel=me” links, allowing you to verify your Threads account on Mastodon. The Verge has a simple guide on how to use this. What stands out is the comment by Threads developer Jessel, who says: “my hope is that folks take this as a sign that we’re embracing open standards seriously”.

Techmeme continues to add further support for the fediverse. They’ve linked to fediverse accounts as commentary for a while. Now it also links directly to their Mastodon post for you to comment, like or share, similar how it links to their post on X.

Lemmy held a Canvas event, similar to /r/Place on reddit, where people can place a pixel on a canvas every few minutes. Here is the final result.

Tweakers is one of the largest Dutch tech news website. They published an article on all Reddit alternatives, going in large detail on both Lemmy and Kbin.

An extensive wiki with practical guides for fediverse software.

A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.

edit: the have blocked the piracy comms, not the instance

Basically I made a post on blahaj and someone from kbin commented on it somehow even though we're not federated with them; I only happened to see the comment because I decided to look at how big the emojis looked to blahaj users so I went over to the same post on blahaj and there it was

Sometimes there's a real humdinger of a comment, like a real that I'd like to reply to, but I find that it only shows up on lemmy.ml and not here. Is that expected behaviour?