I disagree. Decentralization has its own quirks when it comes to usability. This is not a call to exactly emulate centralized platforms, but a recognition of where many of the pain points are, and how we can collectively improve the UX to make it a better experience for newcomers.

Yeah, this is something I’ve been slowly exploring, too. There aren’t a lot of great options yet, and my personal opinion is that we have yet to see a platform that’s purpose-built to be a Fediverse CMS. Hubzilla comes the closest conceptually to this idea, but unfortunately it’s closer to Drupal than it is to WordPress.

Bonfire remains an extremely interesting prospect, I feel as though it might be possible to create something very similar to the Ghost experience with Bonfire and extensions. It might be worth reaching out to their devs and having a discussion about publishing capabilities.

This is what the thread looks like on Wafrn’s side: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/39562254-048e-4224-8445-36bba052ea91

1. From what I can tell, there have been successful tests with posting to the Threadiverse. I’m not sure how good this experience actually is on Wafrn yet, but it’s promising: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/5fa12345-e4ff-4da3-8a95-d1ef1c4bd186/wafrn-a-tumblr-clone-that-federates-with-fedi-and-now-also-has-opt-in-native-bluesky/
2. I don’t think it will natively support RSS anytime soon. It’s not a bad idea, but I’ve only seen platforms from the Friendica family tree and maybe Emissary supporting this. That being said, a lot of publications are on the Fediverse or Bluesky, and it’s not too complicated to set up an RSS bot?

Oh, I misunderstood, I didn’t realize this related to Tumblr specifically…

Still, it might make some of the dev work easier, if they do end up migrating the backend over to WordPress.

That might be more related to what they’re doing with the WordPress-ActivityPub integration, as a way to work around some of the weird limitations WordPress has for representing notifications and activities other than comments. It’s fairly standard for Fediverse stuff.

No, the GPL is strictly a software license. Even then, most Fediverse platforms are AGPL at best, which only really deals with modifications to the source code of AGPL projects. Content licensing itself is more nebulous and more complicated.

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.

He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.

Regardless, he’s continues to do a lot of great development work.

Woah, thanks for sharing!

We actually already have some interviews recorded, it’s just that some of the unedited talks are two hours long. But yes, this is something we’re actively working on!

I loved the voice of the friend who emphasizes the "sh"s :)

I assume you mean Laurens from the Fediverse Report. He’s from the Netherlands, and has a wonderful accent and demeanor.

It appears that they’ve had a few releases since then!

https://fedipage.com/news/fedipage-v2-1-0-released/

Thank you for your feedback. In the interest of working around this, the embed has been replaced by a video that we downloaded from the announcement post (which we were trying to get anyway) and just used that instead.

Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

Unfortunately, even if instance admins were to unanimously defederate, Meta—or any social media corporation—could create white-label instances to take their place, and we might be none the wiser of their control of them.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea, but they would have to justify the business case to their shareholders. As of right now, the idea of a whitelabel personal silo is a limited value proposition to people not already invested in the Fediverse. If it’s whitelabel, what will Meta do? Start a new company? Inevitably, people would figure it out, and go with something else.

It’s true that we can always choose to defederate from them. What’s to worry about is their meddling with the ActivityPub standard using their incomparably vast resources, and them making their own extensions to the standard in efforts to suck users back into the Borg. Things like that.

I said this a little further up in the conversation, but if Meta produces some horrendous, awful version of ActivityPub that only benefits them, what’s stopping the rest of us from forking the protocol or adopting a different one? If we never switch to their version of doing things, and there’s feature breakage between us and Meta, who actually loses here?

Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!

I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:

1. Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
2. Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.

The second route is probably much harder, but there’s no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You’d probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but…if you’re not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?

My uBlock Origin extension is blocking “threads.net” on his site. Perhaps he’s got some skin in the game.

That’s a post embed.

Thanks, now I know not to take you seriously.

It’s all good, I don’t even take myself seriously most of the time. Most of what I have to say is dumb shit anyway.

Real talk, though: I legitimately think that Threads is incapable of actually extinguishing a federated network powered by open standards. Yeah, the infighting might fragment us, and the influx of millions of activities and interactions might overwhelm servers that connect with it. To some extent, they can propose protocol extensions and features and even make an ecosystem push with tooling.

But, so long as servers are federating via an open protocol, no entity can truly snuff out the network in its entirety. An actual EEE move would not actually work here: if they ever made such an attempt, we’d just defederate them.

My article is not a point about how we all need to shut up and start worshipping Meta, but that the things we ought to be most concerned about are in fact the things we’ve always neglected: actual user control over data, the ability for people to decide for themselves on what to connect to, and dealing with the technical requirements of hundreds of millions of people worth of traffic. And that’s just to start! If we want to reach the masses, we have to prepare for these things.

Thanks, fixed. Posting was a little broken earlier, and I made some incorrect assumptions about manually entering in metadata for the link (Kbin lets you upload the thumbnail manually).