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We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

291–300 of 424 posts

Re: We need a federation of forges

#291

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu? Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the c…

Interoperable identity providers would indeed be useful. Beyond that, maybe resilience when a project's host disappears, changes its policies, or gets blocked by a government?

How does tangled solve that? Repository contents are still hosted by the forges themselves.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll then defederate also from you. The argument goes, you're a nazi/facist/racist/*phobe, because you associate with (== did not defederate from) the designated nazi/facist/racist/*phobe. Yes, it's that toxic. Go subscribe #FediBlock hashtag if you don't believe me.

Ok, so what? Let those people block you then, sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways? I've seen that, and I'm not sure what's supposed to be toxic. It's community-organized filtering of unwanted views, for the people who want to engage in that. I don't agree with that, so I don't participate or do that myself, and I also don't seem to face any negative consequences because I'm not partici…

>Ok, so what? Let those people block you then, sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways?

The problem is when this is a large server with people you know using it. They suddenly disappear from your feed. And those people may not have even agreed with the reason for defederation.

At that point, the only way to connect with your friend(s) is for you or them to find new servers that haven't (yet) gotten into a defederation slap fight.

The TL;DR of the problem with Mastodon is that you basically need to pin your identity to what is essentially a small internet community/forum and then give them full power to decide who/what you can consume while your identity is tagged to their community.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#293
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Atproto isn’t “many servers sending messages to each other”. It’s structured more like RSS Except that, crucially, RSS/Atom plays well with static nodes (e.g. personal websites generated with Jekyll/Hugo/whatever—or even written by hand[1]), and Atproto does not. (Nor does Mastodon; previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612 >.) It'd be great if the complexities needed to support the "Atmosphere" wer…

There's always some Gemini protocol faction that shows up to yell that everything is wrong and we have to keep hand assembling our packets by hand or it'll never work. Atproto's PDS is the root idea that everything extends off of, is the "social filesystem" that you control. There's a protocol objective to be able to spread your data around widely and for folks to be able to cryptographically check that that data cam…

> If you need your static site to be on atproto (yay!), you can just have one of the various PDS hosts (such as Bluesky or eurosky or black sky or npmx) host the PDS for your. Since it is authenticated and user sovereign, you can permissionlessly move to a different host whenever you please, should that go awry.

These seems to defeat the purpose of the relative amount of sovereignty that hosting a static site gives you compared to depending on a PDS.

> It's unclear to me why static site needs are an interesting or useful target that social networking ought conform to.

How is this possible?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#294
post #85

Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

I don't mind VC funding as long as they aren't YC funded.

Why?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#295
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atproto isn’t “many servers sending messages to each other”. It’s structured more like RSS: 1) there’s an app-agnostic hosting layer (and anyone can run a host, a bit like personal site with RSS) 2) then there’s apps, which aggregate over data from all hosts (a bit like Google Reader or Feedly) So there’s no such thing as “defederating”. You don’t have many copies of Tangled beefing with each other. It’s more like yo…

The web is already structured like this. You can poll a URL for updates. You can host your own data. Anyone can build an app that aggregates from everyone's data.

> Anyone can build an app that aggregates from everyone's data.

Unless they gut or disable their API, and then ban scrapers, although I understand why after seeing bots crush sites.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not that mature — its name violates git’s trademark policy https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

Do github, gitea, and gitlab not?

From gitea:

GIT is a trademark of Software Freedom Conservancy and our use of “gitea” is under license.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#297

[flagged]

in your world, literally who isn't a dickhead? yourself, presumably? you must make a living somehow.

nah, I'm you're run-of-the mill dickhead, I'm afraid. righteous and principled but ignorant and overbearing. classic asshole, by nature. doing my best to be better every day, though. hoping the same for everyone else.

as far as who isn't, the first names that come to mind are Fred Rogers - he seems like kind of the summit of what a soul can aspire to be. Randall Munroe seems like a pretty awesome guy. Haven't looked too much into him, though. most names that come to mind are personal acquaintances that wouldn't mean much to you, but I find that it's not very difficult to find non-dickheads in my day to day life. probably around 30% of the people I encounter in passing are a-okay in my book! but it is true that the number of dickheads I encounter skyrocket when I start approaching cultures that glorify personal gain over community success and health. abstract or practical; the business community is rife with awful people and los angelos is terrible for entirely different reasons.

anyway, yeah. I make a living. dealing with wonderful people who have a shred of humility and who - when they get called out - just sheepishly say "oh! wow, that is awful. I'm so sorry for saying/doing that." and everybody moves on with their business. I hope you work with wonderful people as well!

Re: We need a federation of forges

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll then defederate also from you. The argument goes, you're a nazi/facist/racist/*phobe, because you associate with (== did not defederate from) the designated nazi/facist/racist/*phobe. Yes, it's that toxic. Go subscribe #FediBlock hashtag if you don't believe me.

Ok, so what? Let those people block you then, sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways? I've seen that, and I'm not sure what's supposed to be toxic. It's community-organized filtering of unwanted views, for the people who want to engage in that. I don't agree with that, so I don't participate or do that myself, and I also don't seem to face any negative consequences because I'm not partici…

Witch hunts and guilt by association are generally seen as toxic. If you disagree with that I'm not really sure what to say as it's a rather fundamental principle from my perspective.

> sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways?

That's all well and good when it's a single user instance or small group of friends. But often enough it will be a much larger one with unknowing participants caught up in it. Blaming them for choosing the "wrong" instance is about as productive as blaming people for using facebook - technically correct but that's about it.

That said, the AP model seems like the least worst to me. Every option I'm aware of has significant downsides.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is bluesky irrelevant in this context? It's obviously not Twitter scale, but no alternative to GitHub will be GitHub scale for a long time to come either... And it does seem to have the right feature set. Not sure which other social graph/network you could reasonably build a GitHub alternative around that would be less irrelevant....

It's largely perceived to be an ideological site. Obviously every community has its own biases and tastes, but I think Bluesky has just captured the imagination as the "left-leaning social platform." When the NYT was talking about a potential link between the WHCD shooter and Bluesky posts, that's what they referred to Bluesky as. Obviously Tangled can live completely separate from Bluesky, it doesn't even need to sh…

>It's largely just become an ideological site.

That may be the case, but anyone can use ATProto. Unlike X where reach is suppressed for ideological motivations, or Mastodon with the federation turf wars, anyone can use it, regardless of their politics. If you disagree with the ideology of the majority users and avoid it for that reason, it just perpetuates the problem.

Unfortunately, I suspect it is only that way at present because the "other side" is perfectly content to continue existing in a communications environment that prioritizes them, rather than one that is actually open.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because this happens on a per-admin level, not on a per-user level. You go on a cruise for two weeks and there's a disagreement about whether to federate with Meta or not. Your admin takes a side, whatever that side might be. Two weeks later, you come back and lose 10% of followers, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Yeah, that kind of makes sense to me, you chose that instance because you're OK with that admin making choices for you. Just like how I choose to post comments on HN, and if the admins/moderators tell me to stop something, or that now half my comments are gone for reason X, I can't really cry about it, all I can do is follow what admins do/say or jump ship.

So... basically the bad problem everybody was intending to solve in the first place?
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