I want to chime in on the subject of community sidebars.

To my understanding, many of the mobile apps people use to interact with the fediverse (and more specifically the threadiverse) haven’t figured out a great way to render community sidebar content in a way that a new user knows that it exists. Sidebar content is accessible, but often hidden in a sub menu or a non-obvious interaction. I use Boost, for example; in it you swipe inwards from the right side of the screen to slide the sidebar into view. This isn’t surprising to me, a somewhat veteran Reddit user that expects communities to have sidebars and for those sidebars to be on the right side of the screen. However a user that doesn’t already know about community sidebars has almost no way of discovering their existence when they use Boost. Mobile apps have limited screen width so they tend to focus on their “principal use” (visiting a community to browse their posts), but if you don’t know that communities have sidebars in which they describe themselves and their posting and commenting rules it’s very easy to end up in OP’s position.

Not to excuse their comments nor question their ban; I agree with the decision by the mods of c/196 to not spend any more effort dealing with such an oblivious user.

I suspect many Lemmy clients are designed for experienced users who already know how to navigate the space(s) and how they function. Yet much of the “how do we introduce new people to the fediverse and onboard them?” discussions I’ve seen seem to settle on “suggest a generalist instance like LW or .zip, suggest a mobile app like Voyager, and make them start browsing! Newbs are put off by having to do work like read up on an instance”. I wonder how much this end up contributing to creating cases like OP’s.

Then again, !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone was plagued for over a year by men claiming they were “just responding to posts in their /all feeds”. When told about the community’s rules and sidebar, the most common response was along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to read the community name before commenting on a post in my feed, now I need to navigate to the community and find their sidebar?? This community should find a way to prevent their posts from appearing in /all instead”. If these users aren’t going to the effort of reading the community name as displayed on posts then there’s no guarantee they would read community sidebars even if they were already on-screen, in front of their eyeballs.

Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to “spaces that don’t cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way” being voiced.

It’s a very clever follow-up to their previous project, the fediverse schema observatory (also mentioned in the Last Week in Fediverse published October 30th of last year).

Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.

Sounds like either federation working as intended, or some client app trying to cache info about your instance. Might be https://fedidb.com/ or https://fediverse.observer/ or some other service.

From my understanding of word embeddings (as used by LLMs), you could skip the LLM and directly compare the similarity of what the STT outputs to each task or phrase in a list you have prepared. You’d need to test it out a few times to see what threshold works, but even testing against dozens of phrases should be much faster than spinning up an LLM - and it should be fully deterministic.

“Top over the last 6 hours” can be a decent middle ground between “new”, “scaled”, and “active”.

The only drama I’m aware of (beyond the small spat with hexbear I mentioned) is how feddit.org’s admins were extra cautious regarding discourse on Israel/Palestine in the wake of October 7th. Given the the servers are physically located in Germany (and as such apparently the admins can go to jail over their content) it was disappointing but understandable to me, and pissed off a lot of the more audibly anti-genocide and anti-imperialism users.

I think, sadly, this kind of tribalism is part of the growing pains for federated online communities, especially the more “Western” ones. Instances behave like villages or city-states towards each other, while in physical space we’ve all grown up and been socialized inside (comparatively) huge nation-states.

anything else: either nazis or tankies depending on who you ask.

I’m curious what you’ve heard of jlai.lu, feddit.org, and/or sopuli.xyz. I suspect that, being more geographically-focused than the topic-focused or mindset-focused like most of the instances you’ve listed, they don’t as easily fit into one box (other than the obvious france/germany/finland boxes).

Here on jlai.lu, we had a bit of a spat with hexbear a while back because we’re too reactionary for their tastes, but even that feels mostly irrelevant nowadays.

I see, thanks for the explanation!

I’ve been working on a frontend/browser client for “exploring” activitypub instances in my spare time, and CORS basically requires me to have some sort of separate server process that can fetch and auth using my account(s). I’m unsure of how much sense it would make to try to bolt my client on top of your software, but at least now I know I can try without needing to involve a Microsoft account.

plus my passwords are partials (I salt them)

I’m curious how you make that work - do you just remember the salts, store them separately, or what? I have like 50-70 passwords in my store currently, there’s no way I’m remembering a (true random) salt for each one.

