I wonder if it could be something like adding a Link: </post/1234>; rel="activitypub" header or <link rel=activitypub href=/post/1234>. Then a browser (or browser extension) could detect this canonical ActivityPub URL and offer to open it in your configured instance or app. This is basically how RSS feeds work.

I like the option to preserve originals. I wonder if this is now always done or if it is configurable. Often times I am preserving the original footage and project files anyways so don’t need an original. However other times I am just throwing footage straight from the camera and the archive is nice.

It also opens interesting possibilities like re-encoding down the road to new or better codecs or even just better encoders. For example it would be interesting to dedicate one background thread to re-encoding in a much higher effort, and possibly re-running this every few years to take advantage of encoder upgrades.

A blog platform.

Happy to see this. But personally I prefer to just subscribe it the RSS feeds. Gives me the videos I am interested from whatever platform they are on all in the same place.

I also like to have them be a bit more “durable” than my ActivityPub is right now. There I generally just scan it occasionally and frequently miss things. In my RSS reader I can mark things as read when I am done with them to not miss anything. (and don’t keep seeing the same stuff repeatedly if I keep checking back)

I’ve never noticed an issue here. Looking into it the thread messages default to 1rem, your browser’s default font size. So if this isn’t suitable for you you may want to change your browser’s font size.

The font size in the feed is 1.25x your default font size, which seems fairly reasonable for titles. But if you want to change that you can apply some user styles. For example to make it only 1.1x as large:

h5, .h5 {
  font-size: 1.1rem !important;
}

I would actually love this. I use email for everything, it is so nice to have everything come to the same place. Right now I follow a few Mastodon users via an RSS-to-Email service, but the problem with that is that you can’t follow private accounts/see followers-only toots. It would be great to have a full email bridge.

I was considering making this myself at one point. But I think one of the big problem with ActivityPub is that it describes a single particular account. So if my ActivityPub-email bridge was running you wouldn’t also be able to access a Mastodon UI and for example browse other posts. So my account would need to be email-only which would be missing UX for a lot of things (like commenting on a random post I was linked to).

People have different definitions of “the fediverse”. To some people fediverse is ActivityPub, but to some people it is any federated protocol.

SMTP is a federated protocol, so some people would consider it part of the fediverse.

POP3 isn’t federated, it is standardized but different POP3 servers don’t connect to each other in regular process of the protocol.

Yes, I agree with this. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago. post lemmy discussion.

TL;DR communities on Lemmy are federated and highly dependent on the instance that they live on. If the source instance gets banned or goes offline the community will effectively go offline too.

This can be compared to Matrix rooms which don’t really live on any specific instance and continue even if the source instance goes offline. Defederation will prevent users from seeing posts from users on the blocked instance, but the room itself isn’t affected.

However I feel that trying to solve this by supporting some form of community merging would likely just be papering over the problem. The only way to really solve this is by properly decentralizing communities.

FWIW I don’t think this is a real issue. It is right now because Lemmy is fairly new and small. But over time it will become obvious which communities are popular and people will go there. I think there is a small issue because local communities are sort of given priority as /communities defaults to “Local”. But that sort of seems like the end of the list.

Just like it isn’t an issue that people can create “Cats” and “CuteCats” on Reddit I don’t think it is an issue that you can create [email protected] and [email protected]. Over time people will find and participate in whichever popular community matches their preferences.

I don’t like the idea of global “Multi-communities” as now there are more instance admins that have control over a community. I think that in general mods should have the most control, instance admins being necessary due to an implementation detail (communities are bound to servers) and should only need to step in for extreme cases. (Like violating server rules)

I don’t mind “Communities following communities” as much but I fail to see the point. If you think that another community is a good place to have a discussion why not just tell your members that you recommend moving there? I can see this working as a “Public Playlist” style idea where you can subscribe to follow recommended communities. I think having the option to post to both a followed community or the community that is doing the following is unnecessarily confusing. Basically I would make this as more of a discovery feature than a way to merge communities together.

You are addressing a strawman.

This post doesn’t address the main “pro-federation” point that I have seen. People who are support of federation aren’t saying that Facebook is a great company, they have great morales or that they aren’t supporting ActivityPub for their own gain. I think there is very little doubt that FB is a shit organization with no morales who thinks that this is a great move to get people back to their sites.

