[HN Gopher] ActivityPub, the secret weapon of the Fediverse
___________________________________________________________________
ActivityPub, the secret weapon of the Fediverse
Author : app4soft
Score : 323 points
Date : 2020-02-15 08:00 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (homehack.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (homehack.nl)
| sschueller wrote:
| Also see PeerTube which is an attempt to provide a federated
| youtube based on activitypub. What I like about peertube vs
| others is that the primary development focus is on video and not
| monetisation althought there is a plugin system which would allow
| something in the future.
|
| Full disclosure. I am the dev of Thorium an android PeerTube
| client. If anyone wants to help with development please let me
| know
| app4soft wrote:
| > _Also see PeerTube which is an attempt to provide a federated
| youtube based on activitypub._
|
| _Eric Buijs_ already wrote few articles about PeerTube and how
| he fully migrated from YouTube to PeerTube.[0,1,2,3]
|
| [0] https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-google/
|
| [1] https://homehack.nl/distributed-social-networks/
|
| [2] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/
|
| [3] https://homehack.nl/welcome-to-the-new-decade/
| tyfon wrote:
| Peertube is really cool in theory buy they are pushing torrent
| crap that displays the viewers public IP to all the other
| viewers and that is a major deal breaker for me.
|
| I've never understood why they set it up this way instead of
| just letting you host the videos normally.
| [deleted]
| buovjaga wrote:
| The release notes for the latest has this:
|
| Add ability to disable WebTorrent (and only enable HLS) [HTTP
| Live Streaming]
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v2.1.0
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why is displaying your public IP (prefix?) is an issue?
|
| If this bothers you, shouldn't you use a VPN ?
|
| What do you mean by "normally" ? Torrent _is_ the normal way
| to host large files in a distributed manner!
| kick wrote:
| WebTorrent has been able to be disabled for a while. It's
| useful in some cases, but if you want to run your own host
| without it, it's trivial.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Another example of ActivityPub is learnawesome.org (which
| intends to be an equivalent of GoodReads but for all media
| formats, not just books). I recently implemented ActivityPub
| support in their webapp, so it's now possible to subscribe to a
| LearnAwesome user's book/course reviews and get that feed in
| Mastodon or any other ActivityPub client.
|
| The ActivityPub standard is straight forward and was quite fun
| to implement actually. Here is the issue in case someone is
| curious how to do it in a Rails app: https://github.com/learn-
| awesome/learn/issues/121
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'm confused how a site about learning resources is supposed
| to be like GoodReads, a site about books.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| You can search for things, browse their reviews, add things
| to your collections, add reviews, follow people interested
| in the same topics, subscribe to topics to make a
| personalized dashboard - just like GoodReads. But you can
| do it for all kind of media like podcasts, courses, blogs,
| livestreams etc.
| Semaphor wrote:
| So it supports some features of goodreads in a completely
| different area. Seems like a strange comparison.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Seems like most of those features are the basic features
| of a social content site - YouTube, for example.
| jeena wrote:
| How do you find content to watch on PeerTube? I have my own
| Mastodon instance running where I can subscribe from to
| PeerTube chanels so they show up when they upload something but
| I have no idea how and where to find content.
| pseudoramble wrote:
| I'm not really sure either. I have never heard of PeerTube
| until this thread. I was wondering the same thing. I found
| this https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list. I
| tried to filter down to particular kinds of content with
| mixed results.
|
| * I found an interesting music instance which had some cool
| music videos. Well worth the while. Though now I can't find
| it while on another computer. * I tried to find an instance
| with some kind of software dev/programming videos. Haven't
| been able to find anything really yet.
|
| That's about as far as I've got yet. Maybe there's room to
| improve search/discovery. Or maybe I just need help being
| pointed to the right spot.
| sschueller wrote:
| There is a list of instances here
| https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list each
| instance has a discovery page which includes videos from all
| the other instances they follow.
| gravitas wrote:
| Hopefully constructive feedback: the namespace Thorium is
| already heavily saturated in the Google Play store; while
| you're the only one on F-droid, there's competition with what
| appears to be well established apps with high ratings for some
| sort of solution named Thorium. $0.02, might be easier to
| rebrand sooner rather than later.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Many months ago I found lots of Youtube clips of shows from the
| 80's and 90's from a TV station in another country (locally
| produced shows).
|
| I had been looking for that stuff for years and then given up.
| Some years later I see it's on Youtube. I'm ecstatic.
|
| I go now and way too many of those clips have been taken down.
| I _really_ doubt the TV station did this - they are practically
| defunct. My guess is it was some kind of automated DMCA thing
| because the opening credits contained clips of well known
| pieces of music.
|
| This is tragic. I hope PeerTube can be a place for such videos.
| bitxbit wrote:
| I like the idea of federated network but I'd rather see a virtual
| implementation.
| yogthos wrote:
| I really think that open source federated services are the
| future. There are now a bunch of these services all using the
| same protocol called ActivityPub. PeetTube is a YouTube
| alternative, PixelFed replaces instagram, Lemmy is an alternative
| to Reddit, and Plume is like medium. There are a few other
| projects as well. All of these services are able to talk to each
| other and allow users to share data across them creating one
| large federated platform. Meanwhile, traditional commercial
| platforms like Fb, Twitter, and Youtube have zero incentive to
| allow users to move data between them.
|
| Another important aspect of the Fediverse is that it's much
| harder to censor and manipulate than centralized networks. There
| is no single company deciding what content can go on the network,
| and servers are hosted by regular people across many different
| countries.
|
| A federated network that's developed in the open and largely
| hosted non-profit is the way internet was intended to work in the
| first place before it was hijacked by corporations. I'm very glad
| to see that decentralized networks are finally starting to get
| popular again.
| loceng wrote:
| I agree it's the future - however their positives - the net
| benefit - has challenges that must be designed for as well.
|
| It will have to unfold that you decide what trusted federated
| network you follow - whereby access, the freedom to that
| decision (or not) will act as a canary for when democracy and
| freedom is more or less at odds with tyranny; control of
| systems of information as a mechanism, or symptom of fear by
| not having access to what everyone says (good and potential bad
| actors) will be a forcing mechanism toward people developing
| real trust - our own ability to trust, to be healthy, open
| minded and open hearted enough, that we naturally organize into
| trusted-social hierarchies - a chain of command.
