I like the concepts of both platforms, Deviantart and Wattpad, but both have been going down the tubes, and the argument can be made that they have always had a pretty big cringe problem.

Is there a platform or platforms more geared toward artists and/or writers like either of those two centralized sites? Pixelfed maybe? But I get the impression that it's more Instagram as opposed to Deviantart. Writefreely for Wattpad? Are either very similar to those centralized sites at all?

I think Tumblr has a pretty unique style in terms of how it works. Even though it's completely centralised, it already almost feels like it's federated. So is there an actual fediverse platform that's similar to it?

Last night, between 23.00 on 23 June and 1.00 AM on 24, the Poliverse instance "exploded" a thousand messages around the fediverse!

** We have to apologize to a lot of people: ** • we apologize to anyone who was ** woken up by our notifications **; • we apologize to those who have cisted their ** federated timeline invaded by messages ** coming from Poliverso; • We apologize to the ** administrators and instance moderators who know us ** who probably wondered who hacked our server; • We apologize to the ** administrators who didn't know us ** and who noticed us in the worst way • We apologize most of all ** to some of our users ** who, through our fault, have ** UNKnowingly ** behaved as a spammer ...

Unfortunately, we could not foresee this collapse and we did everything possible to limit the damage: unfortunately we are sure that our instance or some of our users have ended up in some blacklist.

** If so, we ask you to read this message, in which we explained what happened. **

PS: if any Friendica expert should realize that some considerations are wrong or should be better defined, please let us have your own considerations in the comments!

What happened to the Poliverso server?

The update

The new Friendica release, the 2022.06 called “Giant Rhubarb” is a seemingly useless release, because nothing changes for users! Yet it has greatly improved compatibility with other software in the fediverse: there has in fact been immense work by the developers and there have been many changes; in such cases it is possible that disservices arise and, although some instances have already installed an exploratory version, it is clear that some problems can only emerge during the production phase.

Precisely for this reason we decided to proceed with the installation only several days after the release, to understand what the problems would be for users and notify them in time; and yesterday 23 June at 22.00, the Poliverso server was updated.

The problem

At first it didn't seem like there were any problems and, in fact, after half an hour we stopped monitoring. But at 11.00 something happened ...

Admin 1 22.56 (the developers of friendica) have changed something: some users get a lot of notifications about old things .. then everything is fixed 22.56 (I'm seeing a lot of queue in processes)

Admin 2 23.00 So far I am not having this type of problem. Actually, I am not having any problems 23.01 To be more precise, I still can't see anything different than before ... 😅 23.04 Right now, after a few tens of minutes of pause, he's posting stuff on Twitter 23.07 Holy shit! my accounts are flooding the universe with messages

Admin 1 23.14 in what sense? : D

Admin 2 23.15 in what sense? The system is shitting out all the messages posted by the RSS Feed. It is a disaster. I'm emptying the ocean with a spoon 🤣 23.15 This time we are banned from all the galaxies of the fediverse

Admin 1 23.16 I noticed a lot of RSS stuff, but I said to myself "boh"

Admin 2 23.16 They are the queues of those messages

In short, yesterday there was a real disaster for which the Poliverse instance will pay the consequences for a long time as in reputational terms. However, the management of the problem was absolutely timely both from the point of view of resolution (at 1:00 AM almost all the messages had been deleted) and from the point of view of communication.

