cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21657544

Finally, Hollo 0.1.0 released! Hollo is a single-user federated microblogging software which is ActivityPub-enabled and powered by Fedify.

Hollo has the most of features that Mastodon has except for moderation tools, and also include:

• CommonMark (a.k.a. Markdown) and up to 4,096 characters per post
• Misskey-style quotes (compatible with Misskey, Akkoma, Fedibird, etc)
• Misskey-style emoji reactions (both Unicode emojis and custom emojis are supported; compatible with Misskey, Akkoma, kmyblue, etc)
• Generally much relaxed limitations (more poll options, more attachments, and so on)
• … and many more!

If you're interested in Hollo, please give it a try! There are several ways to install it: using Railway, using Docker (and Docker Compose), or manually.

If you're already using Hollo, please upgrade it to v0.1.0:

• To Railway users: Just redeploy the Hollo service!
• To Docker users: Switch your Hollo image to ghcr.io/dahlia/hollo:0.1.0 or simply latest!
• To manual installers: Fetch the stable branch and switch over to it!

He'll yeah my siblings!!

So you might have heard of Grayjay already, but it's a multi-source video app that creates a hybrid feed from all sorts of places. Think like YouTube+SoundCloud+BilliBilli+Twitch+Patreon.

It's still in early-ish development but it's quite stable and it's not too buggy. The intent of the app is to allow you to follow creators without being stuck in a walled garden, or at least not one solitary walled garden anyway. Good if want to have a feed that includes sources from YouTube but also, say, Odysee so you can keep up with Red. given that Blinken just got them banned from YouTube.

But the coolest thing is that it also supports PeerTube instances so you can now watch videos and follow channels on that PeerTube instance.

Unfortunately their native plugin generators is buggy and won't work right but there's a workaround:

Once you've got Grayjay installed on your device, in your browser head to:
https://grayjay-peertube.github.io/

Click "Generate QR Code"

In the popup window, enter tankie.tube and click Generate QR Code

Click Open in Grayjay

It will open Grayjay and then all you have to do is to click install and you're done!

Remember to go in the Grayjay app and click More on the bottom bar, then Sources, ensure that the TankieTube plugin is enabled in the list of sources and open it to toggle the Visibility settings so that you will see TankieTube content where you want - on the homescreen and in the search, depending on your personal preference.

idk I was thinking federated social media was pretty peachy at the start of the year but with the total failure of the mastodon project to implement basic trust & safety features to keep black people from facing torrents of racism on there it might be cooked

I created this issue a few months ago and someone picked up the task and implemented the feature!

I never had enough time to learn Rust myself so shout out to the comrade who implemented it.

This should help ensure users are not accidentally sharing tracking codes.

The originating thread.

TankieTube is out of "beta" and everyone's invited!

^Definitions:^

• ^TT^ ^=^ ^TankieTube^
• ^PT^ ^=^ ^PeerTube^
• ^YT^ ^=^ ^YouTube^

OpSec

• Email - Make sure to register using an email detached from your legal identity (remember Stonetoss?).

  The software requires an email address, however, I've disabled the verification requirement. This means you can register using something like cum@fart.com and it will totally work—unless the address is already taken (in which case you should get better material!).

  You would need a real address, of course, to have the option of resetting your password. The only other thing I use email for is explaining and notifying users of any moderator actions I take against them, as a courtesy.

• P2P - The peer-to-peer feature allows the software to scale tremendously well when serving the same viral video to many people at the same time (supposedly at least 1000 concurrent viewers, easily, with a wimpier server than ours).

  A downside of the feature is that it can reveal your IP to a subset of people watching the same video at the same time as you. [Read more]. Therefore, it is recommended to either:

  1. Use a VPN. Or,
  2. Deselect the P2P participation feature in the user settings menu.

Federation

TT users can search and view any videos from instances on the subscriptions list, and the instances following TT can view our vids. I occasionally browse the public index and look for new instances to follow (sometimes they're a bust). LMK if you find any cool ones.

Mirroring vids, as in multiple copies on multiple servers, is done when instances implement something called redundancy, but I haven't looked into that much yet.

