Even when you click it without opening in a new tab/window?

You should just need to write [email protected] in the comment box, and the link is generated automatically. Should work in both Lemmy and kbin at least, not sure about mbin but would make sense that it works there as well. :)

Kbin needs to be aware of the community first, so my first link didn’t work properly because of that. After interacting with the community once the [email protected] format works just fine. :)

I subscribed from Kbin.social now, so future posts should be visible from there. :)

I think this should work for everyone: !harrypotter

The nice thing about the Fediverse is that people can go forum shopping. Blåhaj is an instance that chooses to defederate too much rather than too little, making sure to create a safe space even if this safe space is smaller. That’s between them and their users. As long as there are users who appreciate this approach to moderation, it’s good for the Fediverse that such an instance exists.

I think it is great for users. Ernest, the developer of kbin, actively wanted not to federate downvotes because he thought it would be better for the user experience. It is of course open for debate, but it’s a decision made with users in mind, not related to the ease of development.

Of course, there is a dimension if the critique that rings true. If I talk to someone using Firefish they might respond to me using a emoji response, which I will of course not see over at kbin. I just can’t think of a devastating real world example. A good example how things work out alright is seen in posts from kbin and (I assume) Lemmy over at Mastodon: They show up with their headlines, hashtags and some text and pictures, but as the format is too rich for the platform they also contain a simple link to the post. That way that nothing is lost, and Alice can sleep well at night.

Regarding EEE, nobody owns the right to any specific implementation. Sure, Threads could use activitypub but use a different logic for favourites than Mastodon does, and they wouldn’t be able to communicate favourites with each other. We could imagine the entire fediverse jumping after Meta, desperate to see the hearts added by Threads users. And then… what exactly? The extinguish step is a bit unclear to me.

You’d also break compatibility with the previous version of your software, so your users wouldn’t be able to see any threads posted on any server that wasn’t updated.

If you had a really good reason to make this change, chances are this reason would apply to both services and they would move together. If either developer does it out of spite, nobody is going to upgrade their instance and the project would be forked.

And if they were the type to break ActivityPub integration of their service out of spite, why would they use it in the first place? It just makes no sense. I’m not particularly worried.

Which is of course true - if you want to develop an activitypub service that works with the fediverse at large, you’ll have to look around and see how it could integrate with other services.

The dilemma of boosts vs. favourites for upvotes in the threadiverse is a good example. In kbin, boosts used to be preferred: they are used to promote visibility in Mastodon and similar microblogging services, and the counts are spread through the fediverse to a greater degree than what favourites are. On the other hand, people are more trigger-happy dealing out favourites, it matches the intent of an upvote, and, importantly, it fits the implementation that was already in place over at Lemmy.

In theory, downvotes could be matched with a specific emoji response in Firefish and other services that support the technology. They don’t however, and I’m not sure anyone would really want them to either.

While these questions and challenges exist for the developers of Fediverse platforms, it just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. There are several ways of doing things, and sometimes you might not even want a feature to be interoperable. Last time I checked downvotes in kbin are not federated at all, by design. Lemmy users cannot boost content at all as far as I’m aware, and it’s not holding them back. Developers are completely capable of looking to past implementations and make informed decisions about interoperability in whatever way they see best fit. You don’t have to look to every implementation - you might just be interested in text and favourites, in which case you can feel pretty comfortable using the same implementation as Mastodon (or anyone else).

It’s like David Hume’s point about norms and the state of nature. At some point everyone will begin driving on the same side of the road even without some authority enforcing it, just because it benefits everyone.

Maybe this wasn’t clear in 2019, but in 2023 I’m communicating with people on kbin without having any idea which of many ActivityPub implementation the person on the other end is using.

What is your experience?

Your very comment is an example of interoperability working well between kbin and Lemmy, so one would think it cannot be that bad?

Well, one thought is that this blog post is from January 2019, and that a lot has changed since then. Among them is that a lot of different ActivityPub implementations have become a lot more mainstream than Diaspora.

The author’s stance might of course not have changed, but it seems to me this post is a bit too outdated to enter into a current discussion. Interoperability between ActivityPub services is working fine, at least in my opinion.

I guess it might just be easier in the end. There are a lot of spam domains registered on .ml, so going through it all and trying to reach out to owners would be one hell of a job for a presumably already strained Mali bureaucracy. Taking it all down (which they have the right to) and potentially allowing people to buy the domains back from the government later on is probably a lot less work.