ASP.NET Core Identity is backed by an in-memory database (since 11.1.0); the only allowed login method is via Microsoft account, but DeviantArt and Reddit accounts can be added in user management (which will connect these accounts to Pandacap’s main database).

Does this literally mean I need a Microsoft account to run this on my own machine, or is that only for deploying on Azure?

I use pass for my passwords, and it has an otp extension that I’ve been using more and more. I used to use aegis but I have needed to switch phones one too many times without having access to the previous phone to be comfortable with phones for 2fa.

Of course, this isn’t as secure as a truly separate OTP solution, but it’s still better than no OTP/2FA. And I can easily enough back up and restore my 2fa access over the internet, even on a new computer (albeit I need to also backup a PGP key that can decrypt the password store to truly be portable).

Kudos for developing this on your phone! I’ve played around with termux, even have a Bluetooth keyboard, but I’ve never had the courage to actually code through it.

I often see LogSeq, and to a lesser extent Silver Bullet, mentioned as self-hostable alternatives to Obsidian that people actually appreciate using.

From my own experience querying public mastodon timelines via API (edit: removed incorrect /api/v1s in the AP_IDs):

• Mastodon user accounts have an ActivityPub URI of https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<username>
• Mastodon posts have an ActivityPub URI of https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<post_author_username>/statuses/<post_id> (they also have a url property of https://<instance.domain.tld>/@<post_author_username>/<post_id> but that tends to serve the html view of the post)

To see for yourself, pick an instance that allows viewing their public timeline without logging in (mastodon.social is perfect for this) and follow the “Playing with public data” section of the docs. That page ellides most of the info you’re looking for in the example payloads they give (as the JSON payloads themself are quite large and nested), but I can assure you that AP_IDs for user accounts and posts can be found pretty quickly from a single timeline query.

I don’t think Mastodon has any notion of community, nor does it distinguish between posts and comments (when following a lemmy community, both posts and comments show up in my masto feed as “top-level” statuses (ie posts)).

If we want to keep it silly, then "pie-munchers’ gets my nomination.

Op, I appreciate that you seem to be genuinely interested in these topics, and are not just farming engagement (which is kinda meaningless here on the Fedi, anyways…). If I may offer a suggestion, try to find a tone that doesn’t sound like a roadmap for some corporate brand strategy. Most of us that are here and would be interested in a “fediverse permaculture” are severely put off by the structure of your post, not to mention it lacks in depth for most suggestions to be directly actionable (for example, the merch you would sell to support the insurance still needs to be made somewhere, by someone, who either needs to be paid for their time or are already independently wealthy).

Have you taken a look around !permacomputing@slrpnk.net ? Permaculture is not just about principles of mutual support but also a long process of experimentation to see which combinations of which plants and practices works out “for the best”. You might foster more of the conversation you’re looking for if you can bring some more concrete examples or proposals to serve as topics instead of an all-encompassing manifesto post.

The next time I’m about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis “the standard way”, I’ll remember this article and be mollified.

As @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es states, diversity is a strength when it comes to resisting capture.

For instances that already have a user base, admins should not make any significant decisions without the consent of their users. This goes against our values, and we will not permit an instance to use Bridgy Fed in this manner. We’ve had conversations on how to handle a situation like this, and we would block instances [3] from doing so. We strongly expect admins to be loud about bridging, especially during signup. 3/10

This is very encouraging to read from a project that initially did not understand why many would be opposed to an opt-out bridge to ATProto.

Wanted to try it, signed up for the beta, still waiting on my invite code.

On the surface, bluesky integration makes sense if they’re trying to onboard people onto “the social web”. Still, I’m disappointed they seem to want to be a curated view on what they determine is a feed, and not some kind of plug’n’play feed viewer beyond RSS.