Fifty Channels!

The major difference from YT is that TT users can create up to fifty (50) channels (the default is 20 but I bumped it up). Channels are analogous to Lemmy communities, except that PT doesn't yet support shared channels with more than one author/user (I believe it's a planned feature). Create a channel for every weird niche topic that you want!

I'll eventually create a style guide. If you want to sync or archive a YT channel, then I'd prefer that you create a unique TT channel that corresponds to it for better organization.

PT has an automatic channel syncing feature, but I have it turned off right now because it was overloading the transcoding queue.

The TankieTube Homepage

The YT homepage is built by a sinister algorithm customized to distract and exploit you. The TT homepage contains whatever-the-fuck HTML I choose to type with my paws. Determining what to put on it will be a big and ongoing decision. If you've made a channel relevant to the site's theme, send me a message and I'll probably pin it!

About the Outro

The music is La Danse Des Bombes, a great song about the ecstasy of armed combat in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871, which I discovered thanks to comrade exotiquematter@tankie.tube. PT is French software, so I think that's neat.

The sound effects are sampled from a video of the Al-Qassam Brigade resistance fighters in live armed combat against Israeli occupation forces. The sound effects correspond to a :hamas-red-triangle: scene in the video.

Underneath it all is a 140bpm beat by "K1 The Producer".

History & Goals

I started out with a $15/mo VPS (run by Nazis, as it turned out) and have migrated/upgraded the server twice since then. It's now using the most powerful dedicated server available from Freakhosting at ~$230/mo💰🥴, because I wanted it to not suck. It has a Ryzen 9 7950x3D, which is ~32 times as fast as the first server. It still doesn't have the transcoding throughput to keep up with YT syncing without creating a double-digit hour backlog.

The transcoding power can be boosted by renting additional servers for use as remote runners. It all depends on the amount of support the project can get...

Donation Link 🥺👉👈

I'm afraid to add it up, but I'm sure I've sunk at least $600 into various TT expenses since I registered the domain on 2023-10-27 and started playing around. I didn't want to ask for donations until I was sure I knew what I was doing.

Another goal: making the PT vids embed properly in Lemmy!

Bluesky remains highly popular among Brazilians as an alternative to X, that got banned in the country last week. Bluesky has added 3 million accounts since the ban went into effect just over a week ago. When I reported on it last week Bluesky had added 1 million accounts. Of these new accounts, around 85% are from Brazil. The popularity of Bluesky in Brazil also shows up in both politics and the media: President Lula, his party PT Brazil, the Supreme Court, and House of Representatives all have their accounts validated by using their domain as their handle. The media is also paying attention, one of the most popular news programs in Brazil, Jornal Nacional, showed their Bluesky handle during the show. Some of the biggest newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo and Correio Braziliense covered Bluesky as well.

masterfull gambit mr musk

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579425

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423

This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.

I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)

I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.

Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:

https://codeberg.org/danterious/Lemmy_map

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27346179

When an arrogant presumptuous dick dumps hot-headed uncivil drivel into a relatively apolitical thread about plumbing technology and reduces the quality of the discussion to a Trump vs. $someone style shitshow of threadcrap, the tools given to the moderator are:

• remove the comment (chainsaw)
• ban the user from the community (sledge hammer)

Where are the refined sophisticated tools?

When it comes to nannying children, we don’t give teachers a baseball bat. It’s the wrong tool. We are forced into a dilemma: either let the garbage float, or censor. This encourages moderators to be tyrants and too many choose that route. Moderators often censor civil ideas purely because they want to control the narrative (not the quality).

I want to do quality control, not narrative control. I oppose the tyranny of censorship in all but the most vile cases of bullying or spam. The modlog does not give enough transparency. If I wholly remove that asshole’s comment, then I become an asshole too.

He is on-topic. Just poor quality drivel that contributes nothing of value. Normally voting should solve this. X number of down votes causes the comment to be folded out of view, but not censored. It would rightfully keep the comment accessible to people who want to pick through the garbage and expand the low quality posts.