They just handed off the management of .ml domains to a third party on a ten-year contract, and the contract is now ending.

So I guess Mali is honouring its contracts, and I doubt the third party provided anyone with contracts going beyond the ten year period they could guarantee for. I doubt the third party provided contracts at all to be honest.

There was a report in the beginning of June that things started looking weird. The registration of new .ml domains shut down in the beginning of the year.

In short, the Mali government just gave some random 3rd party a ten-year contract to hand out the domains for free, which the third party did without too much care or attention. It would have been up to the third party to notify domain owners, but as they’re not paying and probably don’t even have contracts themselves, there was little incentive to do so.

As far as I can understand, it relates to the US military scandal only indirectly: As the .ml domains are now returning to the government of Mali, it becomes a lot more problematic that the US keep directing their emails there, and the person in charge of managing the domain went public about the security threat.

Mali was giving them away for free, so that’s probably the main reason. I’m a bit confused they just cut them off rather than offering people to start paying for their domains, but oh well.

For the Lemmy devs specifically there’s the added novelty that ML is a common abbreviation for Marxism-Leninism.

Good thing join-lemmy is safely tucked away in a .org domain.

This is extremely bad timing for Lemmy (if it ends up happening), but also a good example of how federation makes the entire social media landscape more robust. Had this happened to a centralized service it would be devastating.

Never hurts. Could be a good opportunity to look around the threadiverse and see if you find anything interesting.

However, as it only affects the domain, I expect the Lemmy developers will manage to migrate user data to the new domain should lemmy.ml go down. So your account won’t just disappear, but it might go down for a while. It might also affect communities hosted on .ml domains, as followers from other instances will not have the correct path any more.

It seems to be Mali just wanting their domains back, in which case it’s uncertain times for all .ml domains.

There is more info here (straight from @FMHY) and Lemmy discussions here and here.

Might be bad news for the Lemmy developers who’ve had a general preference for .ml domains.

Not sure I understand the question, but you should be able to subscribe to their communities (such as !moviesandtv) from wherever you are posting from. :)

The archive link should work?

As far as I am concerned, this owl is the only meme that matters. How I have missed it.

Yes, this is absolutely a thing - there’s a shared list that most of Mastodon has gotten behind. Not without drama of course, but generally it seems to be working well.

Generally speaking, it’s fantastic if people branch out like this and the threadiverse is fragmented into many smaller instances.

It relieves bigger instances of (some) content moderation, and as long as the community hosted at the server behaves well it should remain federated with all reasonable instances.

It also prevents one or a few instances from becoming monopolistic, ensuring that the Fediverse will live on in a decentralized and egalitarian way. Theres nothing in the nature of the fediverse indicating that big instances should be preferable over smaller ones - it’s rather the other way around.

There’s also personal reasons of course. If you self host you also get to make all the calls who to federate with - do you want to associate with Threads? Lemmygrad? LemmyNSFW? The “free speech absolutist” crowd? Self hosting gives you control.

Some people also just enjoy having control over the services they use, and some just enjoy tinkering. [email protected] is a nice community if you’re curious. :)

Similar problems occur for PeerTube though - somebody needs to pay server costs, and for video that can be quite heavy. There’s also no commercial concept behind it, so I doubt any instance of PeerTube feels a great need to get flooded with content. Where it really shines (at the moment) is when it is hosted by organizations (such as Blender or the European Union) to share their own content.

However, what’s cool about PeerTube is hinted at in the name: it uses torrent technology, and whenever you’re watching a video you are also seeding it to your peers (others who watch it). So while storage is an issue, bandwidth requirements are smaller than for centralized video services. So who knows what the future will bring. :)

At least in kbin, if you link a video on a site that allows embedding it includes a handy little button to show the embedded video automagically. Not sure how it’s handled in Lemmy though. :)

For the user experience, blocking meta just means that we won’t have random people who are into baking and casual consumers of social media randomly stumble upon and

Also the /u/ format works when viewed in the Lemmy web interface, but not necessarily inside apps or from other federated services. :)

It also probably doesn’t count as a mention, so the user won’t be notified even if they have that enabled in the settings.

If your instance shuts down your posts will still be visible on the other servers that your instance was federating with. Which might raise concerns if you want to have them removed, but that’s another issue.

