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Jupiter Rowland

@ JupiterRowland @sh.itjust.works

Posts
18
Comments
169
Joined
3 yr. ago

Emergency account of a not-so-average OpenSim avatar. Mostly active on Hubzilla.

  • Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack

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  • Old and busted: Mastodon DDoSes the non-Mastodon Fediverse due to design decisions.

    New hotness: Mastodon DDoSes itself due to design decisions.

  • Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack

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  • Some 22% of the entire Fediverse (except Threads).

  • smolfedi - A lightweight, no-JavaScript Fediverse client written in PHP by Adele at Codeberg

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  • When someone's on Mastodon, and they say, "Fediverse," chances are very good that it's only Mastodon that they're talking about.

  • smolfedi - A lightweight, no-JavaScript Fediverse client written in PHP by Adele at Codeberg

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  • Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are all built in PHP. All they need to run is a LAMP stack. That's why even a feature monster like Hubzilla needs fewer server resources per user than Mastodon.

    They only have a little bit of JavaScript for some UI elements such as spoiler tags.

  • Introducing Threadirator - A Threadiverse Community Federator

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  • Friendica and NodeBB

    And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    When exactly does something count as part of the Fediverse?

  • Already heared of Genshin but I didnt play it

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  • Yeah, either unified login. Like, you only need one place where you enter your user credentials, and you use the self-same credentials to log into any server out there. Guess it's a convenience thing, now that what feels like 90% of all people online have no access to hardware keyboards or screens larger than 6.5".

    Or, going beyond that, something like OpenSim's Hypergrid: You have a player character on one server, and you can teleport to a wholly different server, any server, inventory and skin and all.

    I guess we can all imagine how that's going to be horrible: N00b makes new player character on a non-creative survival server, can't be bothered to mine or grow or craft or even look for anything, teleports to a creative server, stocks up their inventory with all kinds of stuff and goes back to the non-creative survival server, decked out like a god.

  • FR#158 – What is Mastodon for?

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  • The main issue with Mastodon is that literally every single last Mastodon newbie is being told (or at least implied to) during on-boarding that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Nobody learns upon joining Mastodon that Mastodon is not an enclosed network. That the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. That there's non-Mastodon stuff connected to Mastodon and constantly pumping non-Mastodon content into Mastodon.

    Why? Because that's easier to understand. A network of tens of thousands of virtually identical Twitters is already much harder to grasp than one Twitter website. It's basically the maximum of what most people out there, even many die-hard übernerds, can grasp.

    Tell them that it's ackchually a network in which lots of Twitters and lots of different Twitters and lots of yet again different Twitters and lots of Reddits and lots of Facebooks and lots of YouTubes and lots of Instagrams and whatnot are all joined, and that you can follow what amounts to Facebook users or YouTube channels or subreddits from what amounts to Twitter. And they'll nope out. Whoosh. Too complicated.

    At least every other Mastodon user at this point in time "knows" that Mastodon is alone in the Fediverse, that the Fediverse consists of only Mastodon. Many Mastodon users spend literal years believing that. Reply to them from Friendica or Hubzilla in a typical Friendica or Hubzilla way, and they'll shit brix and block you.

    Mastodon's entire culture is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse. It was basically defined in mid-2022 (which is why it doesn't include any Mastodon 4.x features either) by those who had fled Twitter in early 2022 after Elon Musk's announcement to buy Twitter out. None of them knew about a Fediverse outside of Mastodon at that point.

    And so you have a Mastodon culture that's all about Mastodon's features (or lack thereof), and that at least implies that any features that Mastodon doesn't have (and that isn't craved for by the majority of Mastodon users) are bad. You know, like more than 500 characters per post. And yet, Mastodon users are trying hard to force Mastodon's culture upon places in the Fediverse that are very very much not like Mastodon at all, e.g. Lemmy or PieFed or Friendica or Hubzilla.

    This is also why mainstream media, including most tech media, keep hammering on the Fediverse being Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. For starters, the truth would be incomprehensible to their audience. Besides, the journalists themselves haven't understood that either.

    As for BlackMastodon, it was another Fediverse = Mastodon thing. At least, nobody there was really Fediverse-savvy worth mentioning. Blackzilla or Blackstreams might have been a success. If only anyone there had known about Hubzilla or (streams).