|
| The line between tyrannical and democratic behaviour of a
| suppressed or free state is quite clear and obvious once you're
| paying attention and know where to look (when you have the
| ability to see what's going on, which of course is difficult
| when there are physical systems of censorship and suppression).
| zolland wrote:
| What's the difference between Plume and Mastodon?
|
| edit: nvm I see that Mastodon is more like twitter. I don't
| think I really understand why I'm having to create separate
| accounts on each instance if they can all communicate with each
| other?
| osdev wrote:
| Accounts (I believe ) are similar to email addresses. So it's
| like having an account userX@gmail.com and trying to migrate
| that to userX@yahoo.com. Essentially the account is tied to
| the domain/server.
| yogthos wrote:
| Communication happens at server level where different
| instances can choose to federate with one another. Your
| account lives on a particular server along with the data
| associated with it such as your posts.
| kick wrote:
| ActivityPub is a protocol that does very little with a whole
| lot of words in the spec.
|
| Accounts are not federated, there's no reasonable way of
| automating your switch to another server assuming yours dies,
| so forth, so on. Mastodon has a feature claiming to do the
| last one, but it doesn't actually work, because it's not
| backwards compatible and only works with relatively modern
| Mastodon instances (which most are not).
|
| Also, you don't really a heavy expectation of privacy using
| ActivityPub. It's very trust-based, and not in the good way.
|
| A lot of the function of ActivityPub would be better served
| by RSS feeds, the rest would probably be better served on a
| protocol like Zot; Diaspora would also give you a better
| expectation of privacy than ActivityPub.
|
| Zot, though, fixes basically all of those problems, and is
| really pretty cool. You have one identity that you can use
| everywhere, all of your followers come with you because it
| wasn't an afterthought, access control actually does control
| access, so on, so on.
| notatoad wrote:
| I was curious about Lemmy, but it is really not easy to find on
| Google. I was able to find this through a google search for
| "lemmy activitypub" which took me to a random github issue
| which linked here, presumably it's the right site?
|
| https://dev.lemmy.ml/
| cjbassi wrote:
| Yah that's it. GitHub link:
| https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy They've got a decent demo
| working but no federation yet.
| zelly wrote:
| The entire model is flawed. You don't want federation (small
| tribes). That's not why people use FB, IG, Twitter. They use it
| because that's where the people are--network effects. The only
| reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can
| reach people. Federation means you will never ever get network
| effects. Dead on arrival.
|
| It's possible to have decentralization with network effects. Just
| have one canonical network. Tor and Bitcoin are good examples.
|
| Downside (or upside?) is that you can't have moderation or else
| whoever does the moderation becomes the new jack and it's not
| decentralized anymore.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Why do people use email then?
|
| Network effects can be achieved with or without federation.
| They aren't mutually exclusive.
| zelly wrote:
| Email is federated at a lower layer. At the UX layer, it is
| not federated. Fully qualified email addresses are like
| usernames. If you ask a random email user, they would think
| it works like this. If you ask a random Mastodon user, they
| know that they have to join a relatively isolated silo. Also
| most uses of email are peer-to-peer. In the case of two
| people emailing each other, the number of peers is 2. This is
| not directly comparable to public social networks.
|
| Email was once the main way social networking was done via
| mailing lists. This was kind of federated, because you had to
| ask the listserv to add you to the list. The federated
| aspects of email are what caused it to die and get replaced
| by forums which in turn got replaced by Reddit and Twitter.
|
| (Notice the trend? Mailing lists -> forums -> Reddit. From
| federated to centralized. Network effects.)
| lokedhs wrote:
| The Fediverse is federated on exactly the same layer as
| email. You have a username of the form user@domain,this is
| the same in both Mastodon and email.
|
| You can send messages to anyone regardless of the instance
| they're on. This is also exactly the same on both Mastodon
| and email.
|
| Precisely how are these different in any relevant way?
| whoopdedo wrote:
| They don't, though[1]. It's often the lowest-common-
| denominator because everyone has it. But if a more
| streamlined alternative, like Slack, is available then it
| will be preferred over email.
|
| A quick look at websites talking about email trends finds
| that the only people who are bullish on email are marketers.
| And that's why everyone else hates it: it's predominantly
| spam. So if you want to compare ActivityPub to email you'd
| better have a strong argument for why it won't just become
| another vehicle for spam if it ever becomes widespread.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--
| but-...
| ivanhoe wrote:
| > The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where
| your message can reach people
|
| Actually you're posting it here because this is where it can
| reach the niche group interested in the subject, and that
| you're also interested in belonging to. That's a lot different
| than "go where the people are" because nowadays there's just
| too many people online, and unless you're doing mass marketing
| you probably don't want to talk to all of them.
|
| To me the most attractive part of fediverse is exactly that,
| small niche tribes, so very low levels of noise, off-topics and
| nonsense. It's not ideal as a general-purpose marketing
| channel, but for users on a receiving side of it (and that's
| most of us) it makes it even nicer.
| rglullis wrote:
| Federation does NOT mean small tribes. This is the meme that
| needs to die.
|
| You can make the argument that discovery of new people is
| harder on a federated system, but this a problem analogous to
| trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved
| problem already.
| zelly wrote:
| > this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the
| early web and this is a solved problem already
|
| The early web _died_. The problem was solved by killing it
| and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by
| the superior network effects of Facebook feeds, Reddit feeds,
| Instagram, Twitter, or the very site you 're scrolling
| through now.
|
| Twitter is the bar or the town square. Mastodon etc. is
| people's living rooms.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Early web did not died, it evolved. It gained neccessary
| tools and platforms. The web from the early days still
| exists, it's just not the only face the web has now.
| pessimizer wrote:
| More like they stopped including it in search engine
| results and starved most of it to death.
| rglullis wrote:
| BS. Your argument has two problems: you are confusing
| ActivityPub with Mastodon, and you are confusing the
| aggregation part with the content itself.
|
| The early web might have been _eclipsed_ by the big
| companies, but don 't be fooled by availability bias. How
| much of the internet is powered by Wordpress.org? Quite a
| lot to be considered "dead".
|
| How many people still use some kind of RSS Reader? Google
| killed its offering more for a lack of way to monetization
| than for a lack of users. (Also, I don't remember people
| saying "RSS is dead, there is no way to discover who to
| subscribe to.")
|
| Look at messaging protocols, Matrix also is still small
| compared to
| WhatsApp/Messenger/iMessage/Slack/Discord/whatever but
| their are numbers are growing. Far from dead.
