🦊 OneRedFox 🦊

OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.

The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.

Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?

The MissKey forks like Sharkey/Iceshrimp/Catodon all have better featuresets and UI/UX than Mastodon IMO. If you don’t already have a Mastodon instance that you’re extremely pleased with, I would pick one of them instead. I can’t comment on the app situation though.

Ooooh, is that what happened? I noticed Antennae got worse after the rebrand but wasn’t sure what happened.

The loss of money matters more, to the point where it’s better for them to just put up with the annoying rules that pop up. They’d have to make this switch out of pure ideology, which considering that this is their job, that’s not going to win out in most cases.

I talked about this with someone else a few days ago. Professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much, as the decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case. I don’t think it works as a profession here, at least in its current form. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.

Oh wow, I didn’t realize that even the VCS systems were getting in on the action. Guess all the Fediverse platforms picking Codeberg to host their projects has been rubbing off on the Forgejo devs. Maybe I should make a Forgejo account somewhere.

The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently aren’t:

1. I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
2. I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
3. PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
4. Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.
5. Links to known Fediverse instances should open on your instance where you can interact with it rather than taking you to their instance where you can’t.

Implement these and the experience would be much better.

Sounds interesting. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on how it plays out.

NixOS is one of the few distros that legitimately offers something different. Some nice things:

• The entire OS install is managed through config files, so instead of dealing with a billion shitty DSLs, you only deal with one.
• Because of the above, builds are also reproducible.
• Because it ditches the FHS for the Nix store, you can do things like install multiple versions of the same library side-by-side, which is impossible with traditional Linux package management.
• It has the largest package repository of any Linux distro.
• Setting up dev environments is really nice because with Nix it’s like the entire OS has VirtualEnv.
• Because of the above, “it works on my machine” is an excuse of the past.

It’s very impressive and is a welcome innovation to the Linux ecosystem. Now if only they could improve the tooling and documentation.

That fragmentation you describe is a feature of the ecosystem. If you dislike a particular instance’s community and/or moderation policy, then there are alternatives that exist on other instances that can scratch the same itch. When a multireddit-style feature shows up on the platform, users will be able to get more posts put in their feeds as well if they wish to grab content from multiple instances. Users have a lot more granular control over their experience this way.

I don’t have an account on the flagship instance.

Following users does help increase federation, yeah. Another solution is creating a dummy account that follows a bunch of users in order to pull in their posts.

The server list says that instance has 71 users, so that would probably be why. Posts only show up on an instance if something requests them (users following an account, searching a permalink, subscribing to a community, etc). There are solutions to this problem, such as relays in which servers agree to funnel a bunch of posts to each other periodically to share content. You should ask your instance admin if they have one set up, or if they’d be willing to if not. Otherwise, you should make an account on a larger instance, as those tend to be better federated.

The project is only like a month or two old, though it is a fork of a more well-established Fediverse platform (MissKey), so it’s still building up awareness of its existence.

Well, it is a new project, so it probably needs some optimization. As far as visual clutter goes though, I think Mastodon’s quad column layout is much worse about that.

The good news is that they announced that they’re changing the name soon; they have not said what it will be though.

Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it’ll be a force to reckon with.

Yes, there’s nothing stopping someone from creating bot accounts on Lemmy and pretty much every other Fediverse platform. Even if APIs are restricted, they can just parse HTML instead (though that’s a bigger pain in the ass). This is an area where the decentralized nature of the Fediverse works in our favor, though, as it inherently limits reach and discoverability (thus minimizing the benefits of doing this). For example, Mastodon’s flagship instance (mastodon.social) had a spambot problem not too long ago, so what happened is when other instances noticed this spam wave, they limited/defederated with mastodon.social and the problem was solved on their end. The host instance can temporarily close off sign-ups to prevent new accounts from being made. Every other instance can control federation to effectively quarantine the spam problem.

It would be interesting if Fediverse platforms made an external wiki for discoverability. A big shared community resource all in one place.

Last I checked, it’s in the todo list, but it’s going to take awhile before Lemmy implements such functionality.