Why voting fails:

• tiny community means there can never be enough down votes to fold a comment.
• votes have no meaning. Bob votes emotionally and down votes every idea he dislikes, while Alice down votes off-topic or uncivil comments, regardless of agreement.

Solutions:

I’m not trying to strongly prescribe a fix in particular, but have some ideas to brainstorm:

• Mods get the option to simply fold a shitty comment when the msg is still on-topic and slightly better quality than spam. This should come with a one-line field (perhaps mandatory) where the mod must rationalise the action (e.g. “folded for uncivil rant with no useful contribution to the technical information sought”).

• A warning counter. Mods can send a warning to a user in connection with a comment. This is already possible but requires moderators to have an unhuman memory. A warning should not just be like any DM.. it should be tracked and counted. Mods should see a counter next to participants indicating how many warnings they have received and a page to view them all, so as to aid in decisions on whether to ban a user from a community.

• Moderator votes should be heavier than user votes. Perhaps an ability to choose how many votes they want to cast on a particular comment to have an effect like folding. Of course this should be transparent so it’s clear that X number of votes were cast by a mod. Rationale:

  • mods have better awareness of the purpose and rules of the community
  • mods are stakeholders with more investment into the success of a community than users

• Moderators could control the weight of other user’s votes. When 6 people upvote an uncivil post and only 2 people down vote it, it renders voting as a tool impotent and in fact harm inducing. Lousy/malicious voters have no consequences for harmful voting and thus no incentive to use voting as an effective tool for good. A curator should be able to adjust voting weight accordingly. E.g. take an action on a particular poll that results in a weight adjustment (positive or negative) on the users who voted a particular direction. The effect would be to cause voters to prioritize civil quality above whether they simply like/dislike an idea, so that votes actually take on a universal meaning. Which of course then makes voting an effective tool for folding poor quality content (as it was originally intended).

• (edit) Ability for a moderator to remove a voting option. If a comment is uncivil, allowing upvotes is only detrimental. So a moderator should be able to narrow the ballot to either down vote or neutral. And perhaps the contrary as well (like some beehaw is instance-wide). And perhaps the option to neutralise voting on a specific comment.

link that was attached to original post (1st ever ActivityPub), original post is linked in this post

The obvious choice for ActivityPub’s birthday would be the 23rd of January 2018 - the day it was annointed as a W3C recommendation. That doesn’t seem quite right though - its not as if the spec came into existence in any sense upon that date. In fact, Mastodon implemented it before thne.

There are several possible dates you might pick, but for me it will always be September 5th 2014 - when I committed the first sketch of a specification I called ActivityPump [github.com] and pushed it to Github

It wouldn’t be until November that I actually submitted (a revised and enhanced version of) that draft to the working group, but even then I had the very nucleus of the specification written down.

Happy 10th birthday, ActivityPub. 🍰

Just wanted to share a thread for those who don't regularly venture out of the bear site. Can't cross-post since it's defederated. It's small but has some numbers about community counts, active users, etc and links to more info from https://lemmyverse.net/. Thought it was notable that Hexbear shows up no matter how you sort it.

OP image is community count sorted by active users in the last month.

Edit: sorted by comments

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3039190

i should stress that no development has been made to this since last month and the only recent development was the sole contributor suggesting the idea to the official ActivityPub repo last week.

the contributor proposed sending an E2EE message as follows, using PGP keys that are stored with password encryption on the instance's server:

1. It requests the recipents public key
2. If there is a recipent public key, it sends the recipents public key to the sender
3. If there is a recipient public key, it encrypts the message
4. If there is no recipient public key, it will warn the user that this message will send unencrypted and the user can reject sending the message or continue sending the message with encryption.
5. The message is sent to the user

currently, fediverse services just use existing E2EE services (Matrix, XAMPP, etc.) and while the demand isn't big i think it would be really convenient. especially as a part of ActivityPub, E2EE messages would work over different fedi services to any fedi account, as opposed to separate, incompatible implementations maintained by each fedi service.

what do you guys think about this idea? cool or no?

