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My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

tube.jeena.net

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Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#111

Post by dingnuts »

nightpool wrote: post #89
dingnuts wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one correction: the Mastodon API is actually more expansive than ActivityPub, not more limited. Pleroma and Misskey implement additional protocols on top of ActivityPub, like WebFinger, in order to be able to federate with Mastodon properly >it also means that some remote content gets "squished" down into that format this is true but it's usually content going the other way: FROM a Mastodon instance TO something like…

By "the Mastodon API" I'm referring to the REST API used by Mastodon clients, not the activitypub "plus" API used by other servers to federate with them. > FROM a Mastodon instance TO something like WriteFreely that isn't a Twitter clone I understand that it may appear like that from a user perspective, but from a protocol perspective the ActivityPub representation is strictly more generic and extensible. Both direct…

>All mainstream servers ... do this kind of "squishing", which is a sad reality of client design and not what the ActivityPub spec was intended for

I understand what you mean by "the Mastodon API" but I think we're talking past each other; this does not seem like a client design problem but a protocol problem.

I would like to contend that the ActivityPub spec is too vague and thus clients are forced to do this "squishing" in order to find a portion of the spec that is sufficiently well-defined as to actually be practical for a specific use-case like a federating Twitter clone.

As far as I can tell, there's an echo of this lack of definition in the ActivityPub (and actually more specifically, in the ActivityStreams) specification if you do a tour of the ecosystem of implementations, you'll find that almost all of them are in dynamically typed high-level languages like Ruby (Mastodon). Implementations in languages like Go where JSON deserialization must be defined per-type have a very hard time with ActivityStreams and you'll find that Go implementations of ActivityPub like go-fed are much more narrowly scoped in their functionality in order to avoid this problem.

I have wasted many, many hours on ActivityPub, and I am extremely sad to make this comment, because I understand why it was invented.. but I'm not sure it's really good enough to achieve its goals.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#112

Post by spadufed »

WolfeReader wrote: post #94
wccrawford wrote: post #59

I started to look into hosting my own Lemmy instance to have full control over my data and not have to worry about a server shutting down, but after seeing it takes 2-3 docker instances, I decided not to worry about it and let someone else do it.

I never thought of using "number of docker instances" as a metric for evaluating software before now.

That's because it's a pretty silly way to look at things in a world of docker compose.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#113

Post by Feathercrown »

catapart wrote: post #81
robolange wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even c…

Yeah, as someone interested in this kind of thing, I've been hoping someone else would put something together that would work, but I think I share your assumption that this is probably not something that can be made into a product profitable enough to finance a company on. I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never poss…

This actually seems like a great use-case for FOSS. Lots of people have tried their hand at this, so why don't we all put a little effort in to get it done?

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#114

Post by spadufed »

WolfeReader wrote: post #101
apitman wrote: post #97

One huge shortcoming of the Fediverse as currently implemented is that you have to use a different ID for each app, ie tube.jeena.net/@jeena, toot.jeena.net/@jeena, etc. What if you want to use the Mastodon UI to write a comment on a video? Your comment is going to use a different ID than the one you normally use to interact with videos. Given this, what's the point of federating these different apps with each other?…

In practice, federation works _great_ when the apps all have the same basic structure, and gets pretty rough otherwise. Mastodon instances basically _work great_ with each other, and with Friendica and Calckey too, since they have the same Twitter-like structure. Lemmy and Kbin - and all instances thereof - can chat with each other without issue too, since they have the communities + threads structure in common. But…

To expand on this a little the two services make use of different well-defined objects in the AP standard. Lemmy communities are Groups in AP and top level posts are implemented as Pages (rather than Notes). As it stands Mastodon only has basic support for these two but a rework of Groups is listed on the roadmap as in-progress (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#115

Post by lovvtide »

apitman wrote: post #102
Workaccount2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blockchain might actually be a decent solution for this. Just make it so the tokens don't have value.

If all your target users are comfortable with the tradeoffs of systems built on blockchains (ie private key is the source of authority), you're probably looking for Nostr.

Nostr is not built on a blockchain

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#116

Post by spadufed »

dartos wrote: post #108

There just needs to be “social protocols” on top of activitypub. Basically a set of message types that every implementor has a way of displaying

I think what you're describing IS activitypub. The major issue is that each implementor has a preferred message type and only basic functionality of the others. I've posted this elsewhere in the thread, but Lemmy top-level posts are implemented as Pages and communities are implemented as Groups. Currently Mastodon has implemented both but with limited functionality. There is a rework of Groups that is listed as in-progress on the roadmap (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).

I think the way we ended up in this situation is that there are quite a few types of messages in the AP protocol, and up until recently the up and coming ones were seeing pretty limited use. Without another service to test against, I can understand why a lot of fediverse developers have opted to kick that can down the road. That said, we are definitely in the era of determining the defacto use case for each of these message abstractions, and I suspect that will be a slow process and involve a lot of back and forth between projects.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#117

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

spadufed wrote: post #112
WolfeReader wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought of using "number of docker instances" as a metric for evaluating software before now.

That's because it's a pretty silly way to look at things in a world of docker compose.

Classic. Tools become too abstracted? Add a layer of abstraction to manage them.

Feel like there must be an xkcd comic on this, but it doesn't leap to mind yet.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#118

Post by iteratethis »

kome wrote: post #70

I've tried various Fediverse services such as Mastodon and Lemmy, and, based on my experience, I've noticed a stronger tendency towards censorship, self-censorship, and ingroup behavior. In comparison, platforms like Twitter and Reddit still feel freer. But overall, the best solution is to use your own website for everything. But too much censure really stifles social media.

Mainstream Mastodon is basically hard-left Gen Z. Misfits and doomers, including the many joyless Twitter refugees.

To each their own, but I learned that I rather have a little "too much" speech instead of this.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#119

Post by spadufed »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #20

I have a question that I was hoping the video would answer, but I didn't see. The Fediverse is always described with that interconnected diagram where everything talks to each other over ActivityPub. But I never see that in practice. For example: If I have a mastodon.social account, how does that work with pixelfed.social or tube.jenna.net? Do I use my mastodon.social account to sign up to those other services? Or to…

I haven't seen anybody else talk about what the experience of following somebody from another service is like on the user-end.

Following pixelfed accounts from Mastodon is actually fairly straightforward. You simply see them as a tweetlike message with an image attached. One caveat there is that Mastodon does not allow for as many attached images as pixelfed, and I believe will simply drop any images after a certain point (I want to say max size is 4).

Following a peertube account or channel (you can do either) will show a post whenever new videos are uploaded. You can find the OP on mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@jeena@tube.jeena.net. One neat bit of functionality is that if you put all of your peertube follows into a single list, you've basically got a chronological subscribed page (a la youtube). Also take note that comments can be left on either the peertube site or from within mastodon.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#120

Post by europeanNyan »

SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #117
spadufed wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it's a pretty silly way to look at things in a world of docker compose.

Classic. Tools become too abstracted? Add a layer of abstraction to manage them. Feel like there must be an xkcd comic on this, but it doesn't leap to mind yet.

This one comes to mind immediately: https://xkcd.com/927/
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