Quite possibly a luddite.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.

    ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.

    That said, it’s a cool proof of concept, and I’m sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don’t see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.



  • I’m currently experimenting with Seppo for my website, which is… not ready yet. So maybe not the greatest suggestion. But development is happening fast, and I like it for a couple of reasons.

    1. It’s incredibly easy to install. Just upload a file, set permissions, and open it in the browser. I’m somewhat incompetent, so I appreciate that even though deploying WordPress is obviously not very difficult either.
    2. Content is stored in basic XML files, making it easy to access with just basic PHP and an XSLT stylesheet. Basically it easy to incorporate posts into your site however you want it.
    3. It federates with ActivityPub, so people can follow your blog directly and get the content directly into their feeds.
    4. It’s lightweight - very little bullshit.

    Basic functionality such as editing and deleting posts does not work yet, so it’s absolutely not ready for primetime. But it’s a project worth following, especially for those of us with an interest in the social web.

    Edit: I guess this would be more if you wanted to create a basic website yourself, and add a tool for content management to it. I read the post a bit too quickly - if you’re not interested in writing some code there are much better options to go for out there. Seppo I think is nice for those who actively want to tinker a bit. :)




  • Kbin is pretty good for this. Every magazine has two tabs: one for microblogs, and one for threads. The administrator of the magazine can choose relevant hashtags, and all federated posts from the fediverse containing the hashtags will show up in the microblog section. People end up in kbin communities just by making themselves discoverable with hashtags, they don’t even need to know what kbin is.

    There are, as far as I can tell, two problems:

    1. There’s no combined view showing both posts and microblog. As a consequence, the microblog is often neglected.
    2. Federation doesn’t work well - you only see these posts if you’re viewing it from the same kbin instance as the one you’re visiting from. In effect it’s basically only useful for kbin.social at the moment.

    Still, both of these things seem like they could be resolved, and it’s a very neat solution. :)




  • My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don’t.

    The fediverse doesn’t need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn’t be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter “e” is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).

    Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it’s fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It’s simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.

    If you don’t like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It’s literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.


  • It honestly makes a lot of sense to keep illegal content that’s the source of frequent legal actions away from the largest general purpose communities. As you correctly point out it is extremely easy to join another instance where these discussions are allowed, and the larger instances have every reason to have a “better safe than sorry” approach to content moderation.

    It seems to me the Threadiverse is too negative of the concept of defederation. It’s a key concept of how the Fediverse works, and is supposed to work. The people on Lemmygrad is looking for a completely different experience from the folks over at Beehaw, so let them have it. Lemmy.world has become the largest instance, so naturally they need to have an approach to content moderation that is unlikely to land them in legal trouble. And even if they didn’t, they’d be welcome to block discussions of piracy out of moral conviction or any other reason, just as their users are welcome to sign up somewhere else if they are looking for a different experience.

    There was drama about defederation on Mastodon in the beginning as well, but I guess people coming from Twitter had an easier time intuitively understanding the appeal of it.




  • It’s rather the opposite, as it is the alternative to an algorithm choosing which content will be visible. Algorithms are easily abused - a curated list of real people you follow and trust to share interesting content less so.

    On kbin it’s a little different thhough, as content widely boosted across the fediverse is given improved visibility by default. In this system we rely more on servers full of bad actors being defederated.