|
| _Mastodon_ is people 's living rooms only because the
| current users are mostly refugees from the centralized
| platforms, and yes, they are making this mistake of
| conflating instances with tribes. But this temporary and
| specific to Mastodon. As more systems start adopting
| ActivityPub and the more pulverized the user's become, the
| less this will be an issue.
| lokedhs wrote:
| I don't think I understand what you mean by Mastodon
| being people's living rooms.
|
| I mean, a user's identity is @username@domain, and I can
| follow local or remote users equally easy, and most of
| the time I don't even notice where they are posting from.
|
| If that's my living room, it sure looks like a living
| room that's wide open and the size of the planet.
| rglullis wrote:
| I just went with OP's metaphor. It makes sense when you
| take in consideration how a lot of Mastodon instances are
| being created and being kept closed from the federation
| by the admins or being too trigger-happy to block other
| instances on the grounds of "people over there say mean
| and offensive things". For some of them, it is indeed
| just a bunch of kids hanging out in their rooms
| lokedhs wrote:
| Ok, I see what you mean. I've been on the Fediverse for a
| bit over a year (I think, I could be more?) and I've seen
| some drama around this.
|
| That said, the number of instances that engage in
| excessive blocking seems to be rather limited. I'm not
| sure it's such a large problem in practice.
| zelly wrote:
| > and you are confusing the aggregation part with the
| content itself
|
| If they aren't the same, that's a bug. The lesson of
| Facebook et al should be that aggregation and content
| should be in the same place. People use these sites after
| a long day of work and don't have the time or energy to
| plug in other fragmented software to make it work--even
| technical people. They just want to consume and share
| content. They would see this fragmented ecosystem vs. the
| shiny all-in-one network with social proof of all their
| friends and celebrities.
|
| > But this temporary and specific to Mastodon
|
| It's endemic to all of these alternative platforms
| because they select for (other than curious technophiles)
| people who were too extreme for the mainstream platform.
|
| Here's how to solve it and to get what you actually want:
|
| One decentralized global network with self-directed
| moderation (following/friends). The problem with Facebook
| et al is not the UX or the quality of implementation.
| It's that the protocol is owned by one corporation. Why
| can't you just clone Facebook in every single aspect
| except the computers it runs on (everyone's rather than
| Facebook's).
| rglullis wrote:
| Now I don't know if you are just trolling or technically
| clueless. You are criticizing the _implementation_ of a
| application protocol and one the same breath you affirm
| that "the way to solve it" is by using a completely
| decentralized system?
|
| ActivityPub itself is not tied to Mastodon or any
| federated protocol, all it is concerned about is format
| of messages and some authentication mechanisms.
|
| Have you _really_ thought this through?
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it
| and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by
| the superior network effects of MySpace accounts, Slashdot
| threads, Flickr, delicious and Geocities. All of which will
| continue to exist forever more.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > The early web died. The problem was solved by killing
| it and replacing it with big institutions.
|
| During the 80's and early 90's, there were tens of
| thousands of BBS systems. Those disappeared with the
| advent of the Web:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/th
| e-l...
|
| Most of the dominant platforms today have only existed
| for less then 20 years. That's... only yesteryear.
| There's absolutely zero guarantee that they will be
| around for another 10, 20 or 30 years.
|
| Why? Because it's par for the course for empires to come
| and go. Ma Bell had an absolute monopoly on a telephone
| network in the U.S. until they got broken up in 1982.
| That happened. Few large corporations are over 100 years
| old, and even so, they aren't the same they were back in
| the day.
|
| The Internet still consists of the same basic building
| blocks and technology as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
| TCP/IP, UDP,... Beyond your wireless access point, it's
| all just fiber and UTP spanning the globe. Oh, and data
| centers with racks of computers to linked one another.
| Beyond computing power and other trappings, it's all
| conceptually not that different from what it has always
| been.
|
| I've always found it a strange how we have been
| myopically staring at FAANG companies in the Valley over
| the past 20-30 years. You know how that has come to be?
| Damn excellent marketing on their part. That's all it
| ever was.We all know it, but we don't really admit to it.
| And so we laud them as these powers of nature that you
| can't get around. Even though they are anything but,
| really.
|
| For all intents and purposes, large swathes of the
| Internet and the Web are dark, but they are very much
| there. For instance, there is more then just English in
| the world. The Web in Asia looks radically different,
| beyond what Baidu or Alibaba offer.
|
| Sure, the early web has died. But neither do you find
| 19th century newspapers or obscure popular literature in
| modern bookstores. You'd got to a library or an archive
| for those. We have the Internet Archive for good reason.
|
| What hasn't died is the technology and the basic ideas of
| that era. Those are very much alive in small communities
| all over the Internet. And that's totally valid and in no
| way inferior to what large platforms offer.
|
| Yelling that "x has died" and "the problem was solved",
| well, no, that's a very simplistic take on reality. If
| something works perfectly for someone, well, why do you
| forcefully imply that what they want is without value and
| thus a waste of time? Por que no los dos, right?
|
| As too FAANG, ask yourself this: When they publish
| reports about their numbers of users, how much of those
| represent actual use of those platforms? How many
| accounts are truly dead and unused? How many people are
| really using Twitter on a daily basis for hours on end
| and aren't just hopping all over the place? Why would we
| accept those reports at face value? Because they are
| valued billions of $?
|
| Remember, it's all about keeping the music playing and
| the party going. And today's "big instutions" aren't the
| first DJ's at the decks, nor will they be the last.
| History always catches up in the end.
|
| And meanwhile, others will always do their own thing,
| write code, build cool things and invent new ways of
| communicating.
| chromatin wrote:
| You completely missed the GPs point and I suspect you
| even agree with him. Look at the list of entities.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| I disagree with the words "died", "problem" and "solved".
|
| The early Web didn't die. It evolved into what we have
| today. And that's the normal way of how things go.
|
| Much like the Roman Empire has kept and still keeps on
| deeply influencing modern Western culture.
|
| Hence why I disagree with the words "problem" and
| "solved". That assumes that history has come to an end
| and the Web will be and forever be like it is now.
| Stasis. End of story. Which can't be further removed from
| the truth.
|
| Nobody can predict the future exactly, but what we can be
| sure of is that nothing is permanent and everything
| changes, because change is literally what has shaped
| human history.