The most common reason that I see people supportive of Threads’ federation is that they believe it will help people move off of Facebook and other proprietary platforms onto more user-friendly ones. If all of your friends use Instagram it is very hard to move to Mastodon. If you want to stay in touch you will at least need two accounts. You can move friends but it is hard because they each need to make that switch and it affects their interaction with others, or they need to manage multiple accounts until most of their friends have switched. If your friends use Threads (and it federates) then you can switch to Mastodon with very little friction, you can still interact with all of your existing friends in more or less the same way. Similarly each friend can easily move without managing multiple accounts during the transition. If all instances have blocked threads.net many people just won’t move, they will stay with FB.

To make a good argument you need to either refute this perceived advantage or argue that it isn’t worth the downsides. Making up a strawman doesn’t convince anyone.

I would say yes? They make Wordpress which is pretty open and usable by default and it is properly opensource. Since taking over Tumblr they seem to have been making reasonable improvements and in general trying to keep it open.

In general they have been favourable to open source and open standards. So when they say they are adopting an additional open standard I have high hopes.

But FWIW I also think that Threads joining the fediverse is likely a good thing. It is true that it may allow many people to be more comfortable on a user-hostile platform, but IMHO that is their right. I think the biggest concern is that if Threads or a small number of large platforms are the majority of users they can add proprietary extensions but I don’t think the biggest issue. The biggest strength is making the fediverse more popular, and allowing more people to pick more open options without needing to ditch or convince their friends upfront.

Being able to merge them even if they aren’t both visible in the same page of your feed or even just efficiently looking up cross-posts would probably need server assistance. Ideally it could be done in a way that a client could choose to or not to merge them.

I would love to have them linked more strongly. I do think that it makes sense to separate comments. If only because moderation rules are different for different communities. But it would be nice to group them in the feed.

While I probably wouldn’t use a propitiatory client I have no real issues with it. You can always switch off if you feel that it isn’t respecting you, even if it is harder to verify what it is doing under the hood.

Basically having a federated and open protocol greatly mitigates the downsides of a proprietary client.

Regarding the edit:

what I should have said was providing a product in the same market. So the fact that’s its free might not be relevant and a free, instance of a decentralized social network could be considered in the same market as a commercial, centralized social network.

Again, I don’t think the exact product matters too much. Being in different markets can help, for example a Twitter Whistle would have a better argument than a Twitter Social Network. But for huge brands that are well known everywhere (like Twitter) the market difference tends to matter less.

I still don’t see twitter going after this single instance

Yes, it is unlikely. But definitely not impossible with things that Twitter has already done to try and push out Mastodon (like banning links). And if it does happen it will be devastating to the instance as changing domains is painful. So I’m just suggesting that it may be best to play it safe here to avoid possible problems down the road.

I am not a lawyer. But…

I don’t think selling matters at all. The problem is if someone could confuse it. “Is Twitter Down” is arguably very hard to confuse as it is clearly something about Twitter (telling if it is down), and it doesn’t seem to present itself as being made/run by Twitter. This is further supported by the “by ryan king” in the corner.

However if people often talk about #BlackTwitter as some subset of content on Twitter it seems entirely possible that people could think that blacktwitter.io could think that it is run by Twitter. If it was called something like thenewblacktwitter or blacktwitteralternative it would be less likely to cause this confusion.

Another angle that they may argue is that they have an official product called “Twitter Blue” and they could argue that people would believe that “Black Twitter” is also an official Twitter product.

The most important think to remember about Trademark law is that it is very much about consumer protection. It doesn’t give you exclusive rights to use your trademark, it just prevents people from using your trademark to make something seem to be from you.

On top of all of that being legally right isn’t the only thing that matters. If Twitter accuses you of Trademark infringement unless you want to hire a bunch of lawyers you are probably just going to do what they say.

You probably don’t want to use “twitter” in your name/domain like that. You are probably infringing their trademark.

WordPress is always a good option. They have a freeium hosted option at wordpress.com or you can run your own. You can also always move to another provider or host it yourself.

Tumblr is also big and popular and there are tons of smaller hosts like https://bearblog.dev/.

This is like telling someone to stay in an abusive relationship because other people like your partner. No, find something that works well for you. Your true friends will adapt.

Remember when Google Talk was federated XMPP? Maybe we’ll have a second chance.