The Verge article extolling the #Fediverse. I personally think the writer has the wrong point. #Facebook isn't good. Its attraction is "everybody I know is on Facebook" and not any of its half-baked features. Therefore, multiprotocol / multi-network federated social is important to dethroning #corpocentric #socnets like XTwitter ( #x.com / #twitter ) and Meta's Facebook & #Instagram.
I feel this writer's exuberence will turn out to be fantasy, mostly because of misunderstanding what keeps people in the walled gardens and what it will take to free them.
Looks like @Robbie is #newHere give them a follow particularly as I believe his #Diaspora* Pod is smaller they'll need more federation to see what we offer here on the #Fediverse
♲ @robbie@diaspora.ragesoss.com:
Kids Are Getting a Bad Reputation and it's Not Justified
I'm still #newhere because I wanted a place to make a #blog that doesn't make me make an account, pay for it, or have ads to pay for it. So here's my first blog entry.
All you see on TV #news or on the internet about #kids is about how stupid kids are, how confused about everything from #science, especially #biology, to #history and human interaction. Maybe in big cities where #education is all corrupted by politics that might be true. But I don't think you can write off a whole generation because kids in the news don't know which bathroom to use and can't tell you anything about the history of their own country and culture. We're not all like that! In fact I think the majority of kids, the ones you never hear about, aren't so ignorant and confused as people think.
I wonder if that is true about a lot of things. Watching the news it all looks bad! But people find ways to make life work and get through life without all that drama and without wars and protests and things that just make noise and hide the real truth behind one crisis after another.
#Adults reading this should know that probably most kids aren't all mixed up about their identity or their gender. The only thing really in doubt is our future, because the world we are about to inherit is a big battleground where the powerful compete for more power and who use confusion and mayhem to accomplish it.
Is anyone else having Friendica/Lemmy federation issues?
!Fediverse!Fediverse (JP) I am subscribed to many #lemmy communities from Friendica. I really love how it works, showing up as Friendica #Forums and basically just being exactly what I want (and one of the reasons why having your #friendica account enabled 👍 & 👎 is important for the upvote/downvote #features). It is WAY better than trying to follow such communities from #mastodon and I personally like the convince of one account and the UI better than Lemmy's native. It feels like it used to work seamlessly, however over the last few months something doesn't seem to work as well. I don't see nearly as many posts in my Network feed anymore, not all of my posts ever seem to actually be shown on the community page I put new posts to when I go there after being surprised, I haven't had any reactions/comments after a time, and a whole lot of comments and reactions to stuff I have posted successfully never show on my side when they do. I'm not sure if it's a recent change to #Friendica or #lemmy that has affected it, or perhaps if it's related to the #RedditMigration and the sheer number of additional users/connections/traffic the various Lemmy instances have than they did a few months ago. I haven't filed an issue because I am not sure where to even start. It could even by my attempts to always cross post, by putting various tags for @ and ! in posts like this, which iirc used to work just fine too, but even I only post to one I'm still seeing extreme delays, and/or lack of federation at all. also, frequently DELTE & RE-DRAFT rather than EDIT, particularly due to having friends on #Diaspora* and #GNUsocial that don't support EDIT, and somehow, I feel like that might have an impact too? #DazedAndConfused#andStatus@AndStatus project @redditmigratoin@kbin.social @Friendica Support
@fu From #GNU_social, I only see a few of your posts in the thread. As you may know, #Diaspora's protocol is different from #OStatus, so the D* posts do not cross over.
But there's more going on. Years ago, when I hosted a #Friendica instance, posts from ~F to OStatus appeared natively. Now they don't. For example, almost never will a mention or reply from ~F to GS appear in the recipient's replies stream. This doesn't only happen on GS, though.
On Pleroma instances, ~F posts (at least from #libranet.de) appear with delays of 2-12 hours or more, sometimes out of context, usually out of order. They also sometimes change the scope when they reply to a scope limited post.
I have a ~Friendica account on libranet.de, but I barely ever use it because _everything_ seems to be broken and it frustrates me every time I try to use it. I should probably close it and check to see whether the issues are local to libranet.de or something common to all Friendica instances.