| hippich wrote:
| It is fine for both to exist. FB|ig|Twitter is like getting to
| NY's times square - a lot of new people/ads, and then coming
| back home to your federated tribe (perhaps with new friends you
| found at the times square).
| slightwinder wrote:
| People want both. Big world and small tribes. People are
| constantly building new community everywhere for non-technical
| reasons, even if similar communitys already exist. Why do you
| think they do that?
|
| Small tribes have better control and more trust. Big crowds are
| lacking this for the individuals.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I don't disagree, but it's not 100% true that the only people
| who use centralized social networks do so for the network
| effects. YouTube in particular is used by a lot of people
| because of _content discovery_ , not just the network effects.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Content discovery is about having a good search engine. Why
| couldn't _that_ be federated?
| zelly wrote:
| No real reason except no one has tried yet. It's extremely
| difficult to get search right, although Moore's law and
| tensorflow has probably made it easier to attempt today.
| Latency would be significantly worse than major search
| engines though. I think for the people who care about the
| open web, having a libre alternative search engine should
| be the highest priority. It's one of the few classes of
| software/services that no one has tried replicating open
| source.
| cvwright wrote:
| Because the company with the de facto monopoly on web
| search is the same company that bought the company with the
| de facto monopoly on user generated video content.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I had this epiphany the other day, any distributed application
| was actually a messenging system. (I can hear Alan Kay scream
| afar). Wasn't there a project like this ? a guy making some
| whatsapp revolution turning it into a generic app platform ? I
| forgot.
| rglullis wrote:
| You are probably thinking of Movim, which is a social network
| built on top of XMPP.
| agumonkey wrote:
| it was something with a simple name like nextapp
| twoodfin wrote:
| app.net
| agumonkey wrote:
| most probably, I dismissed it because it sounded too
| Microsofty :)
| rglullis wrote:
| App.net has been dead for years already, are you sure
| that is the one?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Not entirely but so far that's the best match. Also I
| didn't mean something current, just that this dude
| pivoted a message exchange app into a generic application
| platform, which is what activitypub feels like (and good
| ol' message passing distributed programming too)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| NextCloud?
| kodablah wrote:
| Question concerning a potential impl I'm pondering: Are there any
| realtime/streaming approaches with ActivityPub? Can a chat
| application be reasonably implemented on it today or is the
| inbox/outbox federation concept too limiting? Are there any
| examples of such services out there and how reusable/generic are
| their approaches?
| lainsoykaf wrote:
| Pleroma has built in support for connection to an xmpp server,
| to share account data.
|
| We are also working on a proper ActivityPub chat, but this was
| put on ice for a while because it require Group support for
| many cases, and that's another complicated topic in a federated
| world.
|
| Overall, the speed of federation is very good, but we will be
| releasing a new federation transport over websockets in the
| next few weeks which should make it realtime in nearly all
| situations.
| nightpool wrote:
| Pleroma worked on a real time chat implementation for a while,
| but iirc they went back and forth on whether to use ActivityPub
| for it and never ended up building anything. IMO, it would
| require a few extensions on the client to server side, but the
| server to server side is already flexible enough for you to
| build a pretty good chat.
|
| as far as streaming more generally, mastodon has had real time
| streaming for all of its main views since day 1, so it's
| definitely doable. using mastodon actually feels more real-
| time, in my experience, then using Twitter--its more directly
| comparable to seeing new posts and notifications come in on
| Tweetdeck. The latency between two different mastodon servers
| is generally a second or two, which is plenty good for
| microblogging. Obviously more steaming focused impls could do
| much better.
| vertex-four wrote:
| In the next version of my ActivityPub system which integrates
| chat, I'm using XMPP, with a reference to the user's XMPP JID
| from the user's ActivityPub actor.
|
| The upside is that everyone can use standard XMPP clients like
| Dino or Gajim to chat. As I'm doing video streaming over HLS,
| they can also use VLC or similar to watch videos - the rest of
| it is then just standard ActivityPub. The web application is
| built on Converse.JS and Video.JS.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Hmm, doesn't HLS have built-in DRM ?
| vertex-four wrote:
| Nope. HLS is an open standard without DRM - it's basically
| just an extended playlist of MPEG Transport Stream files,
| which the client repeatedly requests to find the next part
| of the stream. These can be generated with e.g. gstreamer;
| at the moment I'm using nginx-rtmp-module to generate them
| but intend to replace that with a more flexible/tailored
| option.
|
| It can be used to transport streams with DRM, though, but
| there's nothing special about that - it'll transport
| anything that goes in a MPEG Transport Stream.
| lowdose wrote:
| Why isn't Twitter using and backing ActivityPub?
|
| It sounds pretty much what Facebook has done with login with
| Facebook for developers. Except that the network effects aren't
| controlled by 1 commercial company but is an open source effort.
| zelly wrote:
| Jack said he hired a team to build a NIH version of
| decentralized social networking.
| dgellow wrote:
| That's misleading. They talked about considering the problem
| and creating a team to investigate solutions.They were clear
| about the fact that they would consider existing projects if
| they match their requirements.
| lokedhs wrote:
| And that's all we've heard about it. I think ActvityPub
| definitely does not match their requirements, and also, I
| doubt any federation system does.
|
| I'm saying this because their primary requirement is
| clearly to have strict control over their own^H^H^Huser's
| content.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| With blockchain!
| app4soft wrote:
| Blockchain. 2020.[0]
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/2267/
| manigandham wrote:
| What does Twitter stand to gain from it? They're also notorious
| for disabling 3rd party integrations and seem to prefer a
| strong walled garden.
| lowdose wrote:
| Exactly for their notorious reputation. A lot of developers
| are going to change their mind about Twitter. To survive
| Twitter needs to innovate and become more open.
| jsilence wrote:
| The fact that Twitter has never made any profit and lacks a
| viable business model and yet is backed by "rich dudes"
| makes me assume that it is this vitriol inducing hate
| speech factory on purpose. There is no sane discourse
| possible on this platform and that is for a reason and not
| by accident.
|
| Thus I would rather see Twitter die or fade away than see
| it succeed.
| majewsky wrote:
| > Twitter has never made any profit
|
| Twitter's operating income in 2019 was +453 million $,
| with net income at +1.47 billion $.
| robobro wrote:
| How do you think Twitter makes money?
| lowdose wrote:
| Advertisement like Facebook, but I'm arguing Twitters network
| effects are not as strong as Facebook.
