I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.
And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it'll take way too many communities with it.
If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.
I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?
And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like !main@soccer.forum is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like !nba@nba.space - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.
Yeah, I realized the issue with "main" as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I'll suck it up and just create a new community.
I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?
I'm not the main mod of !football@lemmy.world so it's really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there's a lot of people that don't like having football referred to as soccer.
Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.
moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
As I'm sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy's current size. It's not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.
And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.
And while I'm sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.
If you somehow
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As I'm sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy's current size. It's not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.
And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.
And while I'm sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.
If you somehow managed to convince the other sports communities to migrate to a common instance I'd happily follow along though, but I find it very unlikely happen. ReadyUser31@lemmy.world is the one primarily in charge of !football@lemmy.world
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn't it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it's not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
I would assume the "rendezvous" instance would collect all posts from all communities it is subscribed to, and show them to the users as if it came from a single instance. So moderation would be limited to the moderators of the actual instance behind it.
The explorer makes it easier to discover them, but would be even better if that's automated.
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":
Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a "too big to fail" scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn't want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, i
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If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":
Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a "too big to fail" scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn't want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.
I don't like this kind of community/user instance because 2 instances have to deal with the same problem. E.g. a rogue user can troll on most community instances until they are banned by their user instance.
The instance fragmentatios is not as big issue as it's quite easy to create new accounts. There was a thread about this some days ago here, I also use different accounts on different instances for different topics.
but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It's the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.
My recommendations would be something like this: (I'm just a random user, so it's just my point of view) - Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it - Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology... . I've seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. G
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but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It's the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.
My recommendations would be something like this: (I'm just a random user, so it's just my point of view) - Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it - Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology... . I've seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. Give enough time for subscribers to notice and subscribe to the new one. - Allow registration of moderators on these instances, so they can work around the current limitations of moderation tools. Maybe an invite only solution or something like this. - You could find help more easily if you look for admins for 3-4 instances instead of for 18 instances.
This would be useful for you and other admins, because you would have to admin much less number of instances. They would be still considered small instances, compared to big one, so you still not at the "too big to fail" level. For users it would help community discovery, there are overlap between followers of similar topics, e.g. I have friends who follow both European football and NBA at the same time, I read both selfhosting related topics and about general tech support, etc...
I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.
When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.
I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.
But hey that's just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.
You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.
The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.
for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal
When is this ever true? The idea of a "universal culture" is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any "universal culture" (it's likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).
I don't mean universal in the sense of "totalitarian", I mean it in the sense of "large common denominator".
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries
This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.
Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
I don't see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don't think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.
At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics
I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.
I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.
I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?
I assumed, by "They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.", that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn't realize their instances were already closed-registration.
Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.
I am not sure what "instance members" you are referring to, here.
The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.
If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.
I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users' All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.
If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.
I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven't pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?
Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.
Third is that different communities have different needs.
Also, if we assume that the entire idea is to have more than one admin, then what change does that actually include?
You now have 3-4 people that can go and randomly delete the whole server instead of 1? Do you know that right now, only 1 person has the credentials to the admin account of whatever server you're talking about?
If you don't want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.
It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
I'm skeptical about this since you are squatting on at least 18 urls while trying to get volunteers to create value out of them. Nothing leads me to assume you are being altruistic.
Edit: misattributed something, woops
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize and trying to hold the most potential instances without putting any work or money into it. It's just my impression.
I also think instances without users are a terrible idea and I'd rather real instances come about organically instead created by people that actually care about the subject.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we'd have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is sta
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Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I'd hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
Thank you for providing the numbers, these domains are quite pricey if you have to pay 1700 € per year on domains alone.
You are asking a consortium of different admins to collectively own those instances with you.
If the idea is that those other admins can take over should something happen to you, then it makes sense for them to assess whether the whole project is viable from a financial perspective, otherwise it would just lead to them closing most of the instances, which is just the same as them not owning those instances with you.
There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.
can take over should something happen to you
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I'm failing some type of BS purity test.
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
I wish you the very best (as I generally do to all admins), but at the same time I'm doing some due diligence. As you mentioned earlier in this thread, other instances have disappeared overnight, and one way to prevent this is to have multiple people in charge.
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I’m failing some type of BS purity test.
No matter what people tell you (you've got plenty of comments in this thread which are not from me), you do not take them into account.
This thread is 2 days old, it was the week-end, maybe people will jump in tomorrow or later, but at this very moment, it does not seem like you were able to convince anyone to want to join you in managing a pool of instances for 6500€ per year.
I feel like I have been disc
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Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
I wish you the very best (as I generally do to all admins), but at the same time I'm doing some due diligence. As you mentioned earlier in this thread, other instances have disappeared overnight, and one way to prevent this is to have multiple people in charge.
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I’m failing some type of BS purity test.
No matter what people tell you (you've got plenty of comments in this thread which are not from me), you do not take them into account.
This thread is 2 days old, it was the week-end, maybe people will jump in tomorrow or later, but at this very moment, it does not seem like you were able to convince anyone to want to join you in managing a pool of instances for 6500€ per year.
I feel like I have been discussing this with you several times. You have a certain vision on how to manage those instances, but until you find other people sharing it with you and wanting to work on this together with you, you won't convince people to move communities to your instances.
Sorry, I can not let go of this. I don't know if you realized that the whole reason that I am doing this is because you kept pushing this idea that you'd be more than willing to contribute to different instances and that the only thing that is stopping you is that you'd be worried about me being the only person.
Even with me telling you that I have other people to take over my operations, you were doubting me.
Now that I am actually going forward and offering to get more people onboard, while asking for NOTHING in return, you are putting this bullshit, pretending to be worried about price of domains.
What you are doing is just Concern Trolling, and I am frankly tired of this. You have put no Skin in the Game, yet you continue to find ways to rationalize your senseless idea that this is going to grow magically without getting people to put significant resources at stake.
I've been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.
Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.
Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different /c/Technology communities across instances.
It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.