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-4062-b4e8-2a73-375308279474

The reasons for the problem

However, the problem was not systemic or due to problems of administration of the instance; the problem was due to a series of factors that multiplied its impact:

• Friendica upgrade bugs exist: the "system" upgrade all together, some integration problems with other activitypub instances; but all this causes a "re-reading" of the notifications from the RSS FEED; in this way, users who also repost some posts from the feed get** a new repost (😱!)** of the feed.
• this system (republishing from feed) is not very common among Friendica users; so the problem was not noticed too much on the forums
• this system, however, is very powerful and we Poliverse administrators have often sponsored it with users: therefore some of our users use it; and some "service" and information users that we manage directly on a personal level or as administrators also use it: [@ macfranc @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/macfranc), [@ informapirata @ poliverso .org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/informapirata), [@ news @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/notizie), [@ cybersecurity @ poliverso.org [(https: //poliverso.org/profile/cybersecurity), [@ privacypost @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/profile/privacypost), [@ piratepost @ poliverso.org [(https://poliverso.org/ profile / piratepost), [@ instruction @ poliverso.org] (https://poliverso.org/profile/ Formazione)
• inside Friendica there are no valid administration or moderation tools (an ancestral and well-known Friendica problem: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/8724), which would allow us to delete messages in bulk or to immediately stop the republishing service from feed or to temporarily suspend the "unwittingly spammy" users. So we either manually deleted and deactivated everything or had users manually delete their messages - this was an incredible waste of time!

The reputational damage

All of this prevented us from predicting the problem and then amplified it. However, we can assure you that the management of the application was professional and within a couple of hours from the alert, we have erased all traces of the problem!

The fact remains that some users who followed the accounts in question probably wondered "what's going on?"; others have probably defollowed, silenced or banned the accounts of innocent and unaware users ...

The same thing will have happened for administrators: some of them, to protect their users from spam, will have silenced or banned users; or they will have silenced or banned the instance!

Fortunately, those in the Central European Time Zone were probably asleep at the time and were not online on Friendica, Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma or Hubzilla

Final thoughts

Of course during those hours we felt [a furious rage] (https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1062-b4db-9d28-f53436523782) towards the Friendica developers who caused us such a problem...

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1062-b4db-9d28-f53436523782

...but we clearly don't get mad at them. Moreover, it is thanks to them that Friendica exists; it is thanks to them that there is what we believe is the software of the fediverse that allows the most complete social experience today.

Next time, however, we recommend that you report the problem well and above all, express at least a little regret to the Friendica instance administrators and other administrators who had to manage what seemed to all intents and purposes a massive spam activity!

But above all, we send a message to all instance administrators and users who are reading us: if you have defollowed, silenced or banned some Poliverse users, think again! They had no fault, other than to use the RSS feed reposting system: give them a second chance!

Over the years, I've been studying a handful of different fediverse platforms that bring a lot of interesting concepts to the table.

As someone that has studied and reported on the developments of these various systems, I've decided to put together a summary of things I'd like to one day put into my own federated platform, should I ever develop enough brainpower to actually develop one.

Does anyone know what this thing is? Some kind of decentralized, open source, anti-establishment, etc platform aiming to be an alternative to twitter, but we plebs aren't allowed to see or participate in the development process or even see any source repositories yet.

To me there's a bunch of red flags, but I can't put my finger on what I reckon they're flagging. It's that combo of roll-your-own-crypto and promises of decentralization and secret-open-source-development-model all tied together with node.js and blockchain.

No mention of other decentralization efforts, their envisaged place/relationship with the fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon, possibility of extending their new blockchain protocol ideas with other platforms. Nothing even about how they're better than the fediverse or whatever.

They were banned from twitter tho so they "must be legit"? The slides on the "tech" page mostly have this "COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE - NOT FOR UNAUTHORISED USE OR DISSEMINATION" watermarks, which is pretty weird.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/G08ek

https://archive.is/panquake.com

Email is already nicely federated, but I think it's time for a change. Services like protonmail claim to offer encryption between users, but you can't host your own instance. It would be awesome if there was a spec somewhere for a federated email service that defines

• email encryption between users
• markdown
• ~~connection with activity pub? (What would this look like)~~ I mean some way to "email the web", ie: add comments via email
• compatibility with standard email users (if you send/receive to/from a user who does not have email v2 implemented it just uses normal features)
• somehow better support for email discussion groups (hop in and out, public interface defined)
• this spec should be focused heavily on usage for humans instead of automated mailing, I expect html would not be defined.