| DarthGhandi wrote:
| They have paid API tiers also I believe? It's been a while
| since using it.
| notatoad wrote:
| In FY2019, they had ~3bn advertising revenue and ~465mm
| in "data licencing and other".
|
| https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2019
| /q4...
| shd4 wrote:
| That's where Mastodon comes in.
| sandov wrote:
| I had a mastodon.social account but deleted it after the admin
| power tripped and started to ban instances he didn't like.
| andypants wrote:
| The great thing about the fediverse is if you still want to use
| mastodon, you can find a better instance that suits your needs,
| or run your own instance.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > you can find a better instance that suits your needs, or
| run your own instance
|
| I understand that this is the concept, but in practice, it's
| a laughable recommendation.
|
| Accounts aren't portable and running your own instance is an
| insurmountable task for most and the cost of it is not nearly
| worth it.
| lokedhs wrote:
| There is an account migration feature. If you create a new
| account on a different instance, you can migrate the old
| account to the new one.
|
| This basically sends messages to your followers instructing
| them to follow your new account instead. This is all
| transparent to both you and your followers.
| olah_1 wrote:
| That is not the same as moving your old account to a new
| instance. If your old server actually dies, your old
| account data is just gone. And if it dies before you get
| a chance to migrate, then you're really out of luck.
|
| I just don't understand why people feel such a strong
| desire to cling to the federated servers model when these
| problems are solved in decentralized protocols already...
| progval wrote:
| > when these problems are solved in decentralized
| protocols already...
|
| which ones are you thinking of?
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| you can export all of your account data, and you can host
| mastrodon on a raspberry pie, what are you talking about
| olah_1 wrote:
| > you can export all of your account data
|
| And then what? Write a script that systematically re-
| posts it all on your new account?
|
| > and you can host mastrodon on a raspberry pie, what are
| you talking about
|
| The amount of time and dedication required to do such a
| thing is not just outside of the ability of most people,
| but it is also not worth the effort for such a trivial
| thing as tweets.
| detaro wrote:
| But you can't yet import that data in your new instance
| and have it seamlessly continue to work from there,
| because your identifier obviously changed.
| [deleted]
| tangent128 wrote:
| Moving accounts is supported; your old account posts a
| machine-readable "moved to x@y" message, which tells your
| followers to automatically switch to the new location.
|
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
| detaro wrote:
| Oh cool, missed that being added. That covers a good
| chunk of the issue.
| otachack wrote:
| So let's make it portable? There should be an easy way to
| transfer your account/content to another verse without
| losing data. Then keeping a mapping from the old@firstverse
| -> new@secondverse and verses only allowing a limited
| amount of immigration transfers per some period to prevent
| abuse.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| It's not really a 'power trip' is it? It's his instance and he
| can do whatever he wants. Aren't most of the folks claiming
| censorship also claiming to be for 'individual freedom'?
|
| Also, not that hard to spin your own instance.
| robobro wrote:
| Pleroma guy here. Look into pleroma! It's very lite weight, coded
| in elixir, and full of excellent hackers
| KingFelix wrote:
| Pleroma is pretty great. I was able to spin up a few digital
| ocean servers and built one up on a raspberry pi. Pretty easy,
| also used a lot of options testing and playing around.
| yunohost.org was pretty great to use as a tester to install and
| play around with all sorts of stuff, Mastadon etc.
| softwarelimits wrote:
| Hi, you are using the right stack for this kind of project,
| very promising!
|
| I have only two questions I could not answer myself by reading
| the docs, it would be great if you would like to answer these:
|
| A) Groups: for many use cases of "social softwares" groups are
| a very basic requirement - I can not see any way to have a
| group inside an instance or a way to simulate groups by using
| Pleroma in a multi-tenant way, like one Pleroma instance for
| each group served from the same code installation (ecto has a
| db prefix feature, maybe this could help with a quick path for
| a "multi-tenancy-as-groups" feature?). Am I missing something
| or are groups simply not there yet?
|
| B) EU data protection: would you say that Pleroma is safe for
| (naive) users to install in the sense of EU conformity or is it
| a risk currently for a single person to offer a Pleroma
| instance in EU? I could not find any information about this
| very important topic - what again made me wonder if developers
| are realizing the importance of this issue at all?
|
| Would be very interesting to read your ideas about these
| issues!
|
| BTW the docs at https://docs.pleroma.social/readme.html would
| be more readable if the sidebar could be adjusted to the width
| of the containing text - HTML + CSS allows that, it should be
| used! Also having "Top" - a navigation directive - listed as an
| actual chapter name seems a little strange.
| lainsoykaf wrote:
| groups are a very complicated topic, everybody wants them but
| nobody can agree on what exactly they are. Either way, we are
| working on them for Pleroma, they are necessary for a lot of
| other nice features that we want to have in the future. See
| https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma-meta/issues/14
| lainsoykaf wrote:
| regarding data protection, nobody knows.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I'm wondering if EU data protection rules are fully supposed
| to be applied by small businesses. Because then it has very
| hard to properly follow consequences for contact list
| management (smartphone and paper phonebooks, etc.)
| whoopdedo wrote:
| If not it's a loophole that would allow a large data farm
| to split itself into myriad "small businesses" that all
| share with each other.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That would either add enough friction to be too
| expensive, or be too easy for the anti-fraud services to
| figure out ?
| animesh wrote:
| I have only known about activitypub for a few years but never
| ventured into learning about it. If I wanted to contribute
| eventually how and where should I start? Thanks.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Make a library for the protocol for your favourite
| programming language, if one doesn't already exist. (For
| instance, Rust needs one. There are efforts towards that
| already, but they're not brilliant.)
|
| If there are existing projects, pick the one you think is
| nicest. If you don't think any are nice enough, make your
| own. Expect lots of complaining and criticism; that means
| you've helped enough people that they've started taking your
| work for granted.
| k__ wrote:
| I think the truth lies between federated and p2p. Personal or at
| least very small instances only.
|
| Would be cool if we could get something like remoteStorage going,
| but with a one-click-way of getting your personal instance up and
| running and also a simple way to transfer that from provider to
| provider.
| sneak wrote:
| > _ActivityPub prevents that a social media platform becomes a
| silo (see photo) that can't communicate with other platforms._
|
| I wish that were true. In practice, server admins are more than
| happy to block federation with entire other domains (and all
| associated users, hundreds or thousands at a time) based on
| little more than gossip and rumor.
