Btw. It was also #ReleaseSunday yesterday and as a direct & immediate result from a good criticism received via the community survey, I've updated all 350+ code snippets in 275+ source files/docs of all 190 https://thi.ng/umbrella libraries. Each snippet now includes imports for all functions/constants used, incl. those from other packages (if there are)... The updated docs have also been published on https://docs.thi.ng/. Hope that helps! If you do run into any mistakes & omissions, please get in touch! 🙏
Obviously, this doesn't fix other issues with the docs, but many of them are the result of other fundamental issues with TypeDoc & TypeScript's language server (e.g. treating arrow functions and/or functions annotated with type aliases as 3rd class citizens). I do not have the bandwidth to re-organize a massive project like this around the quirks/bugs of 3rd party infrastructure, but I'm always open to suggestions for how the situ can be improved... Many times I've been pondering and even starting work on a custom doc generator (incl. a ton more metadata, diagrams, cross-references, links to related functions [in other packages]), but I just cannot justify working on this at this stage...
Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Bluesky from here in the fediverse, and vice versa.
Bluesky is a broad network with lots of worthwhile people and conversations! I hope you’ll give it a chance. Only fully public content is bridged, not followers-only or otherwise private posts or profiles. Still, if you want to opt out, I understand. Feel free to DM me at @snarfed (different account than this one), email me, file a GitHub issue, or put #nobridge in your profile bio.
@snarfed.org@snarfed.org @activitypubblueskybridge@fedidevs@fediversenews This should be opt-in, not opt-out. BlueSky doesn't use ActivityPub and, therefore, the tools users have to protect themselves on Mastodon are incompatible with your bridge.
I'll be talking with the other moderators and admins of furry-focused servers to inform them of this new risk to marginalized users and I'm confident they'll be taking appropriate actions to keep our communities safe.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon supports long form and rich content perfectly fine. The problem is that Lemmy and Kbin extend ActivityPub in a way that nothing else does. While most of the Fediverse uses Note objects, Lemmy chose to use Page objects. Mastodon supports Pages but only renders a title and a link because it doesn’t really know what pages are.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
There are also other problems. Lemmy expects the community to be CC’ed or Federation may break.
Something that’ll undoubtably confuse people is that Lemmy will send a Create to create a post (makes sense) followed by a boost (Announce) to populate it across servers. In Mastodon, this manifests as a long list of boosted posts. This is the only way Lemmy can spread comments to every other server, but it’ll flood any normal timeline with boosts.
Notation invented by other platforms (!community) isn’t going to make it into Mastodon, I don’t think. You can just paste a full URL (lemmy.world/c/linuxmemes) into Mastodon and get to the community, though, so I don’t really see the need. This is because of perfectly sensible design choices made by both the Lemmy devs (using group: in webfinger to indicate groups, even though that URL scheme is nonstandard, so username and community can overlap) and the Mastodon devs (accounts follow the standard Webfinger notation and usernames are expected to be unique).
Mastodon has stupidities of its own (think “you must @mention usernames” despite ActivityPub having a non-content field for that purpose that’ll work just fine). But in this case the problem is that different projects use the same standard for different purposes.
Interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is possible, but it’s a massive pain, and even if Mastodon were to support Page objects to render Lemmy posts, it’ll always remain a pain. I don’t think asking Mastodon to change the way their software works to support use cases it was never designed to support (and perhaps doesn’t want to support) is very viable.
That said, you could try to check out the code over at Github and see if you can make Page objects render better in Mastodon. Probably best to ask the maintainers what approach they’d prefer, but I think rendering posts would be a rather small change that would greatly improve interoperability.
I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time....
I'm trying to contact a user on lemmy, but can't dm them (it's not clear to me if this is a bug or if dms don't work across instances or software, but either way it's not working). My next workaround would be to ping them in a microblog post, but lemmy doesn't have a microblog section. Would a lemmy user receive a notification...
I think they're specifically wondering if using @<username>@<instance> mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.
I've been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) -- and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?
I guess I don't really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.
As I'm sure some of you noticed, very shortly after Ernest posted the update to KBin that allowed for abandoned magazine adoption, I took over this magazine....
But wait, there's more! They have now reemerged as a Mastodon server called pebble.social.
The Co-Founder of Pebble, @gabor, mentioned that their new Mastodon server is simply an "experiment". It could very well be!