I'm just spit balling here. Does anyone have any ideas? Does something like this exist?

Thanks, Evan

I love the Fediverse and I love cinema 🍿, I don’t think I am the only one…
I am surprised nobody has realized a Fediverse software for movies, yet!

I am tired of IMDb, and any other alternative is centralized, proprietary software.

What I think could be done is to develop a fork of @bookwyrm@tech.lgbt with the same features, but some key differences that make it the go-to solution for tracking movies you want to watch and that you watched, as well as sharing your thoughts with your friends. I already emailed @tripofmice@friend.camp, Bookwyrm’s creator and main maintainer, about this possibility.

I am keeping notes concerning this idea in the link for the post.

Unfortunately, even though I am a Fediverse enthusiast and I cannot stop talking about it with everybody, I am no developer and I cannot practically start working on this, also because my time is too limited to work on such a software. Nevertheless, I hope writing this post could inspire somebody to code something and start a Fediverse platform for movies! 😍

Of course I am available for anything else concerning the project: website creation, marketing, bug testing and community moderation, etc.

Thanks a lot for your time!

Happy holidays,
Tommi 🤯

Hi, Lemmy! So I made two mistakes. But I'd like to inform Lemmy, that there is a free speech version of the Lemmy code being used to throw racial slurs around. That instance is called goatpen.co I advise you not to go there, as you will come across racial slurs on the front page.

So my first mistake was asking what people on discussions.app like to use for different social networks. One instance, as mentioned above was goatpen.co. My curiousity got the better of me, and I went to check it out. That was my second mistake. That place is a cesspool.

That's all I wanted to say. Someone or some company is using lemmy's code to host a lemmy-clone and make it a cesspool.

What is the best facebook fediverse platform. I want something that is more private which you connect with friends and family.

I know of Frendica and there is Minds which is not yet federated but is working on becoming federated.

Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.

Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.

Alovoa looking for contributors! Can you help us implement decentralization for open source dating app?

ActivityPub?

Help us, join the project: https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa

I know of:

• Tusky
• Fedilab

I don't know which of the two to use. They are quite similar in a lot of regards and I don't think I've seen all differences.

Do you prefer one or the other or another option? Why?

Requirement is that the App needs to be available on F-Droid.

thanks for your opinions.

A very nice app that displays the feed in the "post + comments" way rather than in a microblogging manner.

Hey, I am relatively new to the federated web and I only use lemmy currently. But I love the idea of an alternative social web ecosystem that is not ruled by big corporations. To see how the fediverse has developed in 2020 I decided to look into the stats (stats go from 2nd January 2020 til today) over at https://the-federation.info/:

No. of nodes:

6043 --> 7849 (+29.9%)

Users per Node:

817 --> 840 (+2.8%)

No. of users:

3,597,652 --> 4,153,555 (+15.5%)

Active users (6 Months):

1,348,965 --> 1,175,150 (-12.9%)

Active users (1 Month):

476,457 --> 432,75 (-9.2%)

Active users ratio:

0.132 --> 0.104 (-21.2%)

So before I say something about these numbers I want to warn you that these numbers are not the really correct because not all instances of the fediverse are not correctly listed in these statistics. This might be for a variety of reasons but I guess most of the unlisted instances just want to stay under the radar. However, I still think that these stats can give us an indication how things are going in the federation.

If we look solely at the number of nodes (+30%) and registered users (+15.5%) we can see that these numbers have risen within the last year. It might not be incredible growth that indicates mainstream adoption but I think it is nothing to be concerned about.

However, if we look at the active user stats we can see that activity activity has steadily decreased over the year. It seems like we have lost roughly 13% of active users within this year.

Tbh I don't really know how to judge these numbers as I am pretty new to all of this. So I wanted to ask the users who have been here longer and might even use several federated services. Did you notice a decrease in activity? Is the fediverse healthy? If not, what might be the reason that the active user stats are on a downwards trend and how might we be able to change this?