New users to lemmy usually aren't going to join communities if they can't register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You're cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.
I don't mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you're going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren't that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
Also the idea that communities can be 'neutral ground' doesn't make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it's caused by how you're running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.
aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experienc
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aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experience. A few examples:
No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topic
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Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.
Not my experience. A few examples:
No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
I'm not sure how that goes against what I said. That's mostly people disliking the admins.
Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.
Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn't an active community elsewhere.
I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don't want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.
That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That's also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don't like that very much.
From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don't allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There's still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don't see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what's the point? It doesn't improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you'd need a way to... federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there's no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn't solve the problem because now you got people able to either mo
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Now it makes even less sense.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don't allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There's still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don't see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what's the point? It doesn't improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you'd need a way to... federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there's no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn't solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.
Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it's just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don't need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down
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Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it's just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don't need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.
But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?
I can't even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.
If you want communities to be resistant to server removal
Another non-sequitur.
So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy
How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?
In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy
Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?
Ah, sorry if that wasn't clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.
A type of federation where there is no "home" for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.
I mentioned that basically because I feel that's a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn't clear, not my primary language.
Your key is your identity. If it's lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.
Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub
Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.
(not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis
That’s not true it’s not entirely punted to the end user. It starts with the relay operators just like it does instances. All of the same moderation tools that users have on instances and with clients Nostr users have too, so I’m not really sure about that comment. Also, maybe it’s because I’m a US citizen but I don’t get what so problematic about individualism and allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences. You mention the keys that’s still under user control as if instances have not gone down with users identities, content and social graphs Usability worse than anything on AP that’s very broad. Go point for point with comparisons You can filter out any content related to Bitcoin.
If you have examples of relays differentiating themselves based on moderation policies, it would be appreciated. Not just "we are extreme free speech holders" vs "we pay attention to some laws here". What nostr relay is actually running a strict filter, or do any type of analysis on the message content beyond "payment only"?
as if instances have not gone down with users identities.
If instances go down, there are still lots of possible backups: someone can recover the domain name and regenerate keys (or even recover a database copy). If someone loses a private key, there is no turning back. The fact that (some) poorly managed system are not recoverable does not mean that it is as fragile as something as nostr that gives up completely on making it.
allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences.
The same can be achieved on ActivityPub, no new protocol is needed for that.
Also, this is not matter of individualism, but of UX. It's "nice" when users have the ability to make decisions on their
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If you have examples of relays differentiating themselves based on moderation policies, it would be appreciated. Not just "we are extreme free speech holders" vs "we pay attention to some laws here". What nostr relay is actually running a strict filter, or do any type of analysis on the message content beyond "payment only"?
as if instances have not gone down with users identities.
If instances go down, there are still lots of possible backups: someone can recover the domain name and regenerate keys (or even recover a database copy). If someone loses a private key, there is no turning back. The fact that (some) poorly managed system are not recoverable does not mean that it is as fragile as something as nostr that gives up completely on making it.
allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences.
The same can be achieved on ActivityPub, no new protocol is needed for that.
Also, this is not matter of individualism, but of UX. It's "nice" when users have the ability to make decisions on their own, but it is terrible when they have to make all decisions on their own to get started.
You said that like that’s been reality, I’m not going based on simply what’s possible but what’s happened when instances suddenly shutdown
If the same came be achieved why hasn’t it been? It is a matter of individualism. People often see instances as communities, I don’t agree with this assessment with the exception of coop and special interest instances.
Looks more like you are interested in more influence power, and control for yourself.
What qualifies you to be in a leadership position that directly affects content control?
Your instances are not being used the way you wanted, so you propose structural and organizational changes that, suprise, benefit your administrative influence from your instances.
You're so focused on the details of your solution, you don't seem to be holding or acknowledging any objective perspectives.
benefit your administrative influence from your instances
They are not going to be "my" instances.
acknowledging any objective perspectives.
Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.
ITT: People who don't understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won't de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
lol I think you are right about this. You'll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.
Even though the community is contained the cloud resources should still be split in two between identity and operations to be in alignment with all the industry best practices and potential for scalability. Remember the unix philosophy is do one thing well.
Beehaw should operate their own Beehaw fediverse IDP (Identity provider) for the users to sign in with, that would manage their tos agreements, privacy policies and user based security. Separately they should operate their Lemmy server which hosts pictures and links organized by communities. They could just use a single IDP for their instance and have the same experience as now only better with better architecture.
I'm familiar with IAM concepts, and indeed having a separate IdP and content instances would be a better architecture.
However the reality is that the platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed) are being developed by very small teams (Piefed is a 2 or 3 people team, and Lemmy might be around 5).
Lemmy is focusing on features delivery (join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11…), which could help the platform grow more than a new IAM architecture.
There will probably be a point in time where performance will require a rework, but at the moment, it does not seem to be a priority
But nothing needs to be done to meet this OPs desires for community only instances that are well federated with other instances (IE at least one user is subscribed to each community on each instance). This way those admins just manage those communities and Beehaw and Lemmy.ml can run their combined servers.
The users and the subscribed to communities cause nearly all the load on the servers too, it is a way to keep costs down.
Who would manage all of those community instances?
The current setup works well with the limited number of admins and mods we have overall. I'm regularly looking for mods on communities I mod, there isn't so many of them (e.g. !showsandmovies@lemm.ee )
Also, with the federation currently being broken, mods would need to have an account on each community to be able to get the reports: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issu…
Regarding costs, the cost of these community instances suggested by OP is around 6500€ per year, so 540€ per month (lemmy.world/comment/12595221)
It currently costs 80€ per month to host lemmy.ml, which is the 4th most active instance with 2300 monthly active users
I mean that is what is is asking, he is looking for a team of people to manage the instances in this post. That is what this post is about, he is looking for a team of people to run them as admins while maintaining his (imo correct) vision for how it should be structured.
