Notices tagged with federation
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 12-Nov-2023 21:59:03 UTC 
simsa03
Laurens Hof, "Last Month in Bluesky – October 23" https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-october-23/
« Bluesky has published a roadmap for their current development plans for the AT Protocol that powers the network. [...] :
• Federation is coming, scheduled for early 2024
• DMs are coming, but quite a way off.
The main work that the Bluesky team is focused on is getting to federation. This will allow the network to properly scale, as the current infrastructure starts to hit its limits. Federation is currently available in a separate testing environment for developers. The developers are currently working on completing the final parts of the protocol that enables federation to happen. [...]
One part of the roadmap that does not get any mention is content moderation, and how this will function in a federated version of Bluesky. Federation opens the network to a whole new set of threat vectors, as the fediverse has experienced, but this does not get any mention in this roadmap. Even features such as comment controls, a valuable tool for safety, that are actually being implemented into the network, are not mentioned. »
#federation #Fediverse -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 03:09:08 UTC 
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Picking the right server isn't as important as it seems, because you will need accounts on multiple servers to see and communicate with all the people you want to connect with. Sometimes, it is because of simple #federation failures, but other times, it is because one or more servers participate in #blockwars / #fediblock. -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jun-2023 02:47:05 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
#Bluesky's #AT_Protocol seems to be pretty complex. And its #federation may even be called "centralized by design", as it is designed to "[send] messages to a much smaller number of big aggregators, which then broadcast that data ... across the network."
> On a technical level, prioritizing big-world indexing over small world networking has multiple benefits.
It does ... if every node interacts with every other node on behalf of every one of its users. But if a PDS at pds.example.net mostly interacts with the fifty or so instances where its users have contacts while rarely to never interacting with 10,000 other instances, it doesn't need the BGS firehose, and it can integrate "app views" for its users directly into the same server.
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture [blueskyweb xyz]
Also, even most US companies know to use ISO-style dates (YYYY-MM-DD) in URLs, not US style or European style. -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 03-May-2023 23:10:07 UTC
simsa04
Did you read the Dear Leader's blog post? Sounds like true corporation twaddle. Anyway, enhanced search capabilities would be greatly appreciated (if only for one's own account as I think impeding stalking of others is a reasonable motif to have curtailed searchability in the first place). But there are other people already working on browser-based tools for that https://gnusocial.net/conversation/8165533#notice-14507359 without changing the code. We'll see about that.
Groups would be nice, we could get !rain on a broader basis. :-)
But most of all I would love to see the Dear Leader resume Mastodon's support for OStatus. It's my conviction that the decline in number of gnusocial instances is in part due to the lack of interoperability with Mastodon run instances. Not just that #federation doesn't work and gnuscocial instances cannot see and are not seen by other instances. It's that the deliberate policy decision by the Dear Leader to cut OStatus support contributed to people not seeing a point in joining / setting up gnusocial instances which then contributed to the "desertification" of the gnusocial biotop. But in order to grow and scale, it's important to starve the alternatives and create federation monoculture. So the Dear Leader knew exactly what he was doing.
No, I'm not a fan of Eugen Rochko. He did more harm than good to the #fediverse. But he created himself a source of income, so I guess he's content. -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Monday, 26-Dec-2022 18:58:33 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://lavaforge.org/ is now open for registrations. I don't know anything about them except that they run #Gitea with #federation enabled.
See https://snug.moe/notes/998pnvtt1e -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 09-Dec-2022 23:55:31 UTC
simsa04
To me #UFoI (https://ufoi.org) sounds a bit like the old "Underground Press Syndicate" (later: "Alternative Press Syndicate") of the 1960s to 1980s. In the UPS, many alternative magazines joined to redistribute content from each other (without charge, only an annual membership fee and voucher copies to the media they reprinted from required). The effect was that even tiny magazines could reprint articles by "more famous" authors or sources, which overall lead to an explosion of alternative magazines primarily in the U.S. but also in Europe and the UK.
The advantage of #UFoI may primarily be that very small instances can better "see" (and are easier "seen" by) the #fediverse. That seems to me a far more interesting angle than the trite virtue blocking discussions.
The flipside is that #UFol obviously could become another silo (in addition to the already existing one of the Mastodon run network). But I don't think that the split of the #Fediverse into mutually excluding sub-diverses can be halted anyway. Virtue blocking of instances is already too advanced and widespread, and with that the attitudes regarding what instances are and what they should do.
#counterculture #federation #fediverse !gnusocial #Ufol #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Tuesday, 29-Nov-2022 17:39:32 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Wow! I had forgotten about #Elgg. OpenUniverse and I had accounts on an Elgg instance in South America (time-wise, it was right after Mike's initial #Friendica instance closed, so we shifted existing conversations over) and got to see some of the posts about their #federation plans.
Note: this may have even been before changing the name from #Friendika to Friendica. -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 21:28:38 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
@lxo @clacke's posts sometimes take a while to arrive, whether here or at the Pleroma instance. I suspect that libranet.de has some #federation bugs. -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 21:25:24 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
To what @lxo posted, because vertical scaling ("bigger servers") has its limits, the big #corpocentric #socnets split things up and use technological workarounds to appear to be one big server.
For example, one of the first things is to move the #database management system ( #dbms ) to a separate machine. Once this happens, hoizontally scaling the database by clustering (multiple servers handling the same db) is possible.
Next, we can perform similar clustering with the web server, and we can perform similar clustering at the processing layers.
Once we do this, we can expose things through various interfaces. This is what #cloud providers do with their separate compute, database, and storage services. Each such service relies on hundreds of servers pretending to be one.
