!fnetworks There was an outage on SUR1, which currently hosts both the nu and n0 instances. The disk filled up during an overnight backup, taking down the database. I am currently investigating whether there's a misconfigured log in logrotate.
Created a #Friendica account on Libranet.de ... it very quickly asked to add my contacts from here and is in the midst of attempting to do so. !fnetworks will be adding a Friendica instance once I have some funds for another #VPS.
« If ActivityPub (the protocol) and Mastodon (a server that adheres to that protocol) were designed to incentivise decentralisation, having more instances in the network would not be a problem. In fact, it would be the sign of a healthy, decentralised network.
However, ActivityPub and Mastodon are designed the same way Big Tech/Big Web is: to encourage services that host as many “users” as they can.
This design is both complex (which makes it difficult and expensive to self-host) and works beautifully for Big Tech (where things are centralised and scale vertically and where the goal is to get/own/control/exploit as many users as possible).
In Big Tech, the initial cost of obtaining such scale is subsidised by vast amounts of venture capital [...]
However, unlike Big Tech, the stated goal of the fediverse is to decentralise things, not centralise them. Yet how likely is it we can achieve the opposite of Big Tech’s goals while adopting its same fundamental design?
When you adopt the design of a thing, you also inherit the success criteria that led to the evolution of that design. If that success criteria does not align with your own goals, you have a problem on your hands.»
@lnxw48a1 @fu If I may pitch in on on th etopic of "how the fediverse works"...
Yes, you can explain it with the image of email and email providers. But you rely on "freedom" (whose?) to describe a structure that doesn't explain why newbies can and cannot subscribe to other people or otherwise interact with accounts and posts.
A different way is stop putting "freedom" into the centre – which in itself is a rather problematic hierarchical approach as it invokes the imagery of landlords dealing with their rowdy tenants – and explain to people the basics of #federation, from which most of the peculiarities and problems of fediverse interactions arise.
2015 I wrote a piece for Twitter migrants to GNUsocial primarily from the angle of a layperson, explaining the various oddities by pointing to and explaining from federation as the root cause. Perhaps this snippet is of some help:
1) Why should people leave Twitter just because E.M. purchases it? What changes does he have in mind that people supposedly fear so much that they think about moving to the #Fediverse -- of all places!
2) The author's categorisation of user groups (# 6): 1. Programmers & tech enthusiasts 2. LGBTQIA+ 3. Furries 4. Neurodivergent may be true for some Mastodon and Pleroma instances, but to reduce the Fediverse inhabitants to these four groups, even call them core groups, is ridiculous.
3) His advice to scale quickly, i.e., to build more instances, is misguided, as more instances still face the already endemic problem of mutual de-federating of instances (and the subsequent break-up of the Fediverse in various mutual excluding Sub-diverses). More machines will not alleviate the pressure of the expected wave of new people, as the machines won't interact. Instead, the result will rather be more silos, i.e., more Twitter imitations.
4) Building the Fediverse (# 18) is "about building a ROBUST social media infrastructure that is protected from the whims of shareholders and governments". Nah, that is the usual understanding of instances as machines whereas instances are rather conversations. As shareholders and governments are not interested in conversations, they won't be interested in the Fediverse.
After all those years, people still don't understand the Fediverse. And THAT is quite interesting.
I am not planning to launch the first open registration public instance until every !fnetworks #GNU_Social instance is running version 2.0+, so #Federati Networks may miss this next wave of #Twitter refugees.
The chaotic situation at home has meant that I’ve delayed the planned upgrades again.
I don't know whether I responded. Yes, troubleshooting data would be useful. I'm still in #NYC, but I'm hoping to do some major updates to all !fnetworks sites when I return to #SoCal.
I have some stuff planned for !fnetworks, but I think I'll wait until I am back in #SoCal to put them into effect. #Hotel_living really does make everything more difficult.
I have been reducing family Web presence by abandoning domains and shuttering a #VPS here and there. Now I need to reduce my work hours, so I will have some time and energy to devote to both the family’s activities ( including reviving some #fambiz operations) and to building !fnetworks. I have some ideas in both areas, but have been stymied by the feast or famine nature of my employment.
Federati Networks is the name for the Federati.net and associated sites and the (hopefully soon-coming) organization founded to fund and manage the sites.