But here's the interesting part. A user named @blobcat has recreated Pebble's old UI as a frontend design for Mastodon. So even if pebble.social is just testing the waters, this development could have enormous implications for the Fediverse community.
I've often discussed that there isn't much of a future for centralized alternatives to Twitter. Creating a network effect from scratch requires significant investment in terms of both money and time. If I were a determined developer of a Twitter alternative (which I am in some ways), I would definitely utilize ActivityPub. It would grant my potential users access to tens of millions (soon to be hundreds of millions) of people who are already part of the Fediverse.
I genuinely wish Pebble all the best, and I really hope that pebble.social evolves beyond its current "experiment" status.
Hey, check out this graph! Take a moment to look at it because, honestly, it's pretty amazing. The growth of WordPress on the Fediverse is truly impressive.
In Q4 2022, there were 924,888 posts, and fast forward to Q4 2023, we're seeing a whopping 2,998,430 posts. Can you believe that? It's a 324% increase year over year!
I've always had a hunch that ActivityPub-enabled WordPress would make a big splash, and if this chart keeps going up, it looks like my prediction might just come true!
As web users, what we say and do online is subject to pervasive surveillance. Although we typically associate online tracking with ad networks and other third-party sites, our online communications travel across commercial telecommunication networks, allowing these privileged entities to siphon the names of the websites we visit...
I'm setting off on a journey to self-host a small Matrix server for my direct relatives and wife to use instead of whatsapp. Can you guys recommend any resources or communities before I start purchasing hardware?
This will be a private server only used by 5-10 people mostly from their phones.
This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.
Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.
The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.
A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).
To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.
They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.
Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).
Hey self-hosted community! I thought I'd pose this question to you all as you seem to have a lot of experience with hosting things on limited budgets with usually a single person administering!...
I'm hoping to find a build list for a general home server/NAS. The goal is to have a server capable of running 2-3 VMs along with a handful of containers, act as a Plex server, and act as a NAS for media storage....
I am running a AMD Athlon(tm) X4 860K Quad Core Processor with 32GiB of RAM, Radeon HD 7450, 16TiB of HDD storage and 256GiB SSD. The only upgrade I am considering is buying 4TiB SSD drives to replace the HDD drives, this is only because I've noticed SSD's have gotten really cheap.
I would plan for Docker and not Virtual Machines, as VM's emulate an entire computer and then you run an entire operating system within them and then the application, the result is they need far more resources to act as a host for an application. Server applications have been moving to Docker because its a defined way to sandbox applications, run them consistently and uses far less resources.
I then deployed Portainer Community Edition on to the server, this provides a Web UI to manage the docker contaners running on the server. I have 9 docker containers currently running on the server.
You mentioned Plex: Plex provide a docker image for running their application that supports NVidia GPU Acceleration and seems to run fine on AMD hardware. You will find almost every server application offers an official docker image.
With my business hat on, think how many docker containers you want and plan for that + 1 cores in your CPU, you can probably look up the applications you want to run and add up their recommended RAM usage, as a home rule of thumb 16 GiB of RAM is the minimum, 64GiB would be overkill.
There were most certainly bots but I'm pretty sure (and I'm speaking from experience since I was there) that there were more than enough real people helping.
Especially the Germans were probably a driving force as usual and then there were the other communities that united on their Discord servers as well, I was part of one that had ~3k members I think (Fuck Spez Coalition 🫡).
You could write to the author and ask them to edit the work:-).
Squabbles has an interesting list of media related to it fwiw - like this article mentions: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, Lemmy, and Squabbles, and the honorable mentions section says how it focused on text-based social networks (nothing about an API) but adds TikTok, LinkedIn, BeReal, and even Pinterest... but still no Kbin (or Tildes, or Discuit, etc.). Nor is it really wrapped up into Lemmy / the Fediverse.
Lemmy describes itself as “a link aggregator for the fediverse,” which to the average person may as well be gibberish. Essentially it’s a community discussion board in the vein of Reddit, based on a free and open platform like Mastodon and Bluesky. You register to a server – or host your own – but can interact with other servers with no issue.
Other articles add mention of like Discord, and even Y Combinator's Hacker News for article aggregation purposes.
Kbin just simply is not considered a major player, it seems. It is not blazing any new trails, nor has celebrity endorsement like Bluesky. At best it seems considered to be "just another instance of Lemmy", and at worst forgotten entirely, whereas at least Beehaw seems to stick in people's minds for some reason.