Finally, we come to #federation, where we skip the pretense that everything is one big server and instead have many separate individuals and organizations running servers.
It isn't inherently more complicated, but it does mean users have to know that we're not all on big-centralized-server.com. -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 18-Nov-2022 23:45:19 UTC
simsa04
With content-spam in one's TL and overload of recipient servers increasing (something @aral has pointed out recently) we may pretty quickly face a situation in which the simple growth of the Fediverse (primarily via the Mastodon network) will have such detrimental consequences on one's TL that one's account may become unusable. #federation is the main turbo in this unwanted spread of what becomes content-spam. In order for users to continue to have a pleasant or meaningful experience, default silencing of other instances (in particular from the Mastodfon silo) may be the way to go. If instances are silenced throughout, one only interacts with the people one subscribes to and receives only those notices of them that address people one subscribes to as well. This would reduce the amount of notices a celebrity-thread may bring with it when it enters one's instance, to the benefit of one's TL as of the server-load of one's instance. -
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Monday, 14-Nov-2022 20:23:02 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
#Pjuu ( #OtterSite ) starts planning a rewrite that adds #federation ( probably only #ActivityPub ). Looking to become an alternative to #Mastodon and #Pleroma, while still joining the #Fediverse.
https://pjuu.com/joe/5b0383de620211edba040242ac140002 [pjuu com] -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 14-Nov-2022 18:55:50 UTC
simsa04
Why the Mastodon-network slowly strangles the #fediverse
https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/
« 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.»
#decentralisation #fediverse #federation !gnusocial !fnetworks -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 14-Nov-2022 18:32:52 UTC
simsa04
Aral Balkan, "Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”)" https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/
A wonderful blogpost explaining why mass and scale are a danger to the #fediverse. Thanks @aral for unearthing this problem for the #Fediverse (not just the silo-esk Mastodon-network).
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« [O]n the fediverse, I find myself in a somewhat unique situation where:
1. I have my own personal Mastodon instance, just for me.4
2. I’m followed by quite a number of people. Over 22,000, to be exact.
3. I follow a lot of people and I genuinely enjoy having conversations with them. [...]
Unfortunately, the combination of these three factors creates a perfect storm which means that now, every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. [...]
So, what’s the solution?
Well, there’s only one thing you can do when you find yourself in such a pickle: scale up your Mastodon instance. The problem with that? It starts getting expensive. »
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Yes, scale the instance and have it get more expensive is one problem.
But the other is that by doing so you either oust smaller instances or force them to scale up as well to stay visible and "see" enough accounts.
#fediverse #federation !gnusocial !fnetworks -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 14-Nov-2022 13:44:34 UTC
simsa04
Over in the Mastodon-network (a silo of its own), people keep doing the self-introduction thing. I find this idea rather befuddling, esp. when it comes to sharing personal info which we learnt we shouldn't do on the web.
I think you can learn more about a person when you listen to her tone of voice, her manners, and only to some extent via her interests. With regard to the latter, an annotated list of my tags may suffice.
#batteries (although in the context of infrastructure, energy, climate, less as hardware or essential building blocks but as objects on which people put their misguided hopes on)
#counterculture (I went along with it for many years, now I primarily think about its negative impacts; historical interest)
#drought (is more than "heat" a concern to me)
#ecocolonialism (from the perspective of how Greens and Progressives offset environmental costs on poor nations when trying to jump-start their green economies)
#energy (broad category, includes "renewables", "nuclear", often "infrasturcture")
#federation (how its technical aspects create the conversations-based foundation of the Fediverse)
#fediverse (history as well as present and future developments of something that is more than the Mastodon-network)
#goodread (a corollary to "sources")
#heat (rarely)
#identica (history)
1/2
[in case you can't see the sequel, click on "In conversation" below] -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 07-Nov-2022 23:51:46 UTC
simsa04
@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:
!gnusocial !fnetworks #federation #fediverse https://gnusocial.net/attachment/cb9618538a9e5d8cfe3e78d2ca6b29734cefe631fa4e8b4bcc72ee7140b9e4a9/view -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 07-Nov-2022 15:10:41 UTC
simsa04
To me the interesting thing about the #fediverse is not the so-called freedom to choose and move, but the #decentralisation created by #federation. The result of both is that the fediverse is a far more comversation-based place than the silo of birdside. As one's opinions not automatically spread across all the fediverse but only to those subscribing to one, celebrity-style statement-dropping gains far less reaction and response here than there. I guess that is at the root of why the fediverse and its instances are more "social meda", whereas birdsite is more "scream media". -
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 15:32:12 UTC
simsa04
Worth your thought...
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109273455318668977
https://gnusocial.net/conversation/7417481#notice-12895330
#fediverse #federation !gnusocial !fnetworks -
Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 12:03:10 UTC 
Aral Balkan
Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.
A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)
CC @Gargron
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 11:58:06 UTC
simsa04
Mastodon.social seems to me to become the Twitter of the #fediverse. It's the largest instance and for reasons of #federation it "sees" the most accounts on other servers and draws the most people (mutual reinforcement). Thus for people on m.s. it's much easier to interact with accounts on other servers (all communication occurs "inside" of it) than for users on smaller or more "parochial" instances. The effect is that smaller instances are drowned out in the simultaneity of voices. Add various instance blockings, and the instance with the most (active) accounts wins again. To me m.s. looks far more like a walled garden that you cannot escape than is usually admited in all the self-congratulatory sloganeering of "you can choose any instance you like and interact with everybody you want". The inbalance between large and small instances is detrimental to the later. Perhaps the fediverse should think about means and provisions to counter the negative (but unintended, I'm sure) effects of larger intances. -
Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 09:51:08 UTC
Aral Balkan
We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
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