Hey all, I have been having problems getting offsite images to load via the image markup in comments. I see other Fediverse instances allow users to upload images directly, is that a feature that is active on KBin.Earth? If so how do I use it? I'm mainly using Interstellar as my client.

Thanks!

ClientException: Request failed with status 400: Bad Request: ("type":"https:VV tools.ietf.org/htmlV rfc2616#section-10","title":"An error occurred","status":400,"detail":"Bad Request"), uri=https://kbin.earth/api/ magazine/1/posts

Any hints what's up? Is my post too long?

Hey all, I just found out about Red Dwarf by Whey.Party, and all the sudden I am liking ATProtocol a lot more. Red Dwarf is a client that uses Constellation a self-hosted JSON API to an atproto-wide index of PDS record back-links. Basically Constellation scrapes all the links off of the ATProtocol firehose and creates a queriable index, and Red Dwarf uses it to pull content directly from users PDS, eliminating the need to go through AppView Servers (like bsky.social) to follow and maintain access to user activity. What does this mean for the Fediverse? Well for one thing Constellation creates a pathway to mirror BlueSky content without interacting with AppViews, and includes not only posts but also comments and other user interactions. Is this how BridgyFed already works? I don't know but either way it seems great, as it means that bsky.social admins can't block Fediverse access to BlueSky user content, even if a user is banned, so long as their PDS is hosted elsewhere. This also makes me wonder whether using a BlueSky PDS as a sort of "warm storage" backup for Fediverse content using a bridge the other way might not make sense for those users (like myself) who have been a bit critical about the lack of account portability/control while also critical of the AppView cost based de-facto centralization of BlueSky. Is this the freaky social horcrux I've been looking for? Anyway, very cool and already functional client built on shiny new social index, Red Dwarf is worth a gander.

TIL Karen and her cohort of white Irish women took a stand to boycott South African grapefruit, and went on to be visited by Nelson Mandela and others as their small act inspired their nation to be the first Most Developed Nation to fully Boycott and pass Sanctions against South Africa in the struggle against Apartheid. Video by David Nihill

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/press-releases/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-produced-over-100-million-in-social-and-economic-benefits

"For every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return The net cost of the BIA pilot went from €105m to under €72m due to tax generated and savings on social welfare payments"

"The findings of this external report from Alma Economics show that the real net fiscal cost of the BIA pilot over the period 2021–2025 was just under €72 million. Audience engagement with the arts generated an estimated €16.9 million in social value over the three pilot years, based on willingness-to-pay estimates for cultural participation. The most substantial social gain came from improvements in psychological wellbeing, contributing almost €80 million to total benefits.

It also finds that recipients’ arts-related income increased by over €500 per month on average, while their income from non-arts work decreased by around €280. Dependence on social protection declined, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average, and 38 percentage points less likely to receive Jobseeker’s payments."

Resin and filament, bonus points for laser sintering or anything else.

EDIT: Thanks to all the commenters, especially fanalarbiter, here's the best list we have so far:

FDM:

• Voron
• RatRig V-core
• the 100
• Micron by Printers for Ants
• Powerbelt3D

Resin:

• Prometheus MSLA
• Lite3DP

ArmoredTurtle

SLS:

• SLS4ALL

Powder bed fusion metal 3d printers: reAM250

This post is inspired by this prior post about a blog leaving the fediverse in favor of sticking to RSS:

Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols? I ask this in earnest, assuming that there is a comprehensive and well thought out array of reasons that I need to learn to fully grasp the project and it's motives.

It appears the fundamental design decision of Activity pub, shifting the hosting burden from a single host to a distributed network of server instances and user point of access to social content from a single host to any instance that will allow them to join and support the volume of content that they request to federate. This enables a more robust network, with instances holding content the users have interacted with regardless of if the original host instance goes down. It also reduces time to load for content after it has beed federated to a user's local instance, assuming it is closer in proximity and capable enough. At the same time, this dramatically increases the total storage burden (and to a lesser extent compute burden) of the network and makes content ownership and control a challenge.