edit: btw if you don't know, "private" messaging on fediverse is equivalent to mentioned-only posting, meaning the instance admins can read them as plaintext. this is why Lemmy has a disclaimer warning that your messages aren't private, has a Matrix account field on your profile to securely message with and why virtually no fedi services have tried implementing E2EE encryption

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3009305

I'm quite sure everyone understands how dreadful Twitter is: its user base, privacy policy, moderation, and everything else about it is terrible. People usually leave Twitter for one of the four reasons I just mentioned. Most of the time when people leave Twitter, they commonly choose Bluesky or Mastodon, which are both popular open source decentralized social media platforms, and one of them is also known for cats :3

Let's talk about which one is better and make a final decision on what platform you should use instead of Twitter.

Bluesky (Finally) and Mastodon are both open source, decentralized social media platforms. Both are constantly expanding with new features similar to Twitter, but they are all free to use and do not require subscription (unlike Twitter), and you can do a lot more with both! However, there are a few of negatives with one of the social networking networks over the other, which is Bluesky.

Now, while I give the Bluesky developers some respect for making it open source and decentralized, there are a few serious issues with it right now, including its user base and moderation.

One huge thing that BlueSky did was fairly recently released a feature that will make it even easier for people to harass you the moment they join the platform, the feature is called Starter Packs. This is not even an opt-out feature, and there is no genuine moderation involved. Not only that, but Bluesky is full of anti-Iranian racists everywhere on the platform; the Bluesky moderators have done nothing to address it, and it has not changed since, and if someone quits Twitter and switches to Bluesky, they are literally moving to the exact same platform, except slightly decentralized and open source. Bluesky is TWITTER and isn't really so much better in terms of privacy either even as it being open source.

Until Bluesky improves its moderation and other aspects, it is recommended to leave Twitter or Bluesky by deleting your account, find yourself a good Mastodon instance or create your own Mastodon, and make a account on it :3

Huge thanks to Cyrus and David's Creation for giving me some pointers on what Bluesky is doing, you should definitely check both of them out!

As always, if there is any incorrect information on this post, notify me and I will correct it right away!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16017036

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We're readying the release of Lemmy v0.19.4 (currently on 0.19.4-rc.2), in the upcoming weeks, but still have a few more issues to address, and testing that needs to be done. If you'd like to help us test betas to help find issues, you can go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml for the newest RC, or run your own test ones locally from our beta docker tags.

Please do not run unreleased builds in production, as these could cause issues which require some manual intervention to fix.

We've also added a few github milestones for our upcoming releases, to keep track of what we'll be working on, but you can also look at our pending pull requests.

@flamingo-cant-draw increased the character limit for alt-text fields.

@dullbananas just graduated from high school and will have a lot more time to work on Lemmy for a few months. Has been working on a custom database migration runner.

@matc-pub cleaned up and added a lot of asynchronous loading for various components in lemmy-ui.

@sleepless and matc-pub fixed an issue with leap years in lemmy-ui.

@sleepless fixed a bug with admin settings in lemmy-ui, fixed an issue with language not allowed, fixed an issue with video thumbnails, and upgraded to a non-deprecated QR library. Has also been adding a lot of the backbone for lemmy-ui-leptos.

@nutomic fixed some issues with importing partial settings backups, 2, made NodeInfo standard compliant, and upgraded to 2.1, added some test cases for user reports, removed unused federation code, added a stricter rate limit for logins, made password reset tokens non-reusable, marked DB fields as sensitive so they don't show up in logs, allowed passing of command-line params via environment vars. Also prevented removal of comments which are already deleted, and configured a max comment width in clippy.

@dessalines fixed some issues with image proxying, 2, made some fixes to our woodpecker CI jobs. Replies and mentions are now correctly hidden for blocked users.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15475568

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We're readying the release of Lemmy v0.19.4 in the upcoming weeks, but still have a few more issues to address, and testing that needs to be done. If you'd like to help us test betas to help find issues, you can go to https://voyager.lemmy.ml for the newest beta, or run your own test ones locally from our beta docker tags.

Please do not run unreleased builds in production, as these could cause issues which require some manual intervention to fix.

We've also added a few github milestones for our upcoming releases, to keep track of what we'll be working on, but you can also look at our pending pull requests.