I forgot to mention the biggest fact- the users are where all the risk are. If people are just posting pictures to your instance of communities you have minimized risk as you can just gatekeep what is posted. Once you allow users in who can then post on other federated communities you take on a lot more risk.
Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.
I think this makes a lot of sense. We don't want the instance hosting, say, football communities to be defederated anywhere on account of its users behaving poorly. In general there's just no reasons to have the users in the same place as the community.
I was the only one who could create communities on them.
Typically the only one who can create magazines/communities are local users of the instance. With registration closed, that means only you (or the new instance owner) would be able to do this.
Though one can get around this with some bot magic ( lemmit.online had a magazine that was dedicated to new sub/magazine requests - once someone made the request, the bot would create and own the magazine but add the requestor as the moderator )
Do you intend to have open magazine creation on these instances or would that still be restricted to the owners of the consortium?
My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).
Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)
There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.
I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.
And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that.
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Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)
There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.
I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.
And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that. But it's quite subjective, and hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they're now...
Thanks for the intentions. Let's focus on some new ideas, they'll come...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.
It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.
centralization of domain names under you.
The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.
Can you name any advantage??
Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
Less load o
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If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.
It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.
centralization of domain names under you.
The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.
Can you name any advantage??
Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.
hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…
As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.
Riksdagspartiernas inställning till Chat Control. Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen har skickat ut en enkät med frågor till samtliga riksdagspartier om deras inställning till Chat Control, övervakning och personlig integritet.
Jag är ordförande i Vänsterpartiet Guldheden-Johanneberg-Krokslätt. En av Göteborgs större lokala partiföreningar. Men långt ifrån den största. Men större än Angered där Kristofer Lundberg är ordförande. Jag delar Kristofer Lundbergs åsikt om att PFLP precis som PKK bör tas bort från terrorlistan. Båda två finns med på EU: sådana listor idag.
Speed demos made at FediForum September 2024, the online unconference that brings together the people who move the open social web and the Fediverse forward.
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down
The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.
The Social Web Foundation has launched
The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.
The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:
adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
Working on long-form text in the fediverse.
The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.
Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.
As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?
Software updates
There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:
GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”
Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.
Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.
In Other News
IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.
The Links
All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
A Science News report about Dr. Eliezer Masliah (who held a highly important role at the National Institute of Aging), a 300-page dossier composed of misconducts at his lab, as well as followups... Featuring everyone's favorite research integrity sleuths (Elizabeth Bik, Mu Yang, "Cheshire", ...) and more.
Post URL points to archive.org due to soft paywall on Science News. Here's the original link
The fraud surrounding Alzheimer's research continues... Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.
I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer's products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer's research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more im
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The fraud surrounding Alzheimer's research continues... Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.
I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer's products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer's research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?
I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don't have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.
I have a suspicion it's not just an Alzheimer's issue but rather quite systemic to lots of competitive fields in academia... There definitely needs to be guard rails. I think the sad thing with funding is... these days you have to be exceptionally good at grant writing to even have a chance of getting into the lottery, and it mostly feels like a lottery with success rates in the teens... and apparently no grant=no lab, no career for most ppl (seriously why are most PI roles soft money-funded anyway). Hard to not try and cut the corners if there's so much pressure on the line
Not to mention, apparently even if you are a super ethical PI who wants to do nothing wrong, if the lab gets big enough, there might eventually be some unethical postdoc trying to make it big and falsify data (that you don't have time to check) under your name so... how the hell do people guard against that.
I'm honestly impressed how science is still making progress with all of these random nonsense in the field
Reading about this is making me feel sick. It's so sad how many people's lives have been negatively affected because of this Masliah's dishonesty. I think people who fake research like this belong in jail.
Sadly I think low key dishonesty is even more prevalent than what this guy did - the way we dole out money encourages researchers in every field to cherry pick data so that they can keep getting funding.
It's definitely way more prevalent. There actually is this post from Retractionwatch just a few days ago too. This is kind-of a systematic issue induced by how scientific funding & the system works...
My current PI is actually co-mentoring a student who was studying scientific fraud, but the problem is... being a fraud researcher is apparently a really good way to alienate a lot of people, which ensures you never make it in academia (which is heavily dependent on networking/knowing people)... so I don't know how many ppl would seriously study this.
Erster Schritt in der Häusle-Tech war es, die meisten Sachen im Haus an Tasmota Nous A1T Steckdosen anzustecken. Das Besondere an diesen Dingern ist, dass sie eine eigene IP Addresse haben, mit der man sie in Home Assistant einbinden kann oder halt auch m
Erster Schritt in der Häusle-Tech war es, die meisten Sachen im Haus an Tasmota Nous A1T Steckdosen anzustecken. Das Besondere an diesen Dingern ist, dass sie eine eigene IP Addresse haben, mit der man sie in Home Assistant einbinden kann oder halt auch mit einem sehr einfachen Python script steuern kann.
Erstmal das Script: #!/path/to/.venv/bin/pythonimport sysimport requestsimport jsonsys.path.append("/path/to/.venv/lib/")SOCKETS = [ {"ip": "192.168.1.2", "alias": "Socket One (Mikka's Room)"}, # Add more sockets with IP addresses and aliases as needed]def control_sockets(command): if command not in ["on", "off", "toggle"]: print("Invalid command. Use 'on','off', or 'toggle'.") return for socket in SOCKETS: ip = socket["ip"] alias = socket["alias"] url = f"http://{ip}/cm?cmnd=Power%20{command.capitalize()}" try: response = requests.get(url, timeout=5) if response.status_code == 200: print(f"Succe
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Erster Schritt in der Häusle-Tech war es, die meisten Sachen im Haus an Tasmota Nous A1T Steckdosen anzustecken. Das Besondere an diesen Dingern ist, dass sie eine eigene IP Addresse haben, mit der man sie in Home Assistant einbinden kann oder halt auch mit einem sehr einfachen Python script steuern kann.