Functionally the Fediverse is a public commons with content ownership practically distributed across the network of instances, whether copyright says so or not. Attempts to impose universal author controls on this framework face a lot of dissonance because it is fundamentally at odds with the underlying concept of federation as distributed hosting. The minute a host begins hosting content over which they have no control (such as encrypted posts) the potential for abuse skyrockets, and compromises between these priorities demand at minimum that users outside a host's instance maintain rights to delete and modify content on their instance whether or not they are otherwise at odds with the instance admin. Encryption also adds substantial compute burden to the network.

Since the popularization of the Distributed Social Network concept I have wondered whether pre-existing content distribution infrastructure like RSS/Atom might not be more advantageous as a backbone for social networking, with the development load shifted mostly to the client side and away from protocols. The IndieWeb project is playing with some of these ideas, and I have seen some prototypes online of RSS based social networks, so my question is, what is the fundamental advantage of ActivityPub over the combination of these other existing protocols with longer histories and broader existing implementation? RSS, Atom, email, XMPP, etc. Is lower latency really a good enough justification for widely redundant data distribution when the aggregation and discovery of content can be handled separately from hosting it?

This question becomes increasingly relevant when it comes to multimedia, and the minute that you offload multimedia to central servers by link embedding instead of hosting within the instance, boom you are back to the old centralized architecture and why are you federating?

So I am going to pose this question to the Fediverse myself, what is the reason that federated content distribution should be adopted for general use rather than distributed aggregation? That is to say of a client performed with the same features as a Fediverse front end, but all of the content was self-hosted and listed via RSS or Atom with comments handled via Webmention, direct messages via email or XMPP, and moderation and discivery handled at the level of aggregation via instances (meaning a user "joins" or "subscribes" to an instance, and that instance provides a ban list, list of feeds subscribed to by its users for discovery, provides a user directory) what would be the features that this type of system would lack that ActivityPub based systems have in place?

There are three advantages I see to AcrivityPub, and I'm not completely sure they justify mass adoption vs. the cost of broad redundancy of content and authorship issues. What am I missing?

1. Choosing local instance for faster loading, but this only is an advantage after content is brought in for the first time, in which case it actually is slower as first the instance has to pull the content and then serve it to the user.

2. "all" content in the protocol is of the same type, allowing for easier interoperability between clients and services. I'm thinking this is the root of what most people will say is the big advantage of ActivityPub vs. older protocols, but I'd like to hear more about why this is enough of a reason to overcome the inertia of existing mass adoption and support of the alternatives. Also, couldn't this also apply to a service built on an existing self-hosted protocol like Atom?

3. It isn't based in XML, and modern devs don't want to use XML. As I'm not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

What am I missing? I know it must be a lot, and I thank you in advance for cluing me in.

TLDR: Customized a browser as dedicated Fediverse front-end, use existing web clients for per-service UI, manage account/password with password manager, and merge the notifications from multiple services into one inbox? Is this possible/good?

Hello all,

It's me, an eager fediverse adopter who wants all their friends to get onboard and craves an all-in-one solution for federated content, but who knows no code and barely enough IT to get by reading git documentation.

I'll start by saying that one thing is clear, diversity and experimentation is the essence and benefit of the Fediverse concept. To me, new and exciting ways to use ActivityPub (and other distributed social/comms protocols) get me thrilled and ready for more. The challenge I, and I'm sure many adopters face is the challenge as old as the internet: platform fatigue.

While I want to use all the amazing services the Fediverse offers, managing clients and accounts for each one, and specifically the notification streams coming from all of them, often feels burdensome, decreasing my engagement.

So here's a simple thought experiment I've been playing with: what is the simplest, lowest friction method of accessing and managing multiple notification/content streams without needing to consolidate or centralize client/server development across multiple projects? And further more, how can this set of notifications (and subsequent content interaction) be consolidated yet separated from the other non-fediverse notifications/content across multiple devices?

My naive user mind has pointed me in the direction of dedicated browser instances with customized UI. When I have a webapp I need rapid access to and notifications from I install a dedicated browser instance (or "app" in Edge speak, I know, booo). This works well for me, and in some cases uses less memory than a dedicated application for some reason (looking at you Discord).

So what if a customized browser could be built off of an existing project (probably going to have to be Firefox based, though all eyes on Ladybird), that has a built in password/account manager, and pulls the notification streams from all of the services those accounts interact with into a merged list. Then add filter options for that list including service, account, media type, etc.