|
| Imagine if email services worked this way! "subscriber@otherhost
| is rumored to be slightly politically oriented in a way we don't
| like, so we as admins have prevented everyone@thishost from
| mailing everyone@otherhost, and vice versa".
|
| https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12600
|
| "the internet treats censorship like damage and something
| something"
|
| I'm glad that, in practice, you can still email people who are
| destination-server-adjacent to users your local mailserver admin
| hates. (Of course, mailservers can configure to drop mail from
| specified MXes too--but they don't. Usually they get spam-
| foldered.)
|
| PS: I'm on the fediverse at @sneak@sneak.berlin and would love
| more people to follow.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > In practice, server admins are more than happy to block
| federation with entire other domains (and all associated users,
| hundreds or thousands at a time) based on little more than
| gossip and rumor.
|
| If that is easily possible this is doomed from the start, IMO.
|
| You get into situations where you are at the mercy of a single
| person.
|
| The linked issue's closing comment is even more backward. The
| issue opener did not asked for talking to people which do not
| want talk to him. Blocking between users is one thing, and can
| be good to have. Their issue was that the whole federate
| instance doesn't peers with him, out of theirs or the federated
| instance in questions people choice or support.
|
| Peering needs to be done unconditionally, even over edges, IMO.
| Blocking needs to be in the sole control of the user, not the
| admin of a federation server. All else doesn't makes this
| better than Facebook, or any other single server instance
| without federation.
| rglullis wrote:
| Agreed on all points, except that with Mastodon is always
| possible to create a single-user instance where (a) you are
| in control of the blocklists and (b) admins of other
| instances will be less likely to block you.
| tlamponi wrote:
| (b) less likely is, well, less likely. Better but not of
| use, as seen in the linked issue you can easily "loose"
| access to 19000 other people, just due to one admin with
| whatever reasoning, good or bad, they have - in a
| "Fediverse" it should be never the decision of the admin
| for the users.
|
| At least if the goal is not having silos and
| decentralization.
| rglullis wrote:
| You are absolutely right. I just wanted to point out that
| this is a Mastodon-specific thing and (I believe) one
| that will self-correct with time.
| progval wrote:
| > You get into situations where you are at the mercy of a
| single person.
|
| How is it worse than Twitter, which can also ban you?
|
| At least on the Fediverse you can choose who that person is,
| and it can even be yourself if you host your own instance.
|
| > Peering needs to be done unconditionally, even over edges,
| IMO.
|
| What about instances that are mostly spam? What about
| instances that are dedicated to harassment (eg. Kiwifarms)?
|
| Besides, you're free to use an instance with a block policy
| that aligns with your opinion.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > How is it worse than Twitter, which can also ban you?
|
| Who said anything about twitter and worse?? Shouldn't this
| be better than Twitter?
|
| > What about instances that are mostly spam? What about
| instances that are dedicated to harassment (eg. Kiwifarms)?
|
| Why is that an issue? You do not get spewed their spam in
| your face as long as you do not follow anybody? It has to
| be the users decision, anything else is doomed to be abused
| against users.
|
| And if this would become an issue, and one want's to have a
| more drastic approach to handle bad apples a decision of
| the a federates instances users, i.e., a conses or quorum,
| needs to decide.
|
| > you're free to use an instance with a block policy that
| aligns with your opinion
|
| No, you do not understand the basic issue here. Not only
| the block policy of the instance I'm on is the issue, but
| all the others. So how does your proposal solves this?
| progval wrote:
| > Who said anything about twitter and worse?? Shouldn't
| this be better than Twitter?
|
| I personally believe the Fediverse is better than Twitter
| in that regard, but everyone should agree that it's at
| least not worse.
|
| > a conses or quorum, needs to decide.
|
| Some instances do that, eg. https://social.coop/
|
| > So how does your proposal solves this?
|
| I didn't make a proposal, just explained what I see as an
| early Mastodon user.
|
| > Not only the block policy of the instance I'm on is the
| issue, but all the others.
|
| Again, Fediverse users choosing instances is like Twitter
| users choosing blocklists. If they are on an instance
| which blocks yours, then either:
|
| 1. they are aware of their instance's policy, so they
| indirectly agree with the decision of not seeing your
| toots
|
| 2. they are unaware of their instance's policy, which is
| a bad decision on their part.
| rglullis wrote:
| Yeah, you are not wrong but to me this seems something of a
| mastodon-exclusive cultural issue. They are confusing
| federation with tribalism. I've also already read some excuse
| like "you can always create an account in the other instances
| if you want to follow anyone there" but to me this just seems
| like they are missing the point and/or coming up with a way to
| avoid the harder of work of implementing proper user-level
| filtering controls.
| kalium_xyz wrote:
| You can do that on email no problem, and its common as heck for
| major email providers to block on little more than a mail
| server being in the same IP block as a bunch of spammers.
|
| Its not the same you say? Yet no email admin is prevented from
| doing things as you describe.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >I wish that were true. In practice, server admins are more
| than happy to block federation with entire other domains (and
| all associated users, hundreds or thousands at a time) based on
| little more than gossip and rumor.
|
| That's the prerogative of the instance owner. If the instance
| owner doesn't want to see certain posts, or undesirable posts
| from certain users, they don't have to. It's their own server,
| and they can choose what content to host on there.
|
| If you don't like that fact, you can go to an instance which
| has few or little in the way of defederation (and there are
| many), or you can host your own instance. But what's
| unreasonable is to demand that server owners should have to
| allow certain communication on their platforms. If the owner
| demands you must wear a chicken hat when you post, you'd better
| wear the chicken hat. Or just go elsewhere, if you don't like
| that rule.
|
| Would you demand the same thing of HN? Should there be no
| moderation at all? What about Twitter? If I were the owner of
| an instance, and I found out I'm seeing child porn on my
| server's timeline, would it be unreasonable of me to
| unsubscribe from that user, or defederate with their instance,
| if their instance has a habit of allowing that material? Let's
| say it's not illegal, but morally undesirable to the owner of
| the instance. Why should that change anything?
|
| You have freedom of speech, but you (and the instance owners)
| have freedom of association. To take away one necessarily
| lessens the other. By joining to an instance, you agree to the
| administration policy, and that includes defederation policies.
| Just as you shouldn't be annoyed at being banned for spamming
| (e.g. on the basis of an anti-spam rule), you shouldn't be
| annoyed at the instance owner defederating (e.g. on the basis
| of a "no child porn" rule).