  • Commands/formatting for posting to Lemmy from Mastodon

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  • Thread title goes into the top line. It's mandatory. Top line/paragraph must be only the thread title. No post text.

    Line below: Mention the Lemmy community that you want to post to. The Lemmy community must be mentioned between the title and the post text, as in, under the title and above the post text. Nothing else must be in this line/paragraph.

    Below that: post text in as many paragraphs as you need.

    No further mentions anywhere else in the post.

    Also, no hashtags. They won't break anything, Lemmy simply doesn't support hashtags. But some 99% of all Lemmy users come from Reddit (as opposed to almost everyone on Mastodon coming from Twitter), Reddit doesn't have hashtags, and so they aren't used to hashtags. Lemmy's culture is basically Reddit's culture, and Mastodon's culture is irrelevant and invalid on Lemmy.

  • Fediverse Recommendations

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  • TikTok:

    • Loops

    Facebook meets blogging:

    • Friendica

    Facebook meets blogging meets Apple iCloud/Google Cloud Services meets the nomadic identity that the ATmosphere has yet to prove to have:

    • (streams)
    • Forte

    Facebook meets blogging meets Apple iCloud/Google Cloud Services meets the nomadic identity that the ATmosphere has yet to prove to have with a ton of other stuff on top:

    • Hubzilla

    Instagram:

    • Pixelfed

    Twitter:

    • Mastodon
    • Pleroma
    • Akkoma
    • Misskey
    • Sharkey
    • Iceshrimp
    • CherryPick
    • and a whole bunch more

    Reddit, Hacker News:

    • Lemmy
    • Mbin
    • PieFed

    YouTube:

    • PeerTube

    Twitch:

    • Owncast

    SoundCloud:

    • Funkwhale

    BandCamp:

    • Bandwagon

    Medium:

    • WriteFreely
    • Plume (half-dead; devs recommend WriteFreely)

    Tumblr:

    • wafrn

    Vkontakte:

    • Smithereen

    Goodreads:

    • BookWyrm

  • A fediverse platform that lets you block whole topics, not just communities?

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  • This would require a whole lot of discipline, namely the discipline of everyone always adding all appropriate tags to their content. In a Fediverse which most people use like Twitter/a Threadiverse which most people use like Reddit where there simply are no such tags.

    Even if there was a *booru clone in the Fediverse, you'd still have shit-tons of people who upload their stuff with literally zero tags whatsoever because they can't be bothered. Just like on every last already existing booru.

    No-one is willing to build Fediverse software upon discipline as a requirement.

  • Loops Joins the Fediverse

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  • K&T Host, a hosting provider for many Fediverse software including Lemmy has announced they're shutting down

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  • They're among the very very few Hubzilla hosters. And I think they are the only (streams) hoster.

  • Tinder-alternatives for the Fediverse

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  • Don't make it a scratch-built, stand-alone Fediverse server app.

    Make it a third-party add-on for Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte that sources the profiles of channels that activate that add-on. I mean, you've gotta see the number of profile fields available on these three.

  • How to get people to use Mastodon?

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  • But, but, unlimited characters aren't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging! And understanding threaded conversations isn't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging either!

    What do you want next, full HTML rendering support? Embedded in-line images? More than four options for polls?!

  • What if we called instances providers?

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  • Go ahead. Try to force that upon Friendica that has called its instances "nodes" for almost 15 years now.

    Or Hubzilla that not only calls them "hubs" but also resists any and all cultural or technological influences from anything that wasn't created by Mike Macgirvin.

    Also

    <insert Morpheus here>

    what if I told you that (streams) and Forte call them "communities"? You know, like Lemmy's and PieFed's "subreddits"?

  • What Fediverse services do you use?

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  • Mostly Hubzilla. Also (streams), WriteFreely and Lemmy for special purposes.

  • Hubzilla, Osada, Zap, Streams, Forte.

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  • Forte had its first official release just yesterday. It only uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. It no longer supports any protocols that aren't ActivityPub.

    Mitra is working on nomadic identity via ActivityPub, too. Guess the hardest part is to make it nomadic in the first place.