Erstmal das Script: #!/path/to/.venv/bin/pythonimport sysimport requestsimport jsonsys.path.append("/path/to/.venv/lib/")SOCKETS = [ {"ip": "192.168.1.2", "alias": "Socket One (Mikka's Room)"}, # Add more sockets with IP addresses and aliases as needed]def control_sockets(command): if command not in ["on", "off", "toggle"]: print("Invalid command. Use 'on','off', or 'toggle'.") return for socket in SOCKETS: ip = socket["ip"] alias = socket["alias"] url = f"http://{ip}/cm?cmnd=Power%20{command.capitalize()}" try: response = requests.get(url, timeout=5) if response.status_code == 200: print(f"Successfully turned {command} socket '{alias}' at {ip}") else: print(f"Failed to turn {command} socket '{alias}' at {ip}. Status code: {response.status_code}") except requests.RequestException as e: print(f"Error communicating with socket '{alias}' at {ip}: {e}")def get_power_usage(ip): url = f"http://{ip}/cm?cmnd=Status%208" try: response = requests.get(url, timeout=5) if response.status_code == 200: data = response.json() today = data.get('StatusSNS', {}).get('ENERGY', {}).get('Today', 0) yesterday = data.get('StatusSNS', {}).get('ENERGY', {}).get('Yesterday', 0) total = data.get('StatusSNS', {}).get('ENERGY', {}).get('Total', 0) return today, yesterday, total else: print(f"Failed to get usage data from {ip}. Status code: {response.status_code}") except requests.RequestException as e: print(f"Error communicating with socket at {ip}: {e}") return None, None, Nonedef show_usage(): total_today = 0 total_yesterday = 0 total_all_time = 0 for socket in SOCKETS: ip = socket["ip"] alias = socket["alias"] today, yesterday, total = get_power_usage(ip) if today is not None: print(f"{alias}:") print(f" Today: {today:.2f} kWh") print(f" Yesterday: {yesterday:.2f} kWh") print(f" Total: {total:.2f} kWh") print() total_today += today total_yesterday += yesterday total_all_time += total print("Total usage across all sockets:") print(f" Today: {total_today:.2f} kWh") print(f" Yesterday: {total_yesterday:.2f} kWh") print(f" All-time: {total_all_time:.2f} kWh")if __name__ == "__main__": if len(sys.argv) != 2: print("Usage: tasmota <on|off|toggle|usage>") sys.exit(1) command = sys.argv[1].lower() if command == "usage": show_usage() else: control_sockets(command) So geht’s:
Script kopieren und in eine Text-Datei in einem Folder irgendwo ablegen.
In dem Folder ein Terminal aufmachen und ein Python Virtual Environment anlegen
(Sich merken wo das ist)
requests installieren (pip install requests)
Im Script den Pfad im Hashbang und im sys.path anpassen und das Gemerkte oben einfügen.
IP Addressen und Aliase angeben
Script ausführbar machen (chmod u+x oder ug+x)
Script soft in den Pfad verlinken
Profit
Und so schaut das dann aus! Achtung: Die Tasmota API hat keine zusätzliche Sicherung durch Passwort. Wenn Du also nicht willst, dass Jede:r, der in Deinem Netzwerk ist, Deine Sachen an und ausschalten kann, solltest Du die Dinger in ein eigenes, per ACL gesichertes Subnetz einlegen. In meinem Fall kann nur mein Handy, mein Computer, und der Home Assistant auf dieses Netz zugreifen.
Sapo3 is a suite of scripts-tools that can help the user convert a text file to an audio file.
It uses the tts-edge API for text-to-speech conversion.
Big txt files can be easily converted to audio books, using a wide range of customization capabilities. When the user runs Sapo3, they will be presented with a menu of options:
o option: Fix name pronunciation with Fix Names
c option: Split text to chapters with Chapterize
v option: Convert File to audio
f option: Check every sentence outcome with Fix Audio option.
There's been talk of this unauthenticated RCE vulnerability coming with a CVSS 9.9 rating but none of the technical details were publicly known until it was made public just now at the top of the hour. Simone Margaritelli discovered this vulnerability and has shared a write-up around this potentially very impactful Linux vulnerability.
This vulnerability, fortunately, doesn't affect the Linux kernel but rather CUPS... The print server commonly used on Linux systems and other platforms.
"A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer)."
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This remote code execution issue can be exploited across the public Internet
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There's been talk of this unauthenticated RCE vulnerability coming with a CVSS 9.9 rating but none of the technical details were publicly known until it was made public just now at the top of the hour. Simone Margaritelli discovered this vulnerability and has shared a write-up around this potentially very impactful Linux vulnerability.
This vulnerability, fortunately, doesn't affect the Linux kernel but rather CUPS... The print server commonly used on Linux systems and other platforms.
"A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer)."
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This remote code execution issue can be exploited across the public Internet via a UDP packet to port 631 without needing any authentication, assuming the CUPS port is open through your router/firewall. LAN attacks are also possible via spoofing zeroconf / mDNS / DNS-SD advertisements.
Besides CUPS being used on Linux distributions, it also affects some BSDs, Oracle Solaris, Google Chrome OS, and others.
As of writing there is no Linux fix available for this high profile security issue. In the meantime it's recommended to disable and remove the "cups-browsed" service, updating CUPS, or at least blocking all traffic to UDP port 631.
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported 'severe' unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score..
While I'm glad that there are people who do this work and certainly appreciate it. I also read his tweets and this person did seem to come off as a bit annoying. Like I get it. Security is important. However, things not moving as fast as you like is no reason to act like that.
Ya I was worried this was going to affect something like OpenWRT and a lot of shit was about to get fucked over. CUPS? 99.9% of people are gonna have that port closed on their router. Sure this is important to fix but a 9.9? Nah
Blue check on Twitter... Someone who's paying $10/mo to the world's richest person has an overinflated sense of importance... well... What're you gonna do?
Wtf???? "All GNU/Linux"???? This guy made me think Linus personally had to descend to Kernel-land and fix perhaps the most horrendous memory bug in existence. But no, surely CUPS IS ON EVERY MACHINE, RIGHT??????????