That said, I have seen one article that mentions Kbin: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-reddit-alternatives/, which also mentions Beehaw and Tildes and Squabbles, and yet neglects to mention Meta even though the article says that it was posted earlier this month (it also did not mention some other smaller ones such as Discuit). So that is something, at least - as in even if all articles seem biased in various ways, that one at least acknowledges Kbin:-).
Yes you heard that right, we are planning for the first /kbin release. Currently most server admins are running directly from the develop branch since /kbin is still in very (early) active development....
There are a few obvious security implications with the rise of containerized packaging. One of the first is the move away from true centralized, least trust packaging. With traditional packages, you are trusting your distro maintainer (be it Debian, Canonical, RedHat, Arch, SUSE, etc.) To provide patched versions of software from their trusted repository mirrors to your computer. This does a few things like limiting the amount of places that you need to download software binaries from, as well as having other potential benefits like checksum validation on downloaded packages.
Most containerized package platforms including Docker, Snap, Flatpak tend to have a centralized set of repository mirrors, but anyone may compile and publish their own software to it. Flatpak is kind of the exception to this. Some distros (i.e. Fedora) publish their own sets of repos with flatpak packages. This is because Flatpak allows for more than one source repo for packages. I do believe Docker, Podman allow for the same as well. Snap infamously doesn't allow any repos other than Canonical's proprietary community repo.
Most of these containerized packages solutions also offer varying levels of sandboxing, which is a good set of security features that could benefit individual hosts from potentially vulnerable software. One could argue that flatpaking Firefox or other browsers and jailing them to limited capabilities and filesystem access is a good thing given the potential for malware propagation through such applications.
In particular though, most containerized solutions aren't generally hated by online user communities except Snap, which has both been among the most restrictive as well as furthest behind in features, performance parity, and general user experience. Snap was for the longest time significantly far behind Flatpak for user land applications and still wouldn't be my first choice for server applications compared to Podman or Docker due to just not being nearly as flexible as the other two.
The performance of the platforms can vary compared to native. For the desktop-oriented platforms (Snap, Flatpak) they generally perform insignificantly different from native packages, although Snap packages that are built compressed have had horrific IO performance for the loading of package files (leading to atrociously slow startup times of applications in the past). This is supposedly better now, though I have no intention of installing Snapd to find out.
As a note for culture, people particularly also dislike Snap because of how badly Ubuntu (Canonical's Linux distro) is depending on it, including having Snap automatically reinstall after removal and dropping many packages from apt only to throw redirects in to pull the snap package when requested from apt. This is why de-snapped derivatives of Ubuntu are also popular.
As for package sizes, they tend to be a bit bigger than native, as well as the added cost of a second set of libraries. Many users online don't get the 'why' when their first package from Flatpak is nearly a 3 GiB download, despite the following packages will hardly be any different in size from native packages. In a way, these packaging solutions do remove an advantage of the singular set of libraries. If you use netbooks, SBCs, IoT devices, or other similar minimal storage devices, you might feel this impact. However most systems will only have a marginal increase of storage utilization overall from a second set of libraries being installed.
Oracle is this priest who will try to convert you to christianity when you are in a hospital on your deathbed.
Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it.
Fuck you
We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution.
Oracle is one of the biggest personal data broker out there. Fuck you
By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.
The russian army is hiring too.
Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
Devour each others please. Thank you and fuck you.
Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it.
Considering the stranglehold that huge platforms have on users, it makes a lot of sense for organizations to have their own fediverse servers, with communities and access they control.
For example, a lot of governments use Twitter as a way to communicate in disaster situations. But since Elon lets anyone with a credit card have a check mark and bans people on a whim you can't trust that the account is a real one or that it won't be cut off in time of need. A Mastodon server would solve both of these problems.
That’s true, but now you have to remember which server is legit. One benefit of a centralized service is that you have centralized verification, which at one time was a point in Twitter’s favor.
I’m not very well versed in cryptography, but if I understand the certification system for websites, different sites apply to a certificate provider, of which there are multiple. Maybe something like this is possible for the Fediverse? Where a user or community or instance can be “verified” by one or more trusted verification “agencies” or whatever.