All interactions with notifications pulls up a tab of a webclient the user designates for that service, ideally reusing the same single tab unless the user specifically selects open new tab. Each designated service appears on the toolbar as a bookmark, showing notification number beside it. Total notifications and the shortcut to the unified notifications service/Inbox lives on the left or right side of the toolbar and is emphasized.

And that's it, everything Fediverse under one hood, separate from the main browser, not scattered across multiple installed applications, and with each client self-updating.

The challenge? Of course it is merging all the notification streams. Based on what I know of ActivityPub this seems achievable, but the details are beyond me. I am reminded of RSS emerging as the means of addressing a very similar challenge with the emergence of blogs, perhaps an ActivityPub to RSS gateway/bridge could even be the solution to merge the notification streams and then off the shelf RSS reader extensions could serve for the master notification inbox.

I am also reminded of my beloved Trillian which merged IM services under a single application hood, but faced an ever stacking development load as each service changed. Glad to see they still exist, but it seems like the browser route could avoid that centralized dev burden.

Thoughts from more experienced minds than I? Does this make any sense?

Hello all,

I have been asking sorund in all platforms if anyone knows of a project to build a client with UI/UX format similar to Discord/Element/Slack but based on XMPP?

I was previously pointed to XEP-0503 which outlines the "Spaces" concept for XMPP which would enable the basic backend service to work with "Spaces" and "subchannels", but all I have found so far is Cheogram implementing it in channel info to view the set of channels hosted by a given instance/domain. It works, though not extremely reliably.

Does anyone know of a project explicitly pursing an XMPP competitor to Discord/Element?

Hello fellow Fediversians,

I have been mulling over an eminently feasible and inevitably controversial solution to a couple of challenges I see with the Fediverse gaining traction, and becoming the primary microblog/forum platform for many users. Also I believe this solution can fill a valuable function of accountability in the form of unbiased archiving.

Essentially the concept is an instance entirely populated by bot accounts, accounts which individually scrape the publicly posted content of public figures from other platforms and reposts that content in quotation, with timestamp, link-back attribution, and cross-links to other posts referred to by the primary post if they exist within the archive. Also may include comments requoting the post if it is edited with new timestamp, etc.

Why do this? Well simply put it would create a consolidated archive of published cintent from public figures which cannot be tampered with for the purposes of accountability, similar to the Wayback Machine, but with the added function of direct interactivity via federated services.

In this way Fedenizens can follow their favorite public figures on-platform and interact with their content in a separate persistent environment, and journalists can have a fully up to date copy of what has been said without filter or revision.

This is all extremely feasible with the help of ML agent scripts, even if APIs are not cooperative.

What are your thoughts? If you were an instance admin would you block such an instance or allow it?

There is of course the issue of how to pick what public figures to add to the archive, but I suggest this can be done by nomination. Who nominates? Well the other function of such an instance would be for individuals to self-nominate in order to mirror their content from other platforms into the fediverse. I suggest that these members can also nominate other accounts, perhaps with a quorum voting system, say 5 nominations succeeds in adding a person to the archive.

Some people may in the end choose to use the instance as their primary, as they interact a lot with the archive streams. I think this would be a welcome outcome.

"The scientists analyzed the metal and metalloids inside seven types of disposable devices from three of the most popular brands. Using an instrument to activate the disposable e-cigarettes and heat the internal liquid, they created between 500 and 1,500 puffs for each device. They found:

Some devices emitted surprisingly high concentrations of elements in the vapor, including antimony and lead. Levels of chromium, nickel and antimony increased as the number of puffs increased. Most of the disposable e-cigarettes tested released markedly higher amounts of metals and metalloids into vapors than earlier, refillable vapes."

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/disposable-e-cigarettes-more-toxic-traditional-cigarettes

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5c00641

Explain to me like I'm a 5 year old who just learned what an internet is how CloudFlare can block traffick to websites that dont sign up for their services?

News from the UK shows that CloudFlare is now blocking a bunch of domains associated with peer to peer file sharing, but I dont understand why these domains wouldn't just migrate away from CloudFlare services and that would fix the problem. Do the ISPs use CloudFlare to provide services between the user and the website hosts when the user requests a web page via the browser?