• 31 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • yeah no i seriously don’t see how that one actually helps anything. maybe for the odd self hoster it could make sense but realistically it’s way too under-defined (but then that’s the norm for ap, sadly)

    let’s say lemmy implemented it. ok. what now? my current account is still under lemmy.blahaj.zone. i still can’t move to some other instance without changing my account’s id and breaking all the existing object ids. i can move my posts between instances (or perhaps connect multiple instance software to the same actor, though a generic C2S server can in theory accomplish something of that sort without needing to alter other instances communicating with mine) but my identity is not any more portable than without it.

    actor relative ids requires everyone to anticipate being portable and set their account up with it from the very start. maybe the existing account migrations can be used to one-time migrate a non-portable account to a portable one, but you’re still required to host your own account on your own “identity instance” yourself, and you are more or less stuck on that identity instance if it ever goes down without you sending the same account move activity we already have out. it’s not as simple as taking an account from one instance and moving it to another.

    https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md is imo better at accomplishing the goal, and unlike relative URLs it has real existing implementations proving it’s viable in the first place. but it has it’s own downsides as well (severly limiting domain block effectiveness for authorized fetch enabled instances, no key rotation afaict, …)


    as a side note, don’t get too hyped up by feps. they have no power over anything and an existence of one does not mean anything for the future of the protocol. implementations are still the only ones making the final call on how the protocol actually functions (because real governance and “spec compliance” is anywhere between doesn’t exist and being actively hijacked by threads via swf), and the only implementation that actually matters in terms of protocol improvements is mastodon.








  • to be fair there isn’t that much about the fedi in general that you can meme about. the closes you can get are in jokes but:

    a) lemmy doesnt have them because this place is uncreative and only serves as a dumping ground from memes from other places when they aren’t bickering about politics
    b) in jokes of different parts of fedi do not translate well just because they share a protocol, given the extremely little overlap on people here
    c) they’re not really “fediverse memes” just because they happened in the fediverse, are they





  • Simply by choosing a lesser used fedi software you’re helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software’s whims. So that’s a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ““threadiverse”” that’s Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that’s Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you’re, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.

    Your own local communities being “dead” mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn’t that much you can do there.

    In my experience, it’s always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it’s true in the ““threadiverse”” (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).

    So really, don’t worry about the size of your own instance’s communities. As long as you trust your instance’s staff to keep you safe there’s no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where “discoverability” is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.



  • Mastodon’s WIP implementation uses the conventions of Smithereen semi-standardized as FEP-400e. It’s not something “incompatible with any other platform” (it’s not commonly implemented, but it’s not bespoke for no reason either). FEP-1b12 used by Lemmy also has it’s own quirks (why are we Announceing activities?) and the specific implementation used by Lemmy will likely not interoperate far without breaking changes that will upset one or the other party, mainly the fact that users and communities can use the same webfinger handle.

    Either every single other software needs to have specific quirks for Lemmy in order to handle this as most (reasonably) assume the username@domain combo will be globally unique, or Lemmy instances need to go on an account or community deletion spree to make this non-unique. You can easily DoS a user or community’s federation outside the threadiverse bubble by setting up one of the other with the same username on the same instance.

    PS: Lemmy is the only platform that has had an exploit that overshadows Mastodon’s success

    what? I’d like to remind you Lemmy is the third most largest open AP server software. After Mastodon, and Misskey. (by a not insignificant margin, with Misskey having 8.6% of all known users by FediDB, and Lemmy having 3.8%) Just because they’re Japanese doesn’t make them any less a part of the network, and they do have their own innovations (MFM, and emoji reactions are just the ones that federate. They also had quotes before many others but I think they’re not the first on that one).


















  • i’ve been filtering hexbear’s communities from my all feed with uBO[1] because of the tankie vibes, but outside their own communities hexbear people seem to behave themselves reasonably well. considering lemmygrad is defederated i can expect them being defederated as well just because of the politics, but they don’t seem too brigade-y to the communities here.

    to be fair i’ve been blocking all the politics and politic-adjacent communities left right and center so perhaps i’m just not seeing the bad parts of hexbear, but shitposting wise they seem alright.

    the only real gripe i have with hexbear is that lemmy’s handling of emoji in general suck and man do they like their emojis. but that’s a software issue more than anything


    1. lemmy.blahaj.zone##.post-listing:has(.community-link[title$="@hexbear.net"]) ↩︎


  • A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.

    Because it’s the other way around. Firefox doesn’t run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It’s why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.

    You cannot “rip off” Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you’re on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a “Firefox based browser” is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)