Yup, called it: non-mandatory piece of software. Plus you have to have been dumb enough to deliberately forward the port at your router for the general-case attack, and you have to print something (which I do maybe twice a month) for any command injection to take place.
This does need to be patched, since there is some risk if you have CUPS running and another device on your LAN has already been compromised, but it's definitely not the earthshattering kaboom the discoverer misrepresented it as.
No port forwarding needed when the ISP provides a proper IPv6 subnet. Normal IPv6 router advertisement will then provide a public reachable address for every IPv6 capable device.
But with the size of IPv6 it makes searching for that not really easy, so it only a small attack vector.
My router will still block all ports not explicitly allowed for the hosts regardless of protocol, it's a firewall after all and not just NAT. Just because the host addressable doesn't mean its ports are reachable.
Unfortunately many of the routers provided by ISPs I have seen where not configured that way by default. They only used NAT as firewall, so without configured port forwarding nothing could be reached with IPv4. But for IPv6: If you know the IPv6 for any system on the local network it is free available on all ports. It is the first thing I check when someone asks me to check their network or configure their internet, and only Fritz!Box have a sane default for IPv6 (but to be honest my other experiences are mostly with shitty Vodafone and german Telekom routers so it is a very limited set, and I really hope that most others are better.)
Hmm, never had cups-browsed enabled as I do not need network printing with LDAP or legacy cups. Discovery using DNS-SD/mDNS and driverless printing work perfectly fine without it.
I am not sure if the driverless discovery ever can generate a PPD with arbitrary commands.
Entirely personal recommendation, take it or leave it: I’ve seen and attacked enough of this codebase to remove any CUPS service, binary and library from any of my systems and never again use a UNIX system to print. I’m also removing every zeroconf / avahi / bonjour listener. You might consider doing the same.
Great advice. It would appear these developers don’t take security seriously.
If your router/firewall is configured to let these broadcasts through you have a problem. If it is working correctly and you have an attacker on your lan? You have already lost.
It depends. If you're using a laptop and say you take it to university or work then you're not on your LAN. You're on someone else's LAN and they may have no interest in trying to stop these types of attacks via any kind of client isolation or it may be incomplete.
I can imagine it's a very normal scenario for university students to have CUPS running and available on all networks as they may need to print at their university.
cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source
Well that would explain why I didn't have it installed (although I did have other parts of cups until jwz coincidentally reminded us two days ago that it can all be removed if you don't have a printer.) I clear out anything that opens ports I don't need to be open. A practice I would recommend to anyone.
Done. This should not even be part of baseline Ubuntu desktop. Speaking for myself but I have not had a printer for about 15 years. The paperless office really did become reality.
I don't know if I would like to have my personal data that I needed to print out on any system in a print shop. Printers and Copy machines in print shops often have internal HDD where the files are stored for caching reasons, often for months or even years (depending of the size of the HDD and how much the device is used) until some internal cleanup process deletes them.
I mean, OK, it's a vulnerability and there are interesting implications, but this is hardly significant in any pracitcal sense of the word.
the potential victim has to run their system without a firewall, has to print to the printer they've never interacted with before and then the attacker can run shit with whatever the printing system's user id is, which shouldn't be an issue on any reasonably modern distro.
I routinely remove cups and friends from any system I run because I have no need for printing and it bothers me to see it constantly during every system upgrade.
Worse than the exploit, is hearing the struggles the author faced to report it
Twenty-two days of arguments, condescension, several gaslighting attempts, more or less subtle personal attacks, dozens of emails and messages, more than 100 pages of text in total. Hours and hours and hours and hours and fucking hours. Not to mention somehow being judged by a big chunk of the infosec community with a tendency of talking and judging situations they simply don’t know.
I have cups (but not cups-browsed) installed, but I only start the service when I need to print something a few times a year. Until then it is only a binary sitting in a folder, nothing more.
Yes, but exactly that was/is the issue of this bug. cups-browsed was attaching itself to every available IP on the system. And cups-browsed can't only be bind to localhost, it would defeat the whole purpose of that tool. For it to be able to find other printers in the network it needs to be bound to a non-localhost-IP address. So, not much to sandbox
Tails was first released on June 23, 2009. It is the next iteration of development on Incognito, a discontinued Gentoo-based Linux distribution.[9] The original project was called Amnesia. The operating system was born when Amnesia was merged with Incognito.[10] The Tor Project provided financial support for its development in the beginnings of the project.[8] Tails also received funding from the Open Technology Fund, Mozilla, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.[11]
Which is funded by US Congress, and they also funded Signal.
For those do not wish to use privacy-related projects funded by a world government, what is a good (in your opinion) alternative? Both with and without Tor involvement (since US govt funded that too).
Yes I realize encryption, computers and the internet are all also govt-funded, but everyone is free to pick their battles.
I think any "privacy oriented OS" is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.
A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where... she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:
Two flash drives
One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common "privacy oriented" software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.
Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you "own" or near your home) you need.
Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You... kind of already lost.
Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any "personal" device and any "private" device.
There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not
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... mostly the other way around?
Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You... kind of already lost.
Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any "personal" device and any "private" device.
There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.
If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.
What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there's no defense, and it doesn't have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn't have to be targeted at a particular person.
Don't entirely discount a project only because it is funded by the US government. Do take that as a big yellow flag, but not auto reject. Better to just asses the project for what it is with caution.
I find it much more likely that the US government has a huge interest in giving the public access to secure communication software that would be unbreakable by surveillance from a typical government. Why? Because those are the governments that are enemies of the US, and where the US is interested in regime change. And the existence of this software is much more influential towards regime change in those countries, rather than being threat to the US.
In fact, these softwares are barely a threat to the US. The US has no issue with them existing because they have such a powerful hold on their state.
OP is a conspiracy nut who doesn't understand cryptography, know how to read C code, or know how to differentiate experts in these things from misinformation about these things.
