Hi everybody,

We Distribute (wedistribute.org) is a ongoing passion project of mine. It's the first news publication of its kind: a journal about free, open, decentralized technologies, that just so happens to also be a federated blog. People from all over the fediverse can like, subscribe, boost, and reply, and their interactions carry over onto the site itself.

This project has existed in one incarnation or another for nearly a decade. It's been dormant for the last year or so due to personal health issues, data loss, and the dissolution of the parent organization overseeing it, FENEAS.org.

After putting a lot of legwork in, I've managed to rebuild it, recovering about 98% of all of the articles written over the years. It's due for official launch in a few weeks, but I want to start off on the right foot this time. The network is growing at an unprecedented rate, and there's a lot of ground to cover.

We Distribute has historically been a one-man operation, but I can't do that anymore. It's a volunteer project, that does not serve ads or paywalls of any kind. I'm looking for writers who are passionate about the fediverse, and interested in an opportunity to be the first to break news to a network consisting of thousands of servers and potentially millions of people.

We cover news, feature updates, opinion pieces, bits of history, culture beats, and interviews with the people who are making this thing happen.

If you're interested in being a part of this project, please DM me here, or at my main: @deadsuperhero@social.treehouse.systems

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache andthe ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory. Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.

For all those who have contact with the Fediverse for the first time. A beautiful and light description of what the Fediverse is or wants to be. Take a look. We are facebook, twitter, instagram, rabbit and whatever they are all called, united in one network. We can talk to each other, no matter which project you use.

fediverse.party/en/post/fedive…

for the longest time a lot of images posted to reddit were really posted on imgur (until they started hosting it on their own, too). is there a fediverse'd imgur we should be using to complement lemmy? its docs say it shouldn't be used for large images and videos.

pixelfed seems more like a federated flickr or instagram, not just simple image/album hosting like imgur. thoughts? ty 💙

The Big Social score so far:
- Twitter: burning
- Reddit: detonated a bomb under itself
- Meta: rumored to join #ActivityPub with a new app
- YouTube: videos were always 2nd to "native" ones on the other networks, but they could trivially open an #ActivityPub firehose (and maintain their preroll ads while doing so)
- rest of Google: never found organic success and don't have a bet in the game apart from wanting to index everything

No predictions here, just stating the obvious. @fediverse

A bit paradoxal but it looks that all central platform (twitter, reddit, facebook...) are helping the spread of Fediverse. Recently we saw the impact with Twitter on Mastodon, myself I've discovered Lemmy even if I wasn't a reddit user. And before that Facebook first spread friendica and diaspora. It looks next step will be around Youtube where Google try to lock more and more its user.

Lately I often read about kbin.social being similar to lemmy but more accessible. So I created an account there to check it out. My experience so far is a little mixed. From kbin I can access all Lemmy posts, although I find the interface less intuitive to join new communities. So from the kbin side it feels like an other Lemmy instance.

But when searching for kbin from this Lemmy Account, I do not find much. I feel like I am missing some basic concept, that makes it pretty clear. Why this is such a one way experience.

So now I am wondering: How does this work, what are the difference, what do both sites have in common?

I've been listening to this stream on my transit into and out of work for a while now. Some of the music quality varies, but it's a real, sincere effort to promote musicians on the network and it feels in line with Pirate Radio. Lots of great songs, along with some very quirky interludes.

I never got into mastodon because I couldn't connect multiple instances. I like this a lot about Lemmy so far (just here for a few minutes though).

Reading about the fediverse got me thinking. What other use cases could you think of? Maybe outside social media?

Would a fediverse password manager be more or less secure than some company owned pm?

How about "clones" of other social media like FB and Insta, TikTok?

What about a blogging community like Medium?

Other ideas?

At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?

My experience with the Fediverse has only been through Mastodon, through which I struggled to find a community I really gelled with. Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile. May try again, but I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.

I love the pace of a forum. I grew up primarily with GameFAQS and some lucid dreaming forum, and honestly it was very formative in teaching me how to write and use critical thinking skills, as well as how to respond to a variety of temperaments. I stopped participating in online forums awhile ago, and while I loved Reddit as a resource, I never felt inspired to participate. In the same way, there are an incredible number of forums dedicated to a certain topic, and are extremely valuable, it would be annoying to make an account for all the things I am interested in.

I like what lemmy is becoming. Glad to find system that makes interacting with people enjoyable.

I'm not sure if there is news for music so I thought I might as well as set it up if there isn't any.

If you have thoughts on the direction of the Discourse ActivityPub plugin, they are working on phase 2 of the specification now and are requesting feedback:
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/adding-federation-support-to-discourse/2966/7

[metadata for community reach #Discourse #Fediverse #FediDev #MastoDev #Lemmy #Pixelfed #Peertube #Pleroma @fediverse @angusmcleod]

What's stopping us from using the api to post all of reddit here in a massive one-time merger?

Obviously the Lemmy devs would have to do it, but would there be legal issues? I think it would solve most of the problems with Lemmy, really.

As Reddit's enshittification reaches new heights their attempts to suppress attention for alternatives, like federated Lemmy, has the opposite effect as this Hacker News discussion shows.

What Peertube instance or accounts to follow? @fediverse
What are your recommendations to have funny or interesting video content on Fediverse. Preferably on peertube.

