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If your world view consists of white cowboy hats and black cowboy hats you may want to check whether your white cowboy hats aren't just black cowboy hats that have been spray painted white.


Pinned post, about following from multiple addresses

Hi, when I follow someone I usually do this from multiple accounts, with different servers and platforms. This is partially as backup. It’s also because different software has different features. E.g. at the moment of writing I mainly post from my Friendica server, but it doesn’t yet support polls, or account migrations. So I also follow from my Pleroma server, which does notify me someone has migrated.

I also sometimes use platforms that support nomadic identity, that allows my channels on multiple servers to be synced. From software that doesn’t support that, a follow request looks like multiple separate requests from those channels.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Gidi reshared this.


This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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Looks like the Wordpress Activitypub plugin doesn't handle video cover images in media attachments. Also, I had forgotten that it is not compatible with page caching in W3 Total Cache (another plugin) so I had turned that on. (Either it doesn't send the Vary header or W3TC doesn't respect it)

Anban Govender reshared this.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

No complaint regarding either plugin, I wouldn't be using them if I was unhappy about them...


So when I went from 2GB of RAM for postgresql to 1GB and at that same time Pleroma search went from responding fine to not functioning at all, this was not a coincidence? I'm in that majority...

But still, why is loading a remote user to follow even implemented as a search action. Mastodon anti-pattern...


Also vast majority of admins not having enough RAM to store the search index, and not knowing they need it because they've never dealt with actual database load before.



I don't like bully culture.

Also, sites and software should not show remote content to unauthenticated visitors. You'll become an open proxy to unwanted material. I don't understand that so much fediverse software still does this.

And unauthenticated visitors should not be able to load anything onto your site, not even in a cache. These open search boxes on so many fediverse servers are a bad idea, as they load profiles and posts outside the control or knowledge of moderators.

If so much fediverse software and servers give a bad example, is it so weird newcomers make these mistakes?


It turns out, if people in an online community really don’t like what you’re doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.

wedistribute.org/2024/03/conte…




I hadn't heard of any Streams repository (fka Zap, fka Osada, etc) people for about two months and thought it had just gotten quiet. Instead the forum and the people post quite regularly, but communication with them from my Friendica has broken down. When trying to reconnect I got all the errors about not being able to recognise the protocol (when it fails to load the actor definition). Not even individual posts load correctly when providing the url.

So I thought this could be a use for my Pleroma. But it also mainly fails to connect... :-( I can only load individual posts.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

At the same time I can't unfollow Guppe groups from my Friendica, only follow them. Even when they act as spam amplification...




I'm starting to think no remote content should be stored at all, just maybe cached, but I understand how, currently, received text of posts can be stored similar to an email inbox.

But do I understand(*) correctly that Mastodon stores remote media as well, in their own media storage, even when from unsolicited sources? That can't be right.

(*) It is cited as a side effect of the spam wave that some are running out of media storage.



Hardly a 'crafted payload', more like a completely normal payload, just at another address...

Alice: hi, I'm Bob
Mastodon: hi Bob, you look different
Alice: never mind, I'm Bob, and I have changed my security keys. Please use these new ones when you validate a message from Bob, I mean me
Mastodon: will do
Alice: and by the way, if your user Carol sends a private message to Bob, send it to me instead, since I am Bob, as i said
Mastodon: fine, nothing suspicious there

(My simplistic summary of the recent disclosure. What is not stressed in the released details is that it doesn't change the profile of the impersonated user, Bob in the above, as its profile at the source is unaffected.)



Copied my followed tags into a "Followed tags" channel and copied my followed searches into a "Followed searches" channel. This works quite well. I think this is going to be useful. Channels maybe a quite powerful new Friendica feature.

It's starting to feel like tumblr again, except tumblr would occasionally just delete all tags alphabetically after 'k'.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

Also thanks to Samsung's smart-select text extraction feature of the s-pen, otherwise this would have been a lot of typing.


Not sure what improvement this new 'night posting' icon is on Mastodon...

I don't think the old term 'unlisted' covered what it does (as it does more than unlist a post), but the current terms and icon aren't much better.

(I'm still thinking 'real unlisted' posts have a purpose)



Finally Mastodon will show incoming text formatting (with today's release) and the rest of us can stop wondering how garbled our posts are going to be on Mastodon and we can just post as we intended. Mastodon people still can't write rich text though. Baby steps.

It's not true though that Mastodon used to strip all formatting from posts. They were just very selective about what formatting they preserved:

  • paragraph breaks were preserved
  • hyperlinks were preserved
  • some inline images were preserved


What tended to be messed up on Mastodon:

  • lists
  • context provided by emphasis


Both Friendica and Pleroma seem to have the same problem that video files are loaded the moment they appear in your timeline(*), whether you click play or not. And both are completely ignoring the provided cover image. Mastodon does this much nicer, showing the cover image, the actual PeerTube channel account, and only loading the video in an embedded player after you click to do so.

(*) I know, because when I'm browsing on cellular data I'm almost immediately out of my data bundle if a PeerTube video post appears in my Friendica timeline.



Maybe we should have a social media/microblogging/fediverse platform where external links are only loaded when someone clicks to see it. This would apply to link previews, quoted posts and replies to a conversation.


Ok, so I'm trying to use some relays to help with 'discovery', since on a single user instance I basically only discover what I already know and sometimes only what I wrote myself. So far it is not that much of a success. Of the three relay types I tried, one worked (the rust one), one failed (the fedi-buzz one) and one said it worked but failed (the go one).