Unsourced claims like this do absolutely no good to anyone, ever. Which means that either right before typing this comment, you though to yourself "time to be a bad person for no good reason" or you're a shill for some surveillance agency with an interest in scaring people away from privacy enhancing solutions.
Well, it is a little weird that Tor was originally a military technology funded by the US Department of Defense. Also, privacy in these days is really hard to achieve.
Yes. In order to launder your dirty traffic, you need to mix it with lots of other traffic. And you need it to be safe to avoid attribution.
The US military (and various 3-letter agencies) needs the service to be secure, provide strong anonymity, and to include a sea of traffic thats mostly not their own
COSMIC’s Alpha 2 release builds upon that work with functionality built out for Files, additional Settings pages, considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support+, and some highly requested window management features. System76 is ecstatic at the level of excitement and collaboration so far with alpha testers and early app & applet developers, and we look forward to seeing what comes from these new additions.
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The second COSMIC alpha will be released on September 26th. Those participating in Alpha 1 on Pop!_OS can simply update through the COSMIC App Store to transition. This alpha will be followed by monthly alpha releases until all core features have been built out.
I tried Alpha 1 and it was completely unusable for me (granted I use a tri monitor setup), hopefully this offers an improvement (I will update if it works).
(Edit: it somehow works even worse, now it wont even launch)
Yeah and I acknowledged that my use case is extremely niche and opens me up to a significant amount of bugs, at the same time I still tried it out because I felt like it. In addition im testing this outside of Pop_OS and on a non Debian based system (Artix).
Isn't that already true for QT apps on a gtk desktop and GTK apps on a QT desktop?
In my experience, GTK apps feel pretty good on Cosmic, and it has support for automatically theming them with your Cosmic theme. QT apps feel out of place, but this is an issue I've had on every non-Plasma desktop, because I struggle to get theming to work.
So far, I'm really impressed with how COSMIC is turning out. Depending on your use case, it might not be ready for daily driving, but it works perfectly for my needs. Its especially impressive as an Alpha, because it freezes up a lot less on me compared to KDE.
Android uses forked versions of the Linux kernel, based on Linux LTS versions. They added in Rust support in 2019 and most new code since then has been written in Rust in order to avoid memory safety vulnerabilities. And memory safety vulnerabilities have been significantly down since 2019.
Now that upstream Linux is adopting Rust, we should hopefully see a similar results. Though likely slower than Google (they went all-in on Rust) while upstream Linux new code will seemingly be mainly C for the foreseeable future.
Semiconductors have already had a very profound effect on society, accelerating scientific research and driving greater connectivity. Future semiconductor hardware will open up new possibilities in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and edge computing, for applications such as cybersecurity and personalized healthcare. By nature of its ethos, open hardware provides opportunities for even greater collaboration and innovations across education, academic research and industry. Here we present Flex-RV, a 32-bit microprocessor based on an open RISC-V instruction set fabricated with indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors on a flexible polyimide substrate, enabling an ultralow-cost bendable microprocessor. Flex-RV also integrates a programmable machine learning (ML) hardware accelerator inside the microprocessor and demonstrates new instructions to extend the RISC-V instruction set to run ML workloads. It is implemented, fabricated and demonstrated to operate at 60 kHz consuming less than 6 mW power. Its functionality when assembled onto a flexible
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Semiconductors have already had a very profound effect on society, accelerating scientific research and driving greater connectivity. Future semiconductor hardware will open up new possibilities in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and edge computing, for applications such as cybersecurity and personalized healthcare. By nature of its ethos, open hardware provides opportunities for even greater collaboration and innovations across education, academic research and industry. Here we present Flex-RV, a 32-bit microprocessor based on an open RISC-V instruction set fabricated with indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors on a flexible polyimide substrate, enabling an ultralow-cost bendable microprocessor. Flex-RV also integrates a programmable machine learning (ML) hardware accelerator inside the microprocessor and demonstrates new instructions to extend the RISC-V instruction set to run ML workloads. It is implemented, fabricated and demonstrated to operate at 60 kHz consuming less than 6 mW power. Its functionality when assembled onto a flexible printed circuit board is validated while executing programs under flat and tight bending conditions, achieving no worse than 4.3% performance variation on average. Flex-RV pioneers an era of sub-dollar open standard non-silicon 32-bit microprocessors and will democratize access to computing and unlock emerging applications in wearables, healthcare devices and smart packaging.
Flex-RV, a 32-bit microprocessor based on an open RISC-V instruction set fabricated with indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors on a flexible polyimide substrate, enables an ultralow-cost bendable and flexible microprocessor.
This could be big. The fact that it's sub-dollar, open-source, AND could be put on FlexPCBs opens up a whole lot of applications.
Only concern is the same as for RFID. They end up so cheap they're tossed into landfills or end up in waterways without a second thought. At least there, people are working on biodegradable solutions: bioplasticsnews.com/2020/01/12…
If the Flex-RV people address sustainability, they could have a real winner.
So it's printed on plastic, how's that for dissipating heat?
We can already make processors pretty small, and we could make them in a lot of different form factors, but heat management is probably the trickiest part.
Sure, if you want powerful processors. But if you don't need a lot of power, you could make this into a prox card that's thin, light, and flexible, and can do whatever cryptography you need on-chip.
For a while, I've been using the surface kernel for my Surface Go using Fedora 40. The other day I tried to clone my installation with Clonezilla to put it on another old computer I had lying around.
It didn't work and I have a suspicion that it didn't because of the surface kernel so I'm trying to use the stock kernel instead.
After a few modifications, usinge uname -a, this is the output I get: Linux surface-go-fedora-de-guillaume 6.10.10-200.fc40.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Sep 12 18:26:09 UTC 2024 x86_64 GNU/Linux
When using uname -mrs, this is the output I get: Linux 6.10.10-200.fc40.x86_64 x86_64
Can someone with more knowledge than me confirm that everything is back to stock form as I don't know if the SMP PREEMPT thing shoud be there? Doe's anyone know if the Surface Kernel is probably what prevented me from cloning my installation and putting it on another computer?
