Anyway, very cool that #Pleroma and #Feditext store image alt texts from fedi and can roundtrip from save to re-upload. Hopefully they use mutually compatible mappings!
@evan@prodromou.pub @evan@identi.ca ( and formerly @evan@e14n.com ) has said this a few times, but here it is again.
"Every time you post on Twitter, you produce value for the advertisers.
You tell everyone in your network there that it's OK to stay. That you're all helpless to leave.
You tell the people who've lost their jobs, the people who are being hounded and harassed, that they are not important to you.
You know you're going to be ashamed of it later.
Just stop posting.
Do it here, not there. Connect here, not there.
Don't reply, don't like, don't retweet.
Stop feeding your life into the machine."
This was true before Elon #Musk bought #Twitter, but I guess it wasn't as important before.
I don't fully agree, simply because there may be some advantages to many people who continue to use Twitter instead of moving to the #Fediverse (e.g., #GNU_Social, #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #Misskey, #PixelFed, #Lenny / #Lemmy, etc) or they would have moved over already.
Also, because unless one self-hosts one's own presence, an angry instance admin is all it takes to lose all posts and connections and have to start over. Or, if one has contacts on a different instance, then irate instance admins participating in #blockwars (including #fediblock) can separate the person from some portion of their contacts.
So remember, everything that Twitter is or can do to you, your Fediverse instance can also do. Most instances will never do most of those things, but pretending that one is safe here could result in disappointment in the future.
#Misskey security update. Someone created "instances" which trigger a denial of service in Misskey and possibly #Mastodon. From what I hear, #Pleroma is not vulnerable. #GNUsocial is likely also vulnerable.
We can expect a lot more of these kind of things now that the #Fediverse is getting attention.
@clacke I agree. I typically want to see what a site looks like and what its users are publicly posting before I decide to join.
But I also think most existing users of #Mastodon and #Pleroma don't use posting scopes to their advantage. If you don't want unmentioned non-followers to view your posts, choose a follwers-only scope. If you don't want your posts in the public timelines, choose a non-public scope.
GS groups can usually be joined from any GS instance, but as @administrator mentioned, glitches may happen. #Mastodon intentionally does not support GS groups, and same for #Pleroma.
@gnu2 I have not used #PleromaFE Pleroma front end on GS, but on its own #Pleroma back end, there is a setting to hide the site's built in background image. Unfortunately, it does not remember from session to session, so you have to import your own settings each time you log in.
I'm not sure whether the #Soapbox front-end can be used with #GNU_Social. #Pleroma started out as a front-end for #GS, as #Qvitter started falling behind. So even though #PleromaFE currently doesn't support GS, it may be possible to go back to when support was removed and re-add it.
I've just rediscovered a feature of Friendica, composing abstracts for different audiences. Friendica allows you to write long postings, much longer then the arbitrary chosen 280 or 500 characters. But it also allows you to send those long texts into streams and networks that are not suited for such long texts. For such cases, Friendica has the BBCode tag abstract, you can use to add a summary to the posting--these summaries can be specific for different platforms you relay your posting to.
So say, you make a public posting into the Fediverse that is also send to Twitter by Friendica. Instead of hoping that Friendica does shorten the text correctly for Twitter (it tries to do so) you can define the content send over to the land of the 280 character yourself. Just add an [abstract=twit]This is the message for Twitter[/abstract].
In addition, you can set a general abstract for the ActivityPub network with [abstract=apub]This will the abstract for AP platforms[/abstract] (the result is called Content Warning / CW on other platforms in the Fediverse). And best of all, you can combine the two 😀
As illustration, here is the posting I just wrote. It is not that long, but it was too long for Twitter; so the extra abstract was added.
[abstract=twit]Lorenz hat Micha mal Löcher in den Bauch gefragt, als sie sich das #Fediverse (#Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Mastodon, #Peertube, #Pixelfed, #Pleroma) in der 1. Staffel von "Besser" angeschaut haben. https://besser.demkontinuum.de/2021/12/das-fediverse-als-chance/[/abstract]
[abstract=apub]Podcast Empfehlung über das Fediverse - nicht nur Mastodon 😉[/abstract]
Auch wenn die erste Staffel von "Besser - Der Podcast" schon ein paar Tage auf dem Buckel hat lohnt der sich in meinen Augen als Einführung ins #Fediverse. @lorenz_mv@horche.demkontinuum.de fragt @hoergen@horche.demkontinuum.de da einige Löcher in den Bauch über #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Mastodon, #Peertube, #Pixelfed, #Pleroma und noch einige andere Plattformen.
Den Fediverse Account des #Podcast findet ihr hier: @besser@horche.demkontinuum.de
BTW Friendica offers several addons providing tools for users to define what postings should be filtered/collapsed in their streams. By length, language, filtered words. This is the reason why abstracts are mostly used for outgoing communication but not on Friendica itself.
There's a big rift happening in the #Pleroma and #Soapbox world right now. @lanodan writes about it from his perspective.
The attached screenshot shows what I saw. I personally like Mr Gleason, but this response would not be acceptable in any software project I'd run on my servers. I don't know what happened to make him so angry and hostile.
I know the feedback has been decidedly negative toward his change. But that should have been expected. Anyone that isn't / wasn't running Soapbox's newest develop branch thinks something is broken.
For the record, GNUsocial and its predecessor StatusNet had removed @ names from replies in the default front end for many years now. I would guess 10-12 years, or right around SN 1.0. I think the Qvitter front end added them back (as Twitter still had them at the time). And both Mastodon and Pleroma have them still. https://nu.federati.net/attachment/284703
#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.
Someone shut his #Fediverse #Pleroma server because he saw a polarized us vs them (there were additional reasons not contained in his article ... but you'd have to ask him directly).
I’m still looking for a low priced annual payment VPS provider that has a somewhat lower risk (of closure, hardware failure, etc) than most LEB hosts, so I can launch temporary testing instances (for example, the upgrade of GS to the #ActivityPub enabled 2.0 branch, and looking at how well #Zap, #Pleroma, #Friendica instances fit into the !FNetworks roadmap).
I’m also considering adding a Federati #Pump.io instance, but I need to talk with the Pump.io project about SSO options. Since they use Node.JS, I’d want it on a completely separate VPS, with some restrictions to prevent incidents. Also, if utilization is too low, that would likely close.
Currently, everything is still coming out of my pocket.
@storm #Pleroma comes with PleromaFE and MastoFE. I know PleromaFE is high in #JavaScript. If the #JabbaShit interferes with your assistive technologies, there is a separate front end called “Bloat”, which is supposed to be much less JavaScript-y.
I have not seen Bloat myself (I don’t even know the project’s URL), so this is all hearsay.
You may not see this ... but the best way would have been to create a separate subdomain for #Pleroma. There's a tendency for federation to break if different installs reuse the same "subdomain.domain.ext" name.