Is there something that prevents re-sharing #Diaspora comments? I selected to do so from one conversation I was in. The #Friendica web interface seemed to show as if I did, but the post doesn't appear in my conversations. @Friendica Support
A while back one of my #friends indicated their #diaspora instance supported access via #Tor with a .onion address. I checked out their #onion site at the time but i didn't have the cash they wanted to sign up at the time, and now I can't find it
#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
♲ @denschub@pod.geraspora.de: Okay, here's a fun little story about a rabbithole I just fell into. It's about running the #diaspora project web infrastucture, and probably a glance behind the scenes.
Last week, I got an alert about unusually high load on the diaspora* project webserver. I was traveling for work, and the alert resolved itself after a couple of minutes -- so I ignored it. However, earlier today, I once again got alerted, this time about the wiki responding somewhat slow.
This was unusual. Some of our web assets, like the project's website or Discourse, do get quite a bit of traffic, sometimes holding a steady load of 5+ requests per second. The wiki, however, is not that. It generally only sees 5 requests or so per minute, so it was weird to see the wiki causing trouble. After some initial stop-gap measure, I had a closer look at the node, and noticed that the CPU load was on a significantly elevated, but stable, level. This, again, was unusual - because I designed the system in a way that allows it to handle quite large traffic spikes, and it shouldn't be under significant load on regular days.
Luckily, I have way more than enough metrics to investigate here. Looking at the traffic chart for the wiki only, it became very obvious that there was some sort of... deviation from the norm:
Again, traffic to the wiki is usually best measured in requests per minute - not requests per second. One could argue that diaspora* somehow just got very popular, but I have quite a bit of experience running services, and this chart didn't look natural to me.
The slow on-ramp of traffic over five days, and the occasional double traffic bursts, all of that looks like it's a bot (or a bot-farm) trying to see how far they can go before running into rate limits or load limits. So that's... odd - especially on the wiki.
Now, I have a few signals I can use to correlate requests with each other. In this case, I used the source IP and the User-Agent string provided. And it became quite obvious what was happening: A couple of crawlers, with the Amazon Web Crawler https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot leading the list, followed by some .. shady and undocumented web crawlers, had a lot of fun crawling the entire diaspora* wiki in an endless loop - including images in various thumbnail sizes, all previous versions of all pages, etcetc. Not nice. But also easy to workaround.
I noticed a couple of other interesting things, though. A lot of people run their own webservice monitoring applications, and for some reason, people find it fun to add other people's web properties to the list. I guess that's fine if it's only one or two cases, but if a lot of servers request a page once a minute, .. well you're eventually getting to quite an accumulation of traffic. Anyway, that's annoying, but not on a level where it's causing pain. But some of you really really should update your application versions.
Another, and much much more intersting pattern I saw, was that... apparently, some diaspora* pods .. wanted to federate stuff to the wiki?!
All of those traffic sources are actual diaspora* pods. On rank 1, there's @Fla's diaspora-fr.org, and on rank 2, there's my very own Geraspora. So that was... odd. There's a couple of very odd things in here from the point of view of a diaspora* developer. In theory, diaspora* should not try to federate to... a wiki. Also, all those requests were GET requests, not POST requests like you'd imagine. In fact, the only case where diaspora* should send a GET request is when it's trying to fetch a public entity from another pod. Every single one of those request was a GET /Choosing_a_pod, and while I think that's a pretty important page on our wiki, ... y'know, it's not a diaspora* entity.
So what's going on here? After @Benjamin Neff and I spent a bit of time banging our head against a wall, we eventually found out what happened there.
A recently closed down pod, probably in order to help their existing users, set up a redirect to the wiki's Choosing a pod https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod page. But they didn't only do that for specific URLs, they just send all requests with a 301 status code to that wiki page. And well, that includes the HTTP routes used for federation. So every time those diaspora* pods wanted to send something to the closed down pod, they ended up requesting that wiki page. Fun times. But wait, didn't I say those requests were all GET requests? Well yes, they were! Even though diaspora* itself started out with a POST, that got lost somewhere.
I'm a webbrowser nerd, so I knew what was happening here, but I appreciate that that's not universally the case. So, to explain, what we're seeing here is a bit of an HTTP edge-case. The relevant specification says https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616#section-10.3.2 (and yes, I know that that's an older version - but if you check the new versions, you will know why I quote RFC 2616 and not RFC 9110)
If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents will erroneously change it into a GET request.
and well, yes, that's exactly what's happening here. diaspora* sees the redirect (and actually marks the pod as "down", so it will stop receiving federation packets in two weeks), but the library we're using then switches to a GET requests, and just... queries the wiki.
