I do all of my writing by hand, the old-fashioned way.

One thought I’ve had about this: for a self-hosted gaming instance, it could be incredibly interesting to take inspiration or code from RomM and perhaps Funkwhale’s user library concept?

Basically, RomM is a server / launcher that supports tons of different platforms, allows you to stream games to the browser, and provide game library access to friends. It could be an extremely compelling building block.

Servers are hosted and operated by different admins.

Hey, thanks for sharing this! Yes, we could absolutely use help with writing articles and managing our social media accounts. There’s a lot we try to cover, but we’re a very small team.

I’m just saying, there’s tangible things to point to which explain the current situation, and how we got here. At the end of the day, compromises had to be made to have a working thing in the first place.

We can sit and wring our hands about a piece of software not being open source, but ideological purism doesn’t always get things made. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Besides which, a larger problem is that FOSS devs of critical projects aren’t really making much money, either. You could advance the argument that FOSS isn’t about money, but funding sure helps the longevity of FOSS projects. The Fediverse is practically anemic in this regard.

Look, open tools are great. I assume you’re referring to FediSeer, or efforts like it.

For IFTAS’ purposes, they found themselves in a weird situation. Their CCS system for fighting CSAM had to be developed independently, by contractors that were paid. This is because they needed a service that:

• Could integrate with a national database of CSAM hashes
• That could be plugged into a federated, open source network
• That could report on hash matches detected on the public network to the requisite authorities (a legal requirement for instance admins)
• That would be willing to work with them and take on risk.

There are off-the-shelf products for this. But, they’re prohibitively expensive, typically geared towards large corporations, and generally unwilling to take on a network of thousands of instances. As a consequence of going their own route of development, their work is beholden to a number of constraints. For example, access to the hash database for the National Center of Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) more than likely has legal constraints on implementations not releasing source code.

TL;DR - they built some things that were designed to solve very specific problems. That development depended on grants and donations. Some things, like FediCheck, may actually be open source and simply exist in parallel with FediSeer as using a different scope. They probably have more plans in the pipeline for stuff that generally doesn’t exist for a big part of the network to use today. They’re running out of money.

So, we’ve actually been covering IFTAS for a while: https://wedistribute.org/tag/iftas/

The org was initially founded in 2023, and they started as a high-level community effort to try and tackle the following issues:

• Fighting CSAM in the Fediverse (massive undertaking, requires collaboration with NCMEC)
• Giving admins tooling for coordination against known troll instances and curation capabilities
• Providing documentation and guidelines for how each platform is distinctly different
• Providing mental health resources and digital privacy protections to moderators
• Surveying admins across the network regarding needs their organization could provide.
• Policy recommendations for instance admins, such as how to handle EU’s Digital Services Act

I’m probably missing some additional things here. My point is, they weren’t some rinky-dink organization that just emerged uninvited out of nowhere, they developed out of common needs instance admins and moderators in the community have.

The two systems they offer (as listed in the article) Fedicheck and CCS, as far as I am aware, already have open source alternatives in db0’s Fediseer and whatever his anti-CSAM tool is called.

This may come as a surprise to you, but overlap between efforts can and does exist, and does not lessen the value of the things overlapping. FediSeer is a perfectly legitimate tool and effort, but these other things were being done at an institutional level, so a different approach was taken. Developing tooling to fight CSAM is complicated, regulation-heavy, and in this case depended on the org having to develop their own tooling after spending a long time talking to existing services that did not want to take on that risk.

Anything this group is doing should be open source, should be well advertised, and should be well discussed Fediverse-wide.

While I fundamentally agree, I believe there are reasons their software contractually cannot be open sourced. Presumably because of the integration and reliance on NCMEC and their CSAM hash database. As for being discussed Fediverse-wide…I mean, a decentralized network has no center? There’s a pretty big part of the network that knows about them and has worked with them, but your perception of reach is relative to your vantage point.

Just because your Scout Troop and the AA meetings use the same building, that doesn’t mean that AA members have any interest in supporting the scouts, or in having the scouts tell them how they should run AA meetings.

This analogy doesn’t really make sense in regards to the Fediverse. This isn’t “two different groups in a building”, this is a community-developed Non-Profit organization that mostly emerged out of a desire to help make life easier for instance operators. Nobody has to use anything they produce, but a lot of people have benefited from what they’ve provided.

I was working on a Friendica theme conversion a while back, with the goal of making the theme elements compatible with old-school Myspace layout generators. Unfortunately, Friendica doesn’t support a user wall anymore, so I’d maybe have to rewrite the whole thing for Hubzilla?

It’s profoundly depressing. Developers are the lifeblood of open source projects, and we’re all kind of just scraping by at the moment. Loads of people end up investing years and years of labor for free, only to get toxic interactions in return.

Sorry, our provider had an outage around that time. We should be good now!

To my knowledge, the project isn’t dead…but, it has been moving at a horribly slow pace for a very long time.

Funkwhale is a pretty cool project, but it’s one of those things where the ActivityPub implementation really was bolted on well after the core experience was defined and developed. It was meant to be a Grooveshark clone, while a lot of people were hoping to use it in a more social way, like SoundCloud.

Should be working now. Occasionally, the server gets a little janky due to post federation and caching, but it should be settled at this point.

Yeah, the election results were a horrible thing to wake up to. I had really hoped for a better outcome, but this is the direction America decided to go.

The biggest thing to remember right now is that the progressive cause will always have work to do, and challenges to face. Even if we had won, either partially or by a landslide in the House, Senate, and Executive branch, that would still hold true. The American Right may very well unleash new horrors that make life intolerable for absolutely everyone, and may take up policies that get people killed. Now, more than ever, it is on us to build bridges and networks of support. All we have to do is outlive these bastards, and oppose their worst tendencies at every turn. Vote early, vote often, and vote locally.

In the coming days and weeks, pundits will likely try to highlight all the possible reasons that the Harris campaign failed, because they love sounding like informed geniuses who take a result, work backwards, and highlight what should have been done. Try not to lean into the tendency to blame people on the left, and try to avoid infighting. It’s going to happen.

It’s a slow rollout. Dansup is doing his best to put a good foot forward, there’s a lot of moving parts, and it’s fairly more complicated than some of his prior work. I’m super stoked for it, and can’t wait to put together a detailed review.

Hey, no problem. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Basically, this. In layman’s terms: finding the good stuff on a decentralized network is hard, because not everybody or everything is all in one place. Some tools can help make the experience suck less, but it’s a really hard problem that has lingered on for years.

This proposal is basically a team-up to develop the necessary plumbing so that services, such as search providers or distribution networks, can be easily used by anybody on the network, regardless of whether they’re on Mastodon, Lemmy, or something else.

There’s a few interesting applications here that go beyond just finding people, showing trending stuff, or providing an index of stuff. Some of this could be used for moderation tooling for admins, or custom feeds for users, or a directory of things to review. If the existing projects trying to solve all these problems came together, it might make a lot of things way easier.

It’s an issue with content negotiation for the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin. Upstream is working on it some, we’re using a recommended caching plugin to cut down on how often it happens.

Yeah, I’ll try to look into this for clarity. It really depends on what they mean here - I think they’re referring to curated server following between admins, which is what PeerTube does.

When I tested out the messaging system, I was able to federate back and forth with Mastodon. Maybe it works fine at a user level, it’s just the search entries that don’t get federated automatically?

Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it’s not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it’s substantial.

I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.

The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”