That looks like a normal kernel to me. The mention of the surface is the hostname which comes from /etc/hostname.
Exactly how does it not work? Does the kernel even try to boot? Tried verbose mode?
You might need to regenerate your initramfs for the new hardware, I think on Fedora that's Dracut? That usually does include machine specific drivers that needs to be available during early boot, but just regenerating it should fix that.
Well I’ve tried again with a new image from my Surface Go that I’ve just created with Clonezilla. All I’m getting is a black screen with — on the left side without anything happening.
The computer I’m trying to clone the image on is an old Acer Aspire 5737z.
Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.
Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.
User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.
Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
Article translated in English :
Confederation closes its Mastodon instance
Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.
As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on so
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TL;DR:
Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.
Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.
User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.
Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
Article translated in English :
Confederation closes its Mastodon instance
Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.
As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.
In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.
Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.
Too few active users
On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.
On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.
The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
How do you mean? It's majorly US centric, and that was part of why Mastodon worked better as a Twitter-replacement here in the EU at first.
But as always, something like Reddit or Twitter benefits from centralization, as far as user interactions go. So slowly, people drift to whatever the single largest alternative is when they leave the current status quo, and in alternative-Twitter-land, this seems to be either Threads or Bluesky, and their cases are fairly incomparable.
Doesn't make it the perfect solution, but like always in Engineering, the perfect solution is rarely the best one.
I had a look at it a while ago and almost everything I searched for was in Portuguese. Not a big issue for me since I don't really understand and consequently not use those type of platforms anyway but I kinda felt that would probably stop a wide adaptation with English speaking people.
It has pretty much stagnated in the English speaking part of the internet, and only saw a huge boost in popularity in Brazil recently (due to Twitter being newly banned there).
I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn't even take the browser config into account.)
Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.
No I mean it seems to work better as an alternative. Quite a few smaller companies, content creators and so on I want to see enws from are on there, so it somehow seems to work better for them. 🤷♀️
Yeah, not unlikely. Can't truly know ahead of time of course, but it feels like that would eventually happen. I wish governments in particular had jumped harder onto Mastodon, slowly moving attention there.
But it's probably also difficult to justify, because from their perspective it's just one "someone else's solution" vs another. They'd have to first make their own twitter like fediverse software I bet.
The EU at least is still sticking around, which is cool.
I have to say I'm a believer in slow growth here. It wouldn't be good if one Mastodon server completely dominated; neither would it be good if Mastodon as a software was the only viable alternative. Right now we're in a great spot where a bunch of different solutions are being developed.
I think this development is healthy, and it be depends on slower more organic growth. And it might not be a linear process, but eventually I believe activitypub integration will be as obvious as having an RSS feed. Doesn't matter much if it takes a while to get there.
On that note it would be good if governments didn't just sometimes use Mastodon, but rather integrate activitypub into their actual web sites.
From what I saw it was actually rising. A lot of Brazilian signed up when X was banned in their country and all the indicators are going up it seems. I don’t know where they got their numbers, to me it feels like they needed an excuse to cut costs.
I saw mastodon had a slight bump when that happened, but 90% of them went to bluesky. They got like 3 3 million users in 2 days. Mastodon got like .......a few thousand?
It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Both fedidb and other sources say the number of users are only going up.
FediDB reports that the Mastodon active user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.
Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It's natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it's an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It's not here for explosive growth.
Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, it wouldn't really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.
Anyway, they're not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they're not entirely right either.
Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I've looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it's irrelevant here.
FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.
Put another way, it's almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.
I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.
I just mentioned them because they're microblog sites, so in theory they do the exact same thing as Mastodon. The number of Mastodon users doesn't matter; the number of people on Fediverse platforms compatible with Mastodon matters.
So Lemmy users are not very helpful, but Mbin users maybe more so. Or Friendica.
The point is just that the number of Mastodon users is, in theory, irrelevant, as you don't just communicate with Mastodon users. Maybe misskey was a bad example, I don't know anything about it.
J'ai quand même l'impression qu'ils auraient pu prévenir avant de prendre leur décision. Ça aurait encouragé les gens à suivre le compte, et aurait pu montrer la réactivité plus organique du Fedivers par rapport aux réseaux sociaux corporate
When you're a government, you need a little more process to ensure things are done well (moderation, security, ...). Even something simple like that could take valuable time from quite a few people.
You do. But the point stands, on the scale of a govt budget, having a single full time employee (and even that is honestly overkill) is a drop in the ocean.
LOL, like I write a same comment I got deleted on Fediverse but it lives well on Instagram and X? The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.
The fediverse moderation is either nonexistent, having disinformation, Tankies and terrorist simps flourish, or being mod abusive like on Reddit where mods react selectively and based on their mood.
You do understand that the fediverse is not a single thing? Moderation on the fediverse is a meaningless term because it varies hugely depending which part of the fediverse you are visiting.
Duh..? lol Is your reading comprehension broken or something? I even gave you a freaking range of scenarios. I'm literally using mbin for various parts of the Fediverse, including Lemmy and Mastodon. I think I have a pretty good grasp of it.
You seriously think there's something wrong with not allowing Nazi and Fascist content on a social media site? You think we should allow a platform for those fucks?
The Fediverse is not one thing. It's a bunch of different sites that are interconnected. You can join a site that has strict moderation, or you can join one that has no moderation at all.
Personally, I'm not here because I think moderation on Instagram and X is too active. Rather to the contrary.
Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.
It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like Fediverser could include an indicator of moderation level - for example "relaxed" if few instances are defederated, "moderate" if moderation is more active, and "strict" for more restrictive communities. Data from Fediseer might be useful in this regard.
That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn't have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.
The biggest problem, I guess, is that it's a lot of work, and I certainly don't have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)
If you run your own server (like a country would in this case) you're the one deciding whether things are allowed to be posted. Of course that doesn't stop other people from blocking you. But the whole idea is as a sovereign country a private corporation shouldn't have a say over which posts are seen.