The lemmyverse sounds perfect, but it ignores alternatives like kbin etc. It would be better if we didn't end up with the situation we have with Mastodon where people assume Mastodon is the fediverse.

So, what do we call this little niche in the fediverse?

Communiverse? FediGroups?

#lemmy #kbin #fediverse #communiverse #FediGroups

The content of the reddit post:

Hey everyone, I just had another call with Reddit and wanted to share what I've heard, even though I haven't made any concrete decisions yet on how to proceed. (Previous update

They confirmed to me the new cost of 3rd party apps accessing the site, which is exactly what the Apollo dev revealed -- for every 50 million requests they want $12,000.

They won't be making exceptions for free apps.

The Apollo dev (/u/iamthatis) estimated that the new pricing would cost him $20m per year. I raised this with Reddit -- they said that his calculations were "totally wrong", but they were unable to discuss why. Given that the Apollo dev literally just multiplied the cost by the number of requests, I have trouble seeing how this could be wrong.

I did some back-of-envelope calculations, and the equivalent cost for RedReader could be something like $1 million per year. Since I don't track users it's hard to get an exact figure.

Most of the conversation focused on the ridiculously high cost. They said that they didn't think the costs were high, but were in fact "on parity" with the rest of the non-third-party-app userbase. This contadicts the public calculations by the Apollo dev, who estimates that they are charging more than 20x an optimistic estimate of their typical per-user revenue.

I raised the question of why paid API users will be unable to access NSFW content, whereas other users will have access to all content, meaning that those paying the most for access will be treated as second class citizens. They said that they were unable to discuss the reasons for this.

They reiterated that their goal "isn't to kill 3rd party apps" -- in fact, they said they were "confused" by claims that they want to do that, and that if they wanted to kill off those apps, there would be "literally nothing stopping them" just doing it directly. I pointed out that regardless of what their motives are, the end result is the same -- the apps will be killed off.

Also, I have previously pointed out their dependence on the community doing free work for them (creating and moderating content), and how the users who contribute in that way are the ones most likely to be using 3rd party apps. I don't get the impression that this bothers them -- it all seems to come down to revenue.

I've raised the point of accessibility with them, as I've heard from many blind users that use RedReader due to how it's optimised for screen readers (thanks in part to the excellent work by /u/codeofdusk and other contributors). I'm waiting to hear back from them about this.

It's difficult to imagine any sustainable, official path forward with Reddit as a result of these changes, and personally I'm not at all inclined to invest any more of my time in their platform, or drive any more traffic to it.

Right now I'm considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction.

Just a quick note on some of the other possibilities:

Charge a subscription to use RedReader: I have been considering this as a possibility, however due to the incredibly high pricing, and the fact that only the most dedicated (and costly) users with the highest usage would sign up, I think this would quickly become unsustainable.

Everyone uses their own personal developer key: It's too early to know whether this will be a realistic option. From what I've seen, Reddit may be turning developer signups into a manual process where each user would need to message them and get approval. Also it's likely they'd crack down on this if they knew it was happening.

Scrape the website rather than use the API: This is possible and there's plenty of legal precedent that it would be fine, however it's an extremely high-maintenance approach that means we'll forever be playing a cat-and-mouse game with Reddit. I suspect that even if I don't go down this route, someone else will eventually fork the app and do it anyway!

I haven't made any concrete decisions yet, but I'll keep you all updated. I read every message on the previous thread, and really appreciate all the support and feedback.

I am wondering about the different fediverse software options and what would be best for various usecases.

Currently, I run a Mastodon and a Lemmy instance that is mostly just for myself, which is great for doing microblogging and link-aggregation/replacing Reddit. In the past I've also used various blog platforms for long-form text posts (documentation/guides), and to host some photography pics.

It feels like Mastodon isn't a good option for hosting long-form content (most instances have 500 char limits lol), nor would it be the best for trying to create a photo space akin to Instagram.

What software options would you recommend for either long-form blog posts or photo hosting? I know Pixelfed is an option (that I am looking into hosting), but is there a good blog option?

I think calckey can host pages and galleries, so it might be a good all-in-one solution? I'm not really sure.

p.s. If I export my content from Mastodon, shut down the instance, then bring up an instance of Calckey with the same domain/username, am I going to break things?

Hello everybody. I've been browsing the Fediverse for a few months now and I'm loving it but there's a not-that-small issue I'm having with Pixelfed

So basically every time i go into my federated timeline I always end up seeing PLENTY of literal porn (not artistic nude, i'm talking of fully fledged porn) EVERYWHERE. Is there a way I can disable it? I don't want to force block every post maked as nsfw even because sometimes not-nsfw posts get marked as nsfw for some reason

I'm using in an Italian instance called pixelfed.uno

Some help wold be highly appreciated 🙏 Thanks in advance!

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

Friendica and Bluesky's AT protocol

@fediverse

Friendica has always stood out for being able to manage multiple communication protocols, surpassed in this only by Hubzilla (a software that I have never been able to appreciate, however).
It would be nice if Frindica could integrate Bluesky's AT protocol as well. Do you know if there is any feasibility study on this new frontier?

@fediversenews @hypolite @heluecht @tobias