If you want to host a capable pretrained model, feel free to check out LLaMA, especially the LLaMA.cpp since it allows for speedy inference. For the front-end, there's text-generation-webui, official web UI, Serge, XInference, or chatbot-ui with LocalAI (a server that makes LLaMA.cpp use OpenAI's schema).
For the model fine-tunes, I'd personally recommend WizardLM. It's not perfect, far from it, but it seems the closest to GPT-3.5 in my experience. Be sure to never trust what it says though, it does hallucinate less then other fine-tunes I saw, but still does so frequently enough.
There isn't really much of a need to train a model on a particular community. If you need it to work with changing facts, just throwing results from the search engine into the context window. Most of these models were already trained on huge datasets including Reddit, so...
If you want to fine-tune it on most helpful comments to make sure it generates more consistent advise, I'd recommend QLoRa and a 1k instruction dataset like in LIMA paper. Though again, I'm not sure there's any use for that.
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....
My own personal interest was beyond running a server. It was getting features / policies into the software. I'm actually starting to think that developer's politics aren't the real issue. Might be open source dynamics are the real issue. Saw a lot of things in the bug tracker of someone saying, "Oh yeah that's a good idea" and I thought whatever feature it was, might pull people into more chaos in various ways. Chaos meaning, people don't stick with communities they want to continue to be in. It may be an inherent problem with writing software that uses the Fediverse. People may have rather different ideas about what the Fediverse is "for". Like I'm not trying to look at thousands of GIFs a day. I think that's what's basically wrong with social media. Big groups, big volumes of shallow posts, that mainly works towards advertizing business models and reducing the "user's" participation mainly to the act of "watching the new TV".
Ways to implement customizable feeds that shift with interests over time? (kbin.fedi.cr) en
I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time....
Can lemmy users see when they're mentioned in a microblog post from kbin? (kbin.social) en
I'm trying to contact a user on lemmy, but can't dm them (it's not clear to me if this is a bug or if dms don't work across instances or software, but either way it's not working). My next workaround would be to ping them in a microblog post, but lemmy doesn't have a microblog section. Would a lemmy user receive a notification...
What would you all like to see from this magazine? (kbin.social) en
As I'm sure some of you noticed, very shortly after Ernest posted the update to KBin that allowed for abandoned magazine adoption, I took over this magazine....
Say (an encrypted) hello to a more private internet. (blog.mozilla.org) en
As web users, what we say and do online is subject to pervasive surveillance. Although we typically associate online tracking with ad networks and other third-party sites, our online communications travel across commercial telecommunication networks, allowing these privileged entities to siphon the names of the websites we visit...
Difficulties hosting more than one service (kbin.social) en
I'm considering getting back to self-hosting again, but I remember a problem I never quite figured out....
Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path (i.imgur.com)
need advice for a self-hosted or cloud hosted server for file transfers from remote locations (kbin.social) en
Hey self-hosted community! I thought I'd pose this question to you all as you seem to have a lot of experience with hosting things on limited budgets with usually a single person administering!...
Request - Home Server/NAS Build (kbin.social) en
I'm hoping to find a build list for a general home server/NAS. The goal is to have a server capable of running 2-3 VMs along with a handful of containers, act as a Plex server, and act as a NAS for media storage....
r/Place 2023: The Good Ending (peertube.io) en
Yet another article about Reddit vs. Lemmy vs. others: "Discussing Three Reddit Alternatives After Reddit's API Decisions" (kbin.social) en
https://hackernoon.com/discussing-three-reddit-alternatives-after-reddits-api-decisions
First upcoming /kbin release!?! (kbin.melroy.org) en
Yes you heard that right, we are planning for the first /kbin release. Currently most server admins are running directly from the develop branch since /kbin is still in very (early) active development....
[Question] Why does everyone seem to dislike containerized packages? (kbin.social) en
TLDR at bottom....
Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To (oracle.com) en
Oracle underscores its commitment to helping keep Linux open and free for the global Linux community.
Twitter traffic sinks in wake of changes and launch of rival platform Threads (theguardian.com) en
Data shows the micro-blogging website has been shedding users since early 2023, not long after Elon Musk’s takeover
Selfhosted LLM (ChatGPT) - Lemmy.world (lemmy.world) en
Stumbled across this on lemmy.world. As we are defederated, reposting here....
It is not Lemmy or kbin, it is the fediverse. (kbin.social) en
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....