PeerTube tries to keep a view count on the videos, but the monitoring on the cdn shows that there are definitely more times the video files are accessed. Mostly by me, and maybe all the other requests are just bots, but PeerTube doesn't count them.
#PeerTube


Just had a very quick look at cohost and these are my very initial impressions:

+ the vibe is very tumblr, in lots of ways
- things are even more difficult to find than here, and/or it is even emptier

It looks like especially 'artists-from-tumblr' should be able to find their place there.



in reply to Gidi Kroon

What finally broke the Tumblr software, because I suspect they weren't aware of all the places in the code it was used, was that they stopped using post types. So I want post types back on my hypothetical ideal platform. It would have post types like:

  • a note, short and only text
  • an article, longer like a mobile web page with photos and videos between sections of text
  • a photo post with one or more photos, with a short caption, shown in a layout the poster controls
  • a video post with a description
  • an audio post with a description
  • posts asking for interactions like: poll, question, form, q&a
  • a link share post with introduction text (which includes the link preview from the sender side)
  • reblog post type with optional added text
  • maybe a separate reply type post


in reply to Gidi Kroon

PeerTube is one of the few platforms that have a 'license' field on each post/video. I would prefer that any post/video with an unknown (or non-free) license would never appear publicly (to unauthenticated guests) on other servers in some 'federated'/'Recently Added' timeline. I think Mastodon/Friendica/Pleroma are wrong in appearing to host items of which it doesn't know the license, which for these platforms is all items. One of the reasons I switched off public viewing of 'global community'.

So basically: unknown license? => always unlisted




I think both Friendica and Peertube don't support unlisted-like posts.

The Mastodon unlisted scope could be useful if you want to add a post that's visible to everybody even when not logged in, but you don't want to bother the global or local timelines with it. It is still sent to followers though, which may or may not be useful. The big problem with Mastodon's implementation is that I've heard these posts also don't show up in searches, not even with hashtags, which doesn't make any sense to me.

For Peertube I'm looking for a scope that's public locally, but is not public when federated out. In fact I believe this should be the default for any platform: don't show publically what you've only received from other servers.



Another reason we should not let the receiving server resolve a link preview (so apart from the ddos that is many receiving servers at once loading from a site, bringing small blogs down): your text in the preview will be in the language of where the server is located. E.g. on mastodon.social previews are often in German.

If the client resolves the link preview, load will be spread in time and the reader gets the text in their language. If the sending server resolves the link (my preferred solution), only one request is done to the site (much fairer) and the text will be in a language the poster expects and can see.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


I'm thinking of what moderation rules I would set if I were to set them for some microblogging server. I'd do something sensible and normal like have specific rules that only apply to replies, like: no reaction gifs, no links, no photos, no changing the topic and no evangelising ('have you tried rust/mastodon'). Each top level post is in my mind a new forum with strict rules against off-topic messages or posts that don't contribute anything new.

But more than that I would want replies to be hidden by default. With the original poster being the moderator of this microforum. Maybe able to set the no-links etc rules per post.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Also: it would be illegal to reply to a post with a link to an article, without reading the article. (Twitter is already doing something like this!)

Also: a reply should take at least as much effort as the original post. When you reply to something quicker than someone took to post it, or write the blog, you will be automatically locked out of your account for the remainder of the time.

Yeah, I'd make completely normal rules.



Did a proper way to follow hashtags on the fediverse already get established? I know of none.

I don't mean where you can pin hashtags in Mastodon or save searches in Friendica, where you get the hashtags your server knows about. I mean actually following hashtags that are 'out there' on other servers.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Link previews on the fediverse used to just take smaller sites down, now I see more and more of those sites implementing rate limiting, so I see link previews like:

and even:

We really need to do something about the fedi-ddos.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


The way they migrated calckey.social to firefish.social may have broken federation with Friendica for existing (but now suddenly renamed) accounts. Trying again. At least new accounts work fine. They did send out migration messages for the old accounts, but that doesn't work on Friendica, so I have to (try to) re-follow manually.

Also when checking on the site itself I wish I'd knew how to set the UI to English rather than (presumably) Japanese.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


So weird how Friendica's link preview insists on using the middle link of the three, again. Even when the preview in the post screen shows the last link.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Not complaining about the full screen Felicity this results in.


Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, dare I say it even Twitter, all have websites that work perfectly fine on mobile. I don't understand this obsession with 'I'm on mobile so I should select an app' or 'I want to see the website so I should use a computer'. The sites may even work better than the app. Often you can save them to your home screen too.

You may consider the feature that apps of mainstream social media provided of extra tracking and snooping to be a nice bonus, but you're not going to get that anyway in fediverse apps.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Authorised fetch / http signatures really gets in the way of efficient response caching / cdn, doesn't it?
This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Peertube now supports remote runners for the transcoding jobs! That's the one thing I was missing, I had no idea it was in the pipeline... (I had looked into adding it myself, but found it required substantial changes to how jobs are configured, which looks like they now did).

If only I wasn't on an old Debian version which blocks upgrading...

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Disabling link previews on Pleroma after the thing the other day, made me realise how little I miss it. When doing the same on Friendica just to check, I notice that here it's a user setting, not an admin setting. The link preview, that is; the oEmbed setting is in the admin interface and uses an allow list.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)


So this site documenting the AT protocol has a frequently asked questions section, but no way to ask questions. I'm suspicious.

That FAQ explains why they couldn't just use ActivityPub, by listing a couple of things missing in it. These things happen to be the exact things the Zot protocol does have, while Zot has existing implementations that do interoperate with ActivityPub. They couldn't have looked long.
#AT #ATProtocol

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


So reordering pinned posts is not possible. Also, on my host and my host only @-mentions in one pinned post are completely messed up (as in I type my mastodon.social address and it links my now-defunct isurf address), as is the cw for that post. Also, on mobile in portrait mode the pinned icon doesn't work. I instead tend to check whether something is someone's pinned post by its age.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)