February 22, 2024 Bluesky writes:

Up until now, every user on the network used a Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) to host their data. We’ve already federated our own data hosting on the backend, both to help operationally scale our service, and to prove out the technical underpinnings of an openly federated network. But today we’re opening up federation for anyone else to begin connecting with the network.

The PDS, in many ways, fulfills a simple role: it hosts your account and gives you the ability to log in, it holds the signing keys for your data, and it keeps your data online and highly available. Unlike a Mastodon instance, it does not need to function as a full-fledged social media service. We wanted to make atproto data hosting—like web hosting—into a fairly simple commoditized service. The PDS’s role has been limited in scope to achieve this goal. By limiting the scope, the role of a PDS in maintaining an open and fluid data network has become all the more powerful.

We’ve packaged the PDS into a friendly distribution with an installer script that handles much of the complexity of setting up a PDS. After you set up your PDS and join the PDS Admins Discord to submit a request for your PDS to be added to the network, your PDS’s data will get routed to other services in the network (like feed generators and the Bluesky Appview) through our Relay, the firehose provider. Check out our Federation Overview for more information on how data flows through the atproto network.

Read Early Access Federation for Self-Hosters

February 20, 2024 piefedadmin writes:

For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different things. It’s easy to imagine how quickly this would overwhelm an instance once it gets even a little busy.

One of the first web performance tools people reach for is to use a CDN, like Cloudflare. But how much difference will it make? In this video I show you my web server logs before and after and compare them.

Read How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance?

cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/4527175

Note that unless you're a Lemmy instance admin, this doesn't have much use to you.

Until this package came along, if you wanted a bot that responds to events, you had to manually traverse all comments/posts/whatever at a fixed interval. With this package you can actually react to events directly from the database. It's implemented in a very efficient way by connecting the package directly to the Lemmy database and using native Postgres features to get the events (LISTEN/NOTIFY if you want to get technical).

The webhooks themselves are inserted into a separate SQLite database (API is coming) and allow for both simple and complex filtering of the incoming data. The system is already in use by two of my bots, @ChatGPT@lemmings.world and @DallE@lemmings.world who now both receive the information about being tagged in a comment in seconds (the actual reply takes a little longer, but that's because of the nature of the bot).

Currently you can be notified about a post or a comment, other types are trivial to include as well.

Let me know what you think!

As of today, PieFed includes a ‘theme engine’ which makes it easier for people with low or no Python skills to change how PieFed looks and behaves.

PieFed is a lemmy/kbin clone written in Python with Flask.

Sean Tilley writes:

A new Threadiverse platform has emerged, joining Lemmy, Kbin, and PieFed in a growing list of options for users seeking an alternative to Reddit. It’s also looking to possiblyh serve as an alternative to Lemmy itself.

Read Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy

Conda (@conda@fosstodon.org) writes:

Conda is moving our social media presence from Twitter/X to Mastodon and LinkedIn at the start of 2024. It's past time to move into spaces that are welcoming and more in line with our community values. Going forward, you can find us at 🐘 @conda@fosstodon.org (https://fosstodon.org/@conda) 🔗 Conda Community on LinkedIn

Read Conda is moving to Mastodon & LinkedIn | conda.org/blog

Conda (Software)

Conda provides package, dependency, and environment management for any language.

Using conda provides a streamlined approach to package management, platform compatibility, environment isolation, and access to an extensive package ecosystem. It is particularly beneficial for data scientists, researchers, and developers working with diverse software requirements across different projects.

Conda Community

The "conda" community is made up of millions of users, packaging maintainers and tool developers. Conda is not a single organization but rather a concerted effort of many different organizations, all devoted to the mission of providing easy access to various types of free software regardless of the operating system or programming language.

We firmly believe that everyone belongs in open-source, and we want to start by thanking you for taking the time to read this page. What follows is a high level summary of all the projects and organizations which make up the conda community with links provided where you can learn more or get involved yourself. The many meanings of "conda"

Traditionally associated with the Anaconda distribution, nowadays the term "conda" refers to more than just a package manager or a software repository. Its many definitions also encompass community packaging efforts like conda-forge and bioconda, as well as new tools developed in the Mamba and conda-incubator organizations. All these efforts show that the conda ecosystem is no longer defined by a single actor and continues to grow and thrive.