On Mastodon it’s possible to move from one instance to another, taking your followers and the list of people you follow along with you and having the old account point to the new one. In the threadiverse, the most important feature would probably be to not have to manually re-subscribe to a bunch of communities. I think this moving of accounts from one instance to another will probably become standardized at some point in the future, so that you could for example move an account from Mastodon to Lemmy if you should wish. It’s probably pretty far down on the list of priorities though.

In my opinion, the idea of a hierarchy of users as enforced on Reddit through karma is a bit obsolete. I think we’re posting and commenting out of interest in the topic or a willingness to help or entertain. If that’s the motivation, I don’t see how starting over on a different server is such a bad thing; you’re not really losing anything. We’re not here hoarding upvotes like a dragon hoards gold.

Should be @mango_master if all is working correctly, actually ;)

The threadiverse is a bit complicated since there needs to be a way of distinguishing between users and groups, but the @[email protected] format is standardized across the fediverse.

Lemmy and Kbin won.

Reddit came out of it possibly still standing, but obviously weakened in many ways compared to before. Meanwhile, over here there’s now a bunch of activity and the development and servers seem to be well funded. And we (the Fediverse) didn’t even participate in the fight - it was all Reddit punching itself in the face.

The consumers also won, as we now have viable alternatives to choose from.

Maybe the fact that Reddit is still alive and active could be considered “winning”, in which case Musk’s Twitter is also “winning” every day. But that’s one hell of a low bar for what should be considered a victory in a fight you yourself started.

I’m weirdly nostalgic to the era of hanging out on a random phpBB forum with 40 or so active users, so a part of me feels like maybe they’re right. :)

Worth noting that lemmy.ml is also run by the developers as their general instance (while Lemmygrad is the tankie one). It’s easily forgotten at least for kbin users though, as federation with it has been somewhat broken for a while now.

Arguably it’s probably still not ready - I have heard rumours that running a kbin instance is still much more complicated than Lemmy, and that moderation tools are still somewhat lacking. Which probably explains why there are currently more Lemmy instances out there than kbin.

The confusing thing is that despite this, kbin.social seems spectacularly well moderated at the mement. I guess that’s partly because ernest is a champion, and partly because it didn’t have to deal with the same insane influx of users that Lemmy has.

Still - I think the slow growth model benefits kbin quite nicely, and with federation it doesn’t really matter to the feasibility of the platform whether people are here or on Lemmy. :)

I have never heard of Tildes before, but checked it out now since you said it’s text only.

I actually kind of like the look of that site - would have loved to see it as a federated text-only alternative to Lemmy and kbin!

Not a university as such yet (which indeed would make a lot of sense), but in the Netherlands they’re running a pilot for an official Mastodon server for “research and education”.

I guess it makes sense to start slow, as it’s still not clear which implementation would be best suited in the long run. Eventually there might be a Fediverse service made specifically for academia.

There’s absolutely a lot of potential here.

Thanks for sharing. For me this was also an enlightening reminder what an Mastodon and the Fediverse is not.

In case the built-in Mastodon frame maked it hard for anyone else than me to read the full thread, you can find it here:
https://hachyderm.io/

Very much worth the read.

I think it’s all about moderation and content management.

Before Musk, the greatest challenge facing Twitter was content moderation. There’s all this legal but annoying content you do not want to host, but if you block people from your platform you’re suddenly limiting free speech and there’s an outrage and suddenly you’re in even deeper shit.

The fediverse solves this very elegantly - throwing you off my platform is not the same as cutting you off from the public sphere the platform is part of. So Meta can be stricter in their content management than Twitter was, and possibly avoid the free speech critiques that Twitter faced.

It’s already kind of visible in how the Threads developers are emphasising how they’re trying to make Threads a “friendlier” space than Twitter.

There’s a hint of elitism to it though, at least as it’s commonly used.

I saw a comment the other day that referred to Instagram users as “people you wouldn’t want to associate yourself with”. I don’t know who these people think normal people are.

Worth noting that while Matrix is decentralized, it’s not part of the Fediverse!

The Fediverse/Activitypub protocol cannot (currently) be end-to-end encrypted, so it’s not so great for secure direct messaging. Matrix is completely separate software for a different use case, but it follows similar guiding principles of open source and decentralization. :)

(Oh, and for book lovers, check out BookWyrm; if you used to love Grooveshark back in the day, give Funkwhale a spin!)