@ticoombs converted our docker upgrade script to the newer version, and has been readying lemmy-ansible for the next release.

@dullbananas optimized the actor language inserts, and fixed an issue with triggers locking the tables.

@sleepless Removed an unecessary login step from our crates.io publish, fixed a deprecated reliance on encoding.rs, fixed an issue with onBlur in lemmy-ui, and added a dependency on lemmy-rs-client for lemmy-ui-leptos, which included a lot of structural changes. Fixed an issue with broken direct messages in lemmy-ui, and a bug with newly-created communities.

@nutomic added setting the show_nsfw site setting based on content_warning, fixed an issue with Discourse federation, added NodeBB federation, fixed an issue with crashes for missing domains, added wordpress federation, fixed an issue with early exits when only running scheduled tasks, added a timeout on incoming activities, and made instance.preferred_username optional.

@dessalines fixed an issue with broken community outboxes, fixed an issue with search returning deleted / removed posts. The liked_only for GetPosts now doesn't return your own items, making this more usable to show a history of your likes.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

This noob is testing the interconnectivity of the #Fediverse, with the AP (Mastodon, etc.) and AT (Bluesky) Protocol protocols, and also starting to test #Nostr this week.

https://mastodon.social/@PlasticParagraph/112410298729450013

#ActivityPub #Bluesky #ATProtocol

Organizer for Front End North, @katiefenn@front-end.social:

Last week the LGBTIQA+ Greens, the officially affiliated liberation group for the Green Party of England and Wales, lost its Twitter account for unknown reasons. It was suspended. It was appealed. The appeal went nowhere.

I cannot state enough that trans people need to urgently divest from Twitter. The network is actively hostile to us now.

Maintaining a presence is fine, but we must move the centre of gravity for organising onto other platforms.

I’ve been off Twitter for two weeks now, and I’ve gained a bit of perspective about how much organising still happens on the platform.

The Twitter thread is still our primary source of news and information. All this becomes inaccessible the moment you move off Twitter. And as more and more people quit Twitter, our community is fracturing and becoming less powerful.

I think this really hit us hard when the Cass report was published. Our adversaries are organised, and we are scattered.

tl;dr: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is on the Board. Someone please update this meme:

Anyone know anything about “human rights advocate” Esra’a Al Shafei? This is all I found of note so far: S.T.O.P. and the Fight Against Surveillance

The amazing activists sneaking footage out of Uyghur detention facilities in China and those fighting for reproductive justice in the U.S. use the exact same encryption as criminals.

Where’s the footage, Esra'a? We’re still waiting on it…

From JWZ’s hot-take: I see no way this could possibly go wrong

Oh, and apparently one of the other board members, Ghavi, is a lawyer at a firm that is all-in on cryptocurrency and "AI" companies.

Anyway, on to the Board:

Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in Southwest Asia and North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, the first dedicated fund for feminist tech in the Global Majority. Esra’a currently serves on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy and freedom online.

Karien Bezuidenhout is an advocate for openness and supporter of social entrepreneurs. As the former director of the Shuttleworth Foundation, her core interest lies in social and policy innovation through practical interventions and sustainable social enterprises. Through her experience as a board member to social change organisations and social enterprises across the world, she strives to make connections that accelerate learning.

Amir Ghavi leads Fried Frank’s core technology practices as the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice, where he advises clients on cutting edge technology and intellectual property matters. Amir is also a regular speaker, panelist and commentator to the media on digital assets and quantum computing.

Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of Mastodon since 2020. Felix helped Eugen by incorporating the project in a non-profit LLC in Germany and raising additional funds from Prototype Fund, NLnet and GLS Bank. Felix is the CEO of SOLARYS, a company developing software for volunteer firefighters in the DACH region.

Biz Stone is an entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media platforms. Biz’s career spans various facets of technology and social networking, including contributions to the development of blogging, podcasting, and social media. Beyond Twitter, Biz has engaged in various philanthropic efforts and tech ventures, emphasizing the importance of corporate responsibility and the potential of technology to address societal challenges.