Depends on what you get moderated for. I once posted a question about trans people and I got banned from some Lemmy.ml community because they thought I was trolling them. I wasn't.
It's just sometimes hard for moderators to know what kind of person they are dealing with. But someone's posting history is usually enough to see if they are trolling or not.
Also what is trolling. It's supposed to mean that you intentionally upset people for fun. How can anyone know if it's intentionally or not. To some people, asking a question is trolling because they don't see why anyone would ask that if they didn't try to upset people.
My point is that the word censorship carries a connotation of trying to suppress certain types of speech. While that may be true in some cases, for the most part if I get moderated it's for an opinion I can understand or disagree with. In either case it's an opinion. I'm not a victim. On some instances though, yeah censorship is kind of a thing. On .ml, anything seen as not extremely left wing gets deleted or banned, and that's bad. But I can just avoid that shitty instance. No one owes me the "right" to be heard in every context.
The thing is, i think social media today has created a lot of censorship out of necessity. There are people out there who just aren't mature or intelligent enough to have a conversation without insulting or pushing people down.
And because of they, we all suffer. We get over-moderated, we get called trolls etc.
I think I would like a platform where people actually have to act like adults. But that's hard. Hacker news have kind of made it, but they are also well known for not being open minded at all.
Moderation is when you take down material because the recipient doesn't want to see it. Censorship is when you take down content because you don't want the recipient to see it, regardless of how the recipient feels about it.
And I'm saying you're better off without. That sentence is ridiculous enough already, it doesn't need the source to make it worse. But good on you for worrying about credit, do as you will.
"We've also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular."
Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I'm looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).
Another way of rephrasing this decision is "we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X". Which is pretty questionable.
(I'm looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord)
This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.
There isn't much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.
A good quality open source "federated discord" would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn't much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It's the flipside of Wiki's problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There's currently nothing popular that fills the bill.
Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and "threads" now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.
As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.
People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.
But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.
I can’t throw myself up the stairs. Go in g down isn’t the problem, I could scooch down on my bum. (but then I would need someone to carry my wheelchair down).
Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch's distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of "optional."
Gender-affirming surgery is "optional." Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.
With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.
The term “accessibility” is not the exclusive domain of the physically disabled. Accessibility affects all people across race, gender, class, age and disability.
It's still operating for now, right? Because if I look at randomgovernmentpages in a browser that profile that doesn't block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.
They're complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?
It's still on and will close at the end of the month. But yes I'm very annoyed that they didn't share much of the instance outside a small notification on the admin.ch website. But the goal of this whole pilot test is that if Mastodon became big within the year, they would already have an instance running with officials accounts. But instead I guess they will focus on Bluesky.
I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI is often not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality o... show more
I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI is often not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality of comments can still be a lot higher. But unfortunately this cannot be quantified, or at least not easily. I therefore think that everyone should first think about what they want to achieve with their social media accounts. It then makes sense to define suitable KPIs instead of being impressed by what can be considered an indicator of success elsewhere and in a completely different context.
They all fall for turning KPIs into goals. When KPI become targets, they stop being KPIs. They often forget that KPIs are supposed to be used for informing the evaluation of desired outcomes, they aren't outcomes on themselves. At most they could be activitie's outputs. There are also many more stats and information that can feed the evaluation of outcomes that aren't KPIs, and qualitative evaluations are most definitely a must.
Decisions like these are why they can't move away from proprietary platforms. How much does it really cost to host and maintain this? A single employee could host a mastodon, peertube, and lemmy instance. The employee could also work full-time on one of the projects to address issues.
They also only had 6 accounts on the instance - out of how many politicians and bureaus?
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase. People are actively looking for an alternative to Twitter, it's just that the vast majority of people have no idea that Mastodon, Lemmy, or the Fediverse on the whole exists. That's a double edged sword. Better content moderation with lower numbers, better social media infrastructure building becomes the norm with greater numbers.
Mastodon is too hard for common folks and still miss some functionality. It is unfortunate none has forked it yet into something better and mastodon keeps being the largest platform by a far amount.
The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.
There's also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.
There's Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won't be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.
If you want something with more power, something that's much more like Facebook, there's Friendica and has been since 2010.
If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there's Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks "the Fediverse" needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn't have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
I know all those projects (I host akkoma, besides this lemmy instance) but still my point stands, everyone new to the fediverse will first get in touch with mastodon and its bad design because it is by FAR the most popular platform.
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.
the most important thing is people to know about activitypub protocol. softwares like mastodon, misskey pixelfed or even threads are just tools that serve activitypub
Do you explain the Internet to your grandparents by explaining HTTP first?
Sorry to say, but the Fediverse would be a great deal smaller if it wasn't for millions of Twitter users who were railroaded straight to mastodon.social, not knowing anything about it except that it's allegedly "literally twitter without musk".
There are still people who have been on Mastodon since shortly after Musk bought Twitter out, and who shit brix upon discovering for the first time that the Fediverse is, in fact, surprisingly, who woulda thunk it, not only Mastodon.
These people wouldn't be here, had their introduction to the Fediverse started with an explanation of ActivityPub.
Bluesky is federated right? You will still have to check what the host allows. I get the impression the only reason there are more normies is because of the celebrity of Jack Dorsey.
I really struggle to find good accounts to follow on bluesky, and most of the french accounts/content are inactive for months (I even have a better content/experience on mastodon since they federated w/ threads and flipboard).
But beyond mastodon, it's really sad that they leave the fediverse for now, hope they'll comeback one day or another (on mastodon or any other plateform)
I think the fediverse is ready but only if big companies federates and opt out (unlike threads). the thing is that the fediverse can't be the principal argument to attract users yet, interface and simplicity (such as threads) are the key components to bring users in
unknowing8343
in reply to Leaflet • • •Another week, another incorrect weekday format.
It's 2024-W39, you are welcome.
Leaflet
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in reply to Leaflet • • •