    Mike's and silverpill's plan is for people to be able to clone and sync the exact same Fediverse identity between Forte and Mitra and Mastodon and Lemmy and Pixelfed and PeerTube and everything else.

    FEPs are in place already. Might not be long until cloning between Mitra and Forte works. Once that's achieved, the technology is proven and therefore up for grabs for everyone.

    At that point, the ball will be in the hands of the other Fediverse devs. Especially Gargron will have to swallow his pride and adopt technology from the guy who tried hard to argue him into implementing full HTML rendering support on Mastodon, something he rejected because text formatting (allegedly) has no place in purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging.

  • Hubzilla, Osada, Zap, Streams, Forte.

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  • It isn't reinvention. It's evolution.

    In 2011, Mike invented the Zot protocol because he couldn't implement nomadic identity in Friendika's DFRN.

    In 2012, Mike forked Friendica to Red (later Red Matrix) because he couldn't replace DFRN with Zot on something that people relied upon as a stable daily driver.

    In 2015, he turned the Red Matrix into Hubzilla because the Red Matrix was Friendica with nomadic identity. And nobody needed that because everyone and their dog hosted their own single-user Friendica nodes. So the target audience had to change, and thus, the software itself had to be expanded.

    In 2018, he forked Hubzilla into Osada and Zap because he wanted to develop Zot6, and what he envisioned Zot6 to be like would mean a whole lot of breakage. Like, you couldn't have both nomadic identity and non-nomadic protocols in the same software. That's why he couldn't develop Zot6 on something that, again, people relied upon as their stable daily driver. So he had to fork Osada (non-nomadic, but with support for ActivityPub) and Zap (nomadic, but only supporting Zot) off Hubzilla.

    In 2019, it turned out that Zot6 does play along with non-nomadic protocols. So Mike discontinuned Osada, forked a new, nomadic Osada off Zap and added ActivityPub to it whereas Zap stayed Zot-only.

    Over the course of 2019, Zap itself got ActivityPub support. Thus, Osada turned from "Zap, but with different branding and ActivityPub" to "Zap, but with different branding and ActivityPub on by default". Otherwise, both had the same codebase. And so Osada was discontinued.

    In 2020, Mike wanted to advance Zot even further. Zot6 was good enough to be backported to Hubzilla. But Zap, like now-defunct Osada, had been pronounced stable, so there was no tinkering with it. Something something people's daily driver. Even though only Hubzilla users even knew that Zap existed, and only few of them were willing to switch because they saw Zap as "Hubzilla, but without diaspora* and without articles and without cards and without wikis and without webpages etc. etc. and with no clear advantages over the real deal".

    So Mike took Zap and created three more forks: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty), Redmatrix 2020. Don't ask me what was forked from what.

    Rumours had it that this was a case of different levels of stability vs bleeding edge. Allegedly, Zap was stable, Misty was testing, Osada was unstable with ActivityPub on by default so that its interaction/interference with Zot8 could be tested, Redmatrix was unstable with ActivityPub off by default so that it doesn't stand in the way.

    In reality, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix were identical in everything but branding. The reason why they were three was because Mike wanted to confuse the hell out of brand fetishists who used $FEDIVERSE_PROJECT out of nothing but brand worship with no regards for features. Like, people who refused to switch from Mastodon to clearly superior Zap because Mastodon was the cooler brand.

    In early 2021, Roadhouse joined the fray because Mike wanted to go beyond Zot8, and people seemed to daily-drive Misty and Osada now. This time, all backwards compatibility was to be sacrificed. Thus, Zot11 wasn't Zot11, but Nomad. Roadhouse had to have support for "Zot before Nomad" added, that's how incompatible Nomad is with the old Zot.

    At this point, Mike maintained five Fediverse projects:

    • Zap
    • Osada (III)
    • Misty
    • Redmatrix 2020
    • Roadhouse

    Enough to really confuse the brand fetishists.

    In October, 2021, he really flipped them the bird when he forked Roadhouse again. This time, he fully intentionally removed any traces of a name, the branding, almost the entire nodeinfo code and its license. Unfortunately, while he could deprive the software of a name and a logo, he couldn't do that with the code repository for which he chose the name "streams" and that logo with the three blue waves.