| sneak wrote:
| You seem to be confusing my complaining about a behavior
| (instance operators being stupid) and my being entitled to
| force them to behave in a non-stupid way. This is a common
| misunderstanding.
|
| You're preaching to the choir about "their server, their
| rules". I just think that censorship is dumb, and server
| admins that do this are dumb. They're entirely within their
| rights to be dumb on their own hardware.
|
| I _do_ run my own instance. And thousands of people, some of
| whom I wish to read, have been denied the possibility of me
| following them (despite their toots still available on the
| public internet for anyone, myself included, to view) because
| one such admin has been this type of dumb.
| lokedhs wrote:
| I agree that's a problem. But I don't think we can blame the
| technology for that. After all, an email server admin can do
| the same thing, but they rarely do.
|
| This is a cultural thing, and instances that engage in
| excessive blocking tends to become isolated islands eventually.
| sandov wrote:
| We can't blame ActivityPub, but we can blame the maintainers
| of Mastodon, as their website has a list of instances
| excluding the ones they don't like.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| _> Imagine if email services worked this way!
| "subscriber@otherhost is rumored to be slightly politically
| oriented in a way we don't like, so we as admins have prevented
| everyone@thishost from mailing everyone@otherhost, and vice
| versa"._
|
| This actually does happen. It's not as common as it is with
| ActivityPub servers, but it exists. Most mail servers do have
| ways of rejecting or blackholing content from specific
| addresses or domains. The functionality became necessary for
| dealing with spam mail. :/
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| If you don't properly moderate your instance, your instance
| will have to be blocked entirely because you can't expect every
| instance host to moderate every user on every instance
| individually. This is the solution to decentralized moderation
| and I think it's great.
| progval wrote:
| > Imagine if email services worked this way!
| "subscriber@otherhost is rumored to be slightly politically
| oriented in a way we don't like, so we as admins have prevented
| everyone@thishost from mailing everyone@otherhost, and vice
| versa".
|
| Entire instances don't get blocked just because of one user's
| political opinion.
|
| The most extreme case I can imagine is that of a couple of
| subscriber@otherhost being harmful to other instances, and the
| admins of "otherhost" refusing to do anything about it. So some
| instances ("thishost") would preventively block "otherhost" if
| they don't want to deal with every single harmful user from
| that instance.
|
| But if that block policy of "thishost" is publicly advertised,
| then what's wrong with that? It's like users choosing a
| blocklist provider on Twitter.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Entire instances don 't get blocked just because of one
| user's political opinion._
|
| Not often, but it has happened with a couple of instances.
| There's a group of 7 or so that's trying to wall itself off
| entirely from anybody who federates with anyone who federates
| with the crap instances, which I think is excessive - just
| defederate with the crap ones and soft-block those that don't
| at least soft-block the crap ones; that's sufficient for most
| cases.
|
| However, it's a minority of instances that do that, and I
| don't know of _one_ where the users don 't know. The system
| works; I can still see stuff on the utter shithole corners of
| the Fediverse, if I choose (hint: I don't), but it's not
| pushed in my face.
|
| Just because they want to push things in my face, doesn't
| mean everybody has to let them "unless I opt out". That's an
| opt-in kind of thing, in my book.
|
| See https://telegra.ph/MastodonOStatus-Instance-Blocking-
| FAQ-06-... for a better explanation, from an actual moderator
| who didn't originally agree with this philosophy.
| chromatin wrote:
| The closing (and reasoning for closing) of the linked issue on
| GitHub is absolutely bizarre.
| sneak wrote:
| https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12597
| newnewpdro wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a good and current guide on setting up and
| maintaining your own mastodon instance?
| progval wrote:
| The official docs at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/ should do
| newnewpdro wrote:
| It appears "Installing from source" is the only option?
|
| Are there no distributions packaging mastodon and its
| dependencies such that I don't need to have gcc/build-
| essential and piles of -dev packages installed to run it?
| progval wrote:
| Mastodon has hundreds of Nodejs and Ruby dependencies, so
| it would be a huge amount of work for distributions to
| package it. See
| https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3576
|
| FreeBSD's ports used to have Mastodon, but they gave up
| because it kept breaking https://www.freshports.org/net-
| im/mastodon/
|
| You can however run Mastodon with docker, many people use
| the official docker-compose.yml config.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| Yikes, do you know of any activitypub-compatible
| implementations actually packaged by distros? gnu social
| perhaps? diaspora?
|
| I checked out Pleroma after seeing it mentioned on that
| freshports mastodon page, which seemed a bit less onerous
| with just the OTP component but they don't distribute an
| i686 build, that's unfortunately what the dusty old colo
| I'm looking to run this on has.
| progval wrote:
| Debian Sid has Diaspora:
| https://packages.debian.org/unstable/diaspora , but
| Diaspora doesn't support ActivityPub: https://github.com/
| diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422#issuecommen...
|
| As for GNU Social, well...
| https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/GNUSocial
|
| You might be interested in Yunohost, which is a Debian-
| based distro packaging popular server applications (also
| with an easy installer, aimed at non-technical people):
| https://yunohost.org/
| newnewpdro wrote:
| > Debian Sid has Diaspora:
| https://packages.debian.org/unstable/diaspora , but
| Diaspora doesn't support ActivityPub: https://github.com/
| diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422#issuecommen....
|
| For posterity sake:
|
| I just spent an hour trying to get that package happily
| installed in a fresh debian sid debootstrap running in
| nspawn and it seems to be broken. They're requiring an
| old 1.2.x ruby-zip version, and sid seems to only have
| 2.0. Even after kludging past that, things break down
| again on unmet sass version requirements.
|
| So true to the 'unstable' name, this package isn't
| currently usable.
| progval wrote:
| You may want to submit a bug report:
| https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
|
| This will more likely result in the package being removed
| rather than fixed, but at least someone else won't get
| false hope.
| sevencolors wrote:
| How does this deal with spam? Feels like it would be very easy to
| create bots on all sorts of nodes in this "fediverse" that start
| spamming folks with garbage
|
| I've been curious for a while and have tried Mastodon, but am
| always left with... ok, now what?
| lainsoykaf wrote:
| nobody properly deals with it yet. We are small enough for now
| that we can get away with moderation by hand / blocking bad
| instances.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Most instances are relatively small and have a couple of
| dedicated moderators. They seem to deal with it fine, for all
| I've seen.
