Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!

  • 87 Posts
  • 177 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2019

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  • 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.





  • Most efforts haven’t moved beyond the planning stages. Just because you can point to a plugin or a FEP spec doesn’t mean that it’s an ongoing active effort for bring a payment layer to the Fediverse, with a consumer-facing tool or platform. I’m sorry if I didn’t catch that Mitra had some of that functionality, but I would also push back and say that the average person is not going to use Monero for payments on the Web anytime soon.

    Those PeerTube plugins are nice, and the Premium Users one was actually something I pointed @[email protected] to for sub.club, as an example of prior art. They’re interesting experiments, possibly useful integrations, but not in and of themselves actual platforms to build infrastructure and solutions on.







  • 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.



  • I think it’s a big opportunity that the Fediverse has largely slept on. A lot of people shrug it off, but Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and a number of other places offer an export archive of your data.

    Some of it isn’t all that usable, but there’s something extremely appealing about being able to take old parts of your social graph with you, and merge it into a new identity. A fixation I’ve had for the past few years is consolidating all of my data into one place, under one identity, and I’m exploring the possibility of writing data converters.

    Interestingly, Pixelfed allows you to import your Instagram archive, and it’s fantastic.


  • So, to be clear: it’s not a concept like Nomadic Identity. Rather, it’s a demonstration of importing data archives from other social networks and platforms, and integrating that data into an existing Fediverse account.

    In other words: it’s not a singular managed identity for all your apps, it’s a mechanism for marrying data from different systems to a Fediverse Actor. Paired with something like Nomadic Identity, it would be a game changer.














  • Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

    Mastodon’s community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it’s a new feature or a design change or that he didn’t do something that other projects wanted to do.




  • Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing… but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

    Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.


  • This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There’s some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

    There’s also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.