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Sean Tilley

@ deadsuperhero @lemmy.world

Posts
84
Comments
146
Joined
2 yr. ago

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

  • NeoDB is a Review System for Culture

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  • Not yet, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to add in support for that. I think one of the core ideas here are that you could take NeoDB and use it as a foundation for any review system you want to integrate. Hook up to a service on the search side, support data import on the backend, suddenly you have a way to not only create the reviews, but populate the objects being reviewed with the necessary metadata.

  • Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide

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  • I agree with you in spirit, but some of this stuff needs to be spelled out for people interested in the space. Not every person that builds for ActivityPub is overly aware of technical and cultural expectations. A lot of that knowledge exists in someone's head somewhere, and the Fediverse does a pretty poor job of making assumptions about those people.

    Case in point: one of the stories linked in the piece discusses a guy that implemented ActivityPub on his own, got it to work, but didn't know enough about the space. People thought it was a crawler, turns out it was a blogging platform, but the drama ignited to the point that someone remote-loaded CSAM on the dude's server using Webfinger. Dude was in Germany, and could have gone to prison simply for having it.

    We can't hold two contradictory positions, where we invite people to build for this space, and then gaslight them over not knowing things that nobody told them about. More than ever, we need quality resources to help devs figure this stuff out early on. This article is one small step in service to that.

  • Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide

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  • Google Fonts

    Yeah, I need to work on that. It's been on the back burner, because writing and publishing has kind of been a main focus for me in recent months. But, this hasn't been the highest priority, mostly because modifying WordPress and making it behave correctly can be a massive pain in the dick.

    I'll get around to it when I'm able.

  • An Admin's Guide to Fixing PeerTube - We Distribute

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  • Honestly, self-hosting is kind of the way to go, so long as you stay on top of your backups and storage. There are a lot of Object Storage providers out there that offer reliable storage for cheap, it's a good investment if you plan on uploading somewhat frequently.

  • An Admin's Guide to Fixing PeerTube - We Distribute

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  • It's actually not too bad to run, it's just that my community instance has grown a lot, and is close to four years old at this point. Issues crop up, I mostly wrote this guide to share some insights on how I deal with things.

  • WeDistribute is conducting a poll for instance admins.

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  • Yeah, I kind of screwed up. In hindsight, I should have just made the question accept a text answer, rather than a multiple-choice one.

  • Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork

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  • I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/

    I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.

    It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • Pretty much everybody.

  • Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts

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  • They kind of fucked up everything in approaching this by not talking to the community and collecting feedback, making dumb assumptions in how the integration was supposed to work, leaking private posts, running everything through their AI system, and neglecting to represent the remote content as having came from anywhere else.

    The other thing is that Maven's whole concept is training an AI over and over again on the platform's posts. Ostensibly, this could mean that a lot of Fediverse content ended up in the training data.

  • IFTAS Launches Moderator Resource Portal

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  • I'm like 99% sure that this is just WordPress with BuddyPress extensions. I could be wrong! But, if that's the case, it's likely all open source already. It might be interesting to see if they can get it working with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress!

  • Patch 3.23 - What Do You Think?

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  • I mostly meant the old system where all options were just a bunch of floating neon text. It was...functional, I guess, but the new system is so much better from a controller perspective. It's not perfect yet, things like elevator buttons are still in a weird spot, but most things are a lot easier to deal with.

  • Patch 3.23 - What Do You Think?

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  • One edge case that I really want to see the team nail down is crash loops. In the EPTU build of 3.23, we noticed situations where recovery effectively acted like a rewind feature, but didn't actually prevent the cause of a crash from happening.

    Having to experience a handful of the same crashes during a single play session is pretty painful.

  • Patch 3.23 - What Do You Think?

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  • Honestly? I'm loving it. The biggest improvement for me was getting rid of those awful PIT menus that were ugly and sometimes hard to use. The new system is way more usable, and I'm tweaking the mappings on my controller to see what feels the most usable.

    The improvement to EVA is also phenomenally good. You move a bit faster, there's more precision, and traversal between EVA and ship is much smoother. As a salvager that gets in and out to scavenge cargo holds, this is a big deal to me.

    The character customizer is also really fun to use, and feels pretty intuitive to use. There's still work to be done in explaining what all of these vertices do, but I think the customization is a lot more flexible.

    Some pretty nasty bugs emerged in 3.23 and 3.23.1, but it seems like the team is making pretty good progress on improvements? So, there's that.

  • You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!

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  • I can't tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅

    As far as the "global square" part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you're right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.

    However, there's nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it's definitely not impossible.

  • You can now bridge Fediverse and Bluesky Accounts!

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  • It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

    I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

  • The Trouble with Forking Mastodon

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  • Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

    It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

    The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

  • The Trouble with Forking Mastodon

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  • Thank you for these insights!

    Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

    It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

  • Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! | itsfoss.com

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  • It's an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:

    1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.

    2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.

    3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.

    I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.

  • Substack Competitor Ghost Announces ActivityPub Integration

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  • It's the WordPress competitor.

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Sean Tilley @lemmy.world

    Authorized Fetch Circumvented by Alt-Right Developers

    wedistribute.org /2023/12/authorized-fetch-circumvented/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Sean Tilley @lemmy.world

    Getting Tangled Up in Threads

    wedistribute.org /2023/12/tangled-up-threads/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Sean Tilley @lemmy.world

    After Radio Silence, Kbin App Artemis Shuts Down

    wedistribute.org /2023/12/artemis-shuts-down/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Sean Tilley @lemmy.world

    Debunking the Top 10 Myths About Mastodon

    wedistribute.org /2023/11/debunking-the-top-10-myths-about-mastodon/