| unionpivo wrote:
| lots of small instances.
|
| If you only have few dozen to few hundred users (think a few
| families, or maybe a small to medium corp) it not that hard to
| moderate. Hell even few thousand is manageable.
|
| Plus if one instance is constant problem you can just block it.
| Matumio wrote:
| I hope someone has a better answer.
|
| Remember all those small forums, wikis, and wordpress blogs
| with open comments? Some admins spent hours manually
| reverting automated linkspam. Others didn't. The solution was
| to pay centralized services like google's recaptcha or disqus
| with the user's data.
|
| Mastodon is looking okay so far. But I don't think spammers
| are seriously targeting it yet.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Messages ("toots") propagate through followers. So an account
| that spams excessively is quite likely to be unfollowed or
| blocked by its followers. Probably also reported.
|
| There's also hashtag spam, which propagates via hashtag search.
| The one instance of that I've run into is geocoded (e.g., city-
| name) spam, mostly sex-oriented. That all originated from a
| single instance, which I've now blocked.
|
| There's a user I follow from that instance -- the follow
| overrides the block, so I see that person's posts.
|
| It's possible that hashtag spamming might reach toxic levels.
| For now, that's not been the case. People spamming their own
| followers should be ... pretty self-limiting.
| etxm wrote:
| > People spamming their own followers should be ... pretty
| self-limiting.
|
| You haven't met my family.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Then you probably want to use lists.
|
| This is a technical reference, though you should get a
| notion of capabilities from it. The UI controls are under
| the "Getting Started" pane, or individually on List or User
| panes.
|
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/
|
| I have about three primary ones, simply "A", "B", and "C",
| by priority.
|
| "A" is small and a select set of high-quality contacts I
| interact with frequently. "B" is far more generous. "C" is
| mostly oversharers. In practice I don't have that visible.
|
| I'll pin "A", "B", and "Home" (all following) most often.
|
| There are a few additional utility lists, infrequently
| used. Two sets for press/media ("Press" and "Voluble
| press", the second rarely gets used). One of a set of
| Mastodon admins.
|
| You'd probably want "Family" and "Family I Have to Follow"
| or something like that. And can probably figure out which
| goes where and what to do with them.
|
| Another option would be to have your general and family-
| specific accounts / instances, and treat those as you
| prefer. No reason not to segregate your social circles as
| suits you.
|
| I follow ... just under 666 profiles. That's a lot, though
| lists keep the flow managable and interesting.
|
| My pinned toots give a few other suggestions. This being
| one I live by, effectively, block liberally:
|
| https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145
| pferde wrote:
| "Would be"? There are already way too many bots on Mastodon,
| many of them do unpaid advertising for commercial news outlets
| (reposting their RSS feeds). I guess people who run them think
| they're doing "fediverse" a favour, but they're only getting
| more eyeballs and ad views for those outlets.
|
| The solution is liberal and frequent use of blocking, but it's
| a solution that does not scale well.
| nightpool wrote:
| actually, it's a solution that scales pretty well. I help run
| an medium sized mastodon instance, and I managed to silence
| every spammy news aggregator with a couple hours of effort,
| It only takes a few seconds to respond to reports of new
| ones, and now the couple hundred people who use my server
| don't need to worry about RSS spam at all. Small communities
| allow for more effecient moderation.
| pferde wrote:
| Sorry for being unclear - I was referring to blocking on
| user level, where everyone can decide for themselves what
| they consider spam, instead of leaving it "for the admin".
| toohotatopic wrote:
| On user level, people could cooperate and make lists of
| spam accounts. There could be various lists with
| different values that determine who belongs on the list.
| People could subscribe to the lists that suit them and
| add all users on those lists to their block list.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I run some RSS bots on Diaspora. Lots of people feel I'm
| providing value. They want to get this content in their feed,
| so they subscribe.
| progval wrote:
| The problem on the Fediverse is when these bots post in
| "public" instead of "unlisted", so everyone gets the posts
| in the public timeline, which gets overrun by bots.
| egypturnash wrote:
| There is a human element in the new user signup path on a lot
| of Masto instances. For a while I had mine set to "there's a
| form on the front page to fill out with an freeform text field
| to say why you want an account here" until the day a whole
| bunch of people with suspiciously similar email account names
| all requested new accounts and filled that space with links to
| buy viagra and cialis. Now it's gone back to "ask me elsewhere,
| or ask a friend who is on the instance, and I will hand off an
| invite link". An admin can leave her instance set to open
| signups, but eventually she's probably going to turn that off
| once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable
| handling.
|
| You could always set up your own instance to spam people, but
| you'd quickly find the entire instance blocked. There's a few
| hashtags where admins tend to share bad actor instances they've
| run across, and you'd start seeing instances you'd never made
| contact with blocking you preemptively.
| progval wrote:
| > An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but
| eventually she's probably going to turn that off once it
| grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling.
|
| Strangely, I didn't get that much spam registrations on my
| instance (French-speaking; created in early 2017). There was
| a dozen accounts with ads for laser pointers and currently
| I'm getting accounts in vietnamese which don't post anything;
| but that's all.
|
| On the other hand, I had to silence some instances because
| they had way too many bots flooding the public timeline,
| mostly with porn.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| People here like to shit on Bitcoin and the like, but
| micropayments are an excellent way to reduce spam.
| thiht wrote:
| Even if that was the case, you would still not need bitcoin
| for that
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Micropayments may be a great mechanism to reduce spam, if you
| can get people to pay at all.
|
| Bitcoin is a terrible mechanism for micropayments. Right now,
| to get a transaction completed in 10 - 30 minutes (next - 3
| blocks fee), it costs $0.77. If you're happy to wait an hour,
| it costs $0.36. (Source:
| https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees)
|
| Disclaimer: I am long bitcoin.
| app4soft wrote:
| Here is POC of cryptocurrency donation daemon, with example
| usage for micro-payments for GitHub contributors.[0]
|
| [0] https://github.com/jollheef/donate
| toomim wrote:
| True, but payment channels can solve that. They work and
| are implemented in some clients and servers, but haven't
| become too popular yet, except in the (not working very
| well) lightning network.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Lightning Network fixes this with nearly instant settlement
| and units divisible to the microsatoshi.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| How is it coming up?
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| At best, it's going to be Ubuntu in Windows world. Irrelevant.
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