That's obviously a bug, and diaspora* should not follow redirects. Anyway. In the end, the requests caused by that bug were not responsible for any significant load on the server. But it was fun to dig into that. 😀
@simsa04 It's good to see that #Loomio is still around. #Diaspora used to use Loomio many years ago. (They also used either #GetSatisfaction or #UserVoice ... which are more like user-to-user support communities, and I think they used #Convore until it closed also.)
I wish I'd had the time and focus to document everything I've seen in the #federated #socnet space. I could probably write a book by now.
A #VPN provider that I used shut down without much notice (in fact, the only way I found out was that I visited their site months later, trying to figure out why I hadn't been able to connect).
The #hotel I was using had a local provider that blocked #Fediverse instances (including Mastodon.Social), #Diaspora, #XMPP, #IRC, and a certain mail provider that I still use. They did not block: #Facebook, #Twitter, #GMail, or Outlook / #Hotmail
Because I couldn't connect to the VPN, I discovered how many perfectly normal sites were blocked because they weren't on the top 100 list. I went downstairs and informed the front desk that I would be leaving their establishment because of their blocking.
I received a phone call from their networking vendor, who logged into their router and proxy and turned off filtering on a list of about 25 sites they'd blocked.
But the point is, the hotel and its provider cannot be trusted not to fsck with your data. Always use a VPN.
#Pleroma (and I assume #Mastodon) have ‘relays’ built in, where an instance can join other instances’ relays, so that their outgoing traffic is shared with all the other instances that are members of that relay.
The advantage of a relay is that all of an instance’s public posts are automatically shared with other participating instances, where a followbot follows each user individually.
(Another thing that #Diaspora did a long time ago to improve federation.)
Hat Thieves (formerly at hatthiev.es/ but that appears to be gone now) was a group from Spain that was exploring independent and federated services. They operated GS, Mastodon, and Pleroma instances, plus lots of other FOSS but not federated things.
Whenever they opened a new federated instance, they’d immediately start following a bunch of people, to get posts into their network feed. The Masto and Pleroma instances would get angry and mass-block the instance.
Looked at the #Linux tag on #Diaspora again. @linux has posted 13 posts in about 2.5 hours (12 article links + a daily round-up link). Of course you know it is Tuxmachines, part of Roy's kingdom of article factories.
This is why I rarely ever log in there anymore. Very few actual people, zillions of linkbots churning out article links in popular hashtags.
(There was one guy that had at least three linkbots that each posted the same links within minutes of each other. I guess he could have done manual copy-pasting, but that would be boring, repetitive, and error-prone. I finally blocked him. I guess I need to do the same for Tuxmachines and similar linkbots.)
@moon@shitposter.club Is releasing a series of "Masters of the Fediverse" #NFTs and the first one will be @schestowitz ... which is why I asked if he was even still here.
His volume of posts on #Diaspora was so high that I finally had to unsubscribe from the #Linux hashtag. If I recall correctly, he posts a link, then one of his sites posts the link, then another site posts the link ... all camped out on the Linux hashtag.
I haven't logged onto #Diaspora in a while. Most of my contacts don't post anymore and the tags I follow are full of obnoxious botposters.
Although I'm thinking of spinning up an experimental (e.g., non-backed up and likely temporary) D* instance for us.
Can you describe what you experienced? Could it have been related to the recent series of updates (kernel, systemd, glibc, etc) that have required reboots every 2-3 days for the last couple of weeks?
So far, each time, everything seems to have come back okay, except that I'm still starting the #queuedaemons manually when they really should be automated.
I think the #blockwars folks may have indirectly caused this. There are people who file complaints against client apps that don’t build in blocklists against specific servers whose moderation policies they dislike.
I think that #Matrix / #Element competes with one or more Google-owned chat-type services. Since they gatekeep the overwhelming majority of Android users’ software installation, a good antitrust lawyer would be helpful. I’ll bet that faxing a bunch of documents to #USDOJ and various states would suddenly cause Google to decide that Element doesn’t violate their policies anyway.
(Someone said it was “Boomers at Google that don’t understand federation”, but first of all, I’m certain that most GOOG employees are far younger than you and I, and secondly, I’m sure someone at Google understands federation, though they obviously dislike not being in control. Google Talk was federated with #XMPP, while Google Plus was basically #Diaspora with federation stripped out.)