    Now he still maintained the same five Fediverse projects plus that nameless thing that, according to him, isn't a project. But that nameless thing was the only one out of the bunch that he actually developed. Everything else was in maintenance mode.

    Came New Year's Eve, 2022, and Mike put Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse on the chopping-block. They weren't needed anymore. What people had started calling "(streams)" was now stable enough to replace all five.

    From then on, Mike only worked on (streams) anymore.

    In 2023, silverpill, the creator and developer of Mitra, was absolutely hell-bent on making Mitra nomadic. But he didn't want to switch to Nomad. He wanted to do nomadic identity with ActivityPub. And so he hit Mike up, and the two started brainstorming about how to pull this off.

    This time, Mike didn't fork anything, even though, yes, people were daily-driving (streams) now. Instead, he created a "nomadic" branch of the streams repository to tinker around with implementing nomadic identity in nothing but ActivityPub.

    Fast-forward to summer, 2024. Mike was so confident in the "nomadic" branch that he merged it into the "dev" branch. Soon afterwards, he merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch. In doing so, he officially switched (streams) to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects".

    It. Blew. Up. Big. Time.

    It had worked just fine under lab conditions with only Mike's instances and silverpill's non-public development instance of Mitra as sparrings partners. Out in the wild, it blew up. (streams) no longer properly federated with anything.

    The reason: (streams) had to deal with so many IDs now that it confused them.

    The consequence: Mike had to work his butt off trying to fix that mess and figure it out first, even though it was only for a handful of users.

    In mid-August, he forked Forte from the streams repository. One of the first things he must have done was rip out any and all support for Nomad and Zot6 to get rid of at least some IDs.

    Also, he attributed the lack of success for (streams) to the Mastodon-centric Fediverse rejecting something that's no project with with no name, no brand and no license that doesn't submit stats. Thus, Forte was declared a project, it got a name, it got a brand identity, it got its nodeinfo code back, and it got its MIT license back.

    August 31st. Mike was so burned out from all this that he officially quit and retired from developing software. Effective September 1st, the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs. As there was no-one there to grab them, Mike still went on working on both, including introducing new features to both. After all, new code for Forte could fairly easily be backported to (streams).

    When asked, Mike said (streams) isn't going to go anywhere, (streams) is the stable one (it is stable again now), and Forte is very experimental.

    March 12th, 2025. Just yesterday. This was the day that Forte saw its very first official release. And this was the first time that Mike talked about Forte in public as opposed to only to his immediate connections.

    The family tree:

    • Friendica (ex Friendika, ex Mistpark) (2010) (two new devs, relicensed to AGPLv3)
    • Free-Friendika (2012-2012) (only fork not by Mike; created for there to always be an MIT-licensed Friendika; died because the sole dev couldn't backport Friendica's AGPL code into his MIT-licensed repository)
    • Hubzilla (ex Red Matrix, ex Red) (2012/2015) (two new devs)
    • Osada (2018-2019)
    • Zap (2018-2022)
    • Osada (2019-2019)
    • Osada (2020-2022)
    • Mistpark 2020 (2020-2022)
    • Redmatrix 2020 (2020-2022)
    • Roadhouse (2021-2022)
    • (streams) (2021) (still developed by Mike)
    • Forte (2021) (still developed by Mike)

  • Meta's Days Are Numbered

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  • It won't replace anything. It's just another alternative.

    Friendica has its advantages. Hubzilla has its advantages. (streams) has its advantages. (streams) can't replace either because both have features that (streams) will never implement.

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Bluesky outage double feature, part 2

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Bluesky outage double feature, part 1

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Get rid of Threads without blocking it

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    When all you need is LÄMP

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Lööps

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Hubzilla and (streams) reacting to the current spam wave

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    The toughest Fediverse history lesson

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Whenever Mastodon breaks compatibility with something else

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    The Fediverse, late summer of 2024

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes?

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?

  • sh.itjust.works Main Community @sh.itjust.works
    Jupiter Rowland @sh.itjust.works

    Strangely limited access for non-Lemmy Fediverse users and not-logged-in people