Goofed Home

Fedibook groups just got a major rewrite.

Groups now work as a ActivityPub group actors — meaning members from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse platforms can join and participate, not just Fedibook users.

Invite a @mastodon.social friend to your group, they accept the follow request, and group posts start appearing in their home timeline. They can post back via DM. It just works.

On Fedibook, groups looks just like that face-thing.

Jump over to my blog to read more
https://sindum.dk/fedibook-groups/

#Fedibook #ActivityPub #Fediverse

This is incredibly useful. The fact that you can subscribe to a community’s RSS feed without needing an account is a feature that most of the web has abandoned, and it’s a feature we desperately need back.

RSS is unglamorous. It doesn’t optimize for engagement. You get what was posted, in order, without algorithmic reshuffling. That’s the point. And the Fediverse’s commitment to keeping RSS feeds public is one of the reasons I think it matters—you’re not locked into their algorithm, you can read what’s actually happening.

The Lemmy RSS URLs are particularly nice because they let you build custom feeds by community and sort order. I use them to track conversations I care about without the noise.

Great comprehensive resource. This is actually pretty relevant to the Zeitgeist Experiment — we build a platform where people respond to questions via email and my butt helps surface the real substance of opinion, not just algorithmic amplification.

RSS is exactly the kind of open, ownership-preserving distribution that makes the fediverse interesting. No algorithmic ranking, no engagement optimization. Just people subscribing to what they want to read.

The gap between “what algorithms surface” and “what people actually think” is huge. Tools like RSS and email-based responses let that gap become visible instead of papering over it.

RSS still matters more than ever on the fediverse.

Most people treat it like a legacy protocol, but it is the only thing that actually makes the fediverse interoperable at scale. ActivityPub is great for posts, but RSS is the real workhorse for discovery and archiving.

I keep thinking about what happens when the fediverse hits millions of users. ActivityPub requires federation to new instances for every post. RSS is pull-based, cacheable, and doesn’t depend on the other side being online. It is the only thing that scales when you have thousands of instances.

The Zeitgeist Experiment uses RSS to collect responses from people who respond via email. We don’t force people into accounts or dashboards. They reply to questions, we aggregate the responses, and visualize where people agree and disagree. No algorithmic sorting. No engagement optimization. Just raw public opinion.

Sometimes the simplest protocol wins, not the flashiest one.

Yes

Wow this is cool. Why is nextcloud there and where is masstadon. Do you recommend any?

For Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/

Nextcloud is included because it’s part of the fediverse: https://nextcloud.com/blog/federation-a-foundational-concept-for-digital-sovereignty/

This release fixes federation with Lemmy.

Active users and number of servers also recently reach all time high.

If you want to learn how to create a good open source project for the fediverse. i think peertube is the best role model for that.

So most instances don’t allow open registration and posting.

Yep, a few days ago, I decided I wanted to use peertube and add content. The first fucking 5 peertube instances I opened said ‘not accepting registration.’

So yeah, fuck that. I stopped. Went to youtube and was able to start a new channel and post my video within 5 minutes. lol

I briefly posted about this in this thread yesterday. I think it deserves more notice because of the problems it can cause, and it will scale negatively.

Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you’ll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once. These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they’ve interacted in.

The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn’t block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won’t federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won’t even know because they don’t view their community from there. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.

Lemmy 1.0 promises to fix this apparently from their end, but I think at least for as Piefed is concerned we could get in on this first. We also need a way before that for Piefed based communities to automatically throw out all comments made even locally by instance banned accounts.

Oh sorry :)

I mean I agree with your description of the problem and the changes you propose.

I’m coding it now, should be deployed today.

That’s great!

What about Lemmy users? I know if a banned lemmy.world user was to post on a piefed.social instance that it would be federation rejected, but what I propose here would go further and simply have it automatically purged at source too.

I find the inclusion of every federated instance in ‘All’ fairly annoying. New tiny/niche/vanity instances get added by default when federated. There ends up being too much duplication and stuff I’m not interested in.

I’d much rather a system that only includes the local instance by default with a way to discover and add other instances.

My instance block list is long but there’s always new instances to block. For me, this a design flaw of the fediverse.

All those things are on the ‘Explore’ menu.

Great point about feeds. I think the ability to curate what shows up is actually critical for healthy discourse. When everything defaults to all or local only, you lose the middle ground where diverse perspectives can actually intersect without overwhelming noise. This is why I am working on Zeitgeist not as another feed, but as a way to actually see where people agree and disagree without the algorithm gaming that. The best conversations happen when you control the context, not when everything is flattened into one stream.

You can use the dropdown menu in the top left to switch it over to PieFed: https://lemmyverse.net/piefed/communities

But really, if you’re on a mature instance like feddit.online pretty much every community will already be known so you can just go to https://feddit.online/communities and use the search tool. Try the advanced search.

Yes, Lemmyverse doesn’t detect and sort by active users for Piefed - but you don’t need Lemmyverse if you’re on Piefed now. It’s essentially built in.

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted.

I’d go a step further and say that if big tech must control the internet it would be better to not have an internet at all (and that’s coming from someone who remembers life without it well and currently uses it a lot). But given the current situation I would hand back any true productivity gains, casual enjoyment, etc to take away the global narrative control that a tiny handful of companies have.

I've had an inspiring first week with Fedibook. Your feedback has been truly inspiring. It started as a provocation and an experiment — but I have decided to turn this into a proper open source project. My first ever!

If you tested on dev1.fedibook.dk — come to https://fedibook.net. The new showcase instance where we will run the latest released code. Or even better, run your own instance and friend request me @sindum@fedibook.net.

I'm heading off on holiday, but I wanted to share what I'm hoping we can build together:

Your Friendly Neighborhood Social Network... One that is there for you when you want to take a moment to connect and follow up. That shows your feed from friends, follows and groups. Nothing more. With a UI that focuses on that rather than keeping your attention.

Jump over to my blog for this post with a little more detail.

https://sindum.dk/come-join-fedibook-net/

#fedibook #fediverse #activitypub @shellsharks #YourFriendlyNeighborhoodSocialNetwork

I’m disappointed, this doesn’t seem to be about books.

@Territorial sorry for that misunderstanding. It's a fediverse addressbook.