Organizations on GitHub include:

• @conda, plus Anaconda, Inc. efforts like @AnacondaRecipes, @anaconda-distribution, @ContinuumIO
• @conda-forge, @regro
• @conda-incubator & @conda-tools
• @mamba-org
• @bioconda

Some tools you might be familiar with are conda or conda-build themselves but also community efforts like mamba, boa, setup-miniconda, conda-lock or conda-tree, among many more.

Read more about the conda community.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10025807

This library is responsible for federation in Lemmy, and can also be used by other Rust projects.

Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

When and how is this going to happen? The process of opening Flipboard to the Fediverse is called “federation” and it will happen in three distinct phases between now and April:

Phase 1 (Today): We are federating 27 publishers and creators so that we can test and gather feedback
Phase 2 (January): We will enable anyone in the Fediverse to follow and engage with any public curator on Flipboard
Phase 3 (April): We will enable anyone on Flipboard to follow and engage with any public account in the Fediverse

Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this.

- Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) on Threads

An explanation of two problems inherent to social media platforms from @siderea@universeodon.com

scale has social effects. Most technical people know that scale has technological effects. Same thing's true on the social side, too.

difference in perspective between the governance parties and the end users

Explanation starts

End of thread

https://www.threads.net/@potus (2 Million followers)

https://www.threads.net/@vp (1.7 Million followers)

https://www.threads.net/@whitehouse (616 Thousand followers)

Notifications are a pain point:

giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.

They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.

They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.

And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/5730013

Before sharing a link I would like to determine whether the website excludes people from access, and who is excluded. I can test for myself whether the Tor community is excluded, but what about:

• VPNs
• i2p
• public libraries
• #cgNAT issued IP addresses
• various regions
• particular browsers (e.g. lynx, w3m)

for example? I cannot check all those means of access. If a website is implementing some form of digital exclusion, I would like to ensure that I am not helping the exclusive website gain visitors.

#askFedi #netneutrality

LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:

• Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
• Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
• Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive

It’s antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.

So what’s the solution?

Individual action protocol:

1. Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed. (there are no search tools advanced enough to have a general Cloudflare filter, but #lemmyverse.net is useful because it supports manually filtering out select nodes like LW)
2. Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
3. Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).

This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.

Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?

Seems fitting to share this now that Social.Photo is live. It’s our newest addition to the fediverse.

We launched a new Pixelfed instance. This is a newly growing community. Most Mastodon Apps work with it if you already have a favorite app like Ivory by Tapbots. They have a PixelFed official app that is about to launch.

Checkout Social.Photo today!

We now have a Pixelfed instance. Check it out!

Social.Photo. Signup is open!

Is Lemmy a replacement for Reddit or just something different?

Before Reddit was Digg. Before Facebook was MySpace. Before Mastodon there was Twitter. Before Lemmy there was Reddit. It's fair to say that each of these sites was or is going to be replaced. The time it takes for the migration is typically slow as the new system gains traction and features. I don't believe they are direct replacements. If there was a copy of the existing site there would be no need to leave. Lemmy is different. Lemmy replaces a need not a site.

When I was growing up the internet was created by the people. Corporate sites were rare and far between. They didn't dominate. People would visit Geocities, Newgrounds, IRC, etc. The biggest players were AOL for chat and Yahoo for sports, news, & search. No site was perfect and beautiful and people didn't care. It was wonderful. This all changed.

It feels almost instant; however, I believe it was slow. Sites like Facebook promised to be the people's network. Youtube took over as this amazing video hosting service. No more Flash! People thought the rough edges of the internet were over. They traded their personal information for free sites. They didn't know what they were giving up.

Over time these "small" sites became the Internet. 5 sites now are the internet to some people. It's time for the internet to return to the people like it was before. Rough & personal.

Lemmy replaces that need people have to connect on common topics and to gather news. It's the newspaper of the people.

Lemmy isn't a Reddit replacement... it is filling a need that Reddit has failed to fill. Reddit became like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Youtube. It wanted to be more than what people wanted it to be. It changed, so people are leaving. The fediverse is the future. It's time to take the internet back!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/253571

Why isn't anyone talking about this? It looks like Meta wants to compete with Twitter with a new Instagram microblogging app which will probably be compatible with Mastodon

Key Point of the article:

*“Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon,” Instagram’s slide says. “Users on these other apps will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and content if you’re public, or if you’re private and approve them as followers.” *

The Verge - This is Instagram’s new Twitter competitor

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/49400

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/83649

A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.