Faceplant — tallship

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 02:02:49 +0000

takahē – A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPub – this is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

⛵

Making Better Use of Space

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 10:48:59 +0000

Making Better Use of Space

Moving that old white elephant in the room.

There's been a lot of talk lately, and speculation, about the #Fediverse. Yet for the most part, only with respect to a single brand of server platform.

What I find particularly odd about that, is it's a rather lackluster server platform (especially considering the hefty system requirements) with an extremely limited feature list. Mastodon servers have a hard coded default character count limit per post of only 500 characters – more than Twitter, but not often enough to get a complete thought out with a link to somewhere else, or engage in a conversational thread, and certainly nowhere near what you need to post a news article, holiday recipe, tutorial, HowTo, or movie review.

As if a paltry 500 character limit isn't bad enough for this resource hog, virtually every other Fediverse platform provides for sensible , and configurable message lengths with common defaults of 2000, 5000, or more; most support #Markdown, and other ubiquitous text formats like #LaTex or #HTML, and some even have built in #WYSIWYG editors – like #WordPress, #Hubzilla, and #Drupal, with big players like #Imgur and #Tumblr already looking forward to their official Fediverse launches soon.

When those latter two giants arrive on the scene, the world of social networking will truly be interconnected, having achieved critical mass. It will be a revolution, a juggernaut toppling the deprecated, legacy monolithic silos that have so insidiously subverted and subjugated the masses like chattel. But I digress.

Other Fediverse platforms have offered the ability for people to edit their own posts for a long time, some for years, yet mastodon enabled this capability less than a month ago. It lags behind most other Fediverse platforms in several other ways too – groups, marketplaces, federated chat, and several other often requested functions are all but ignored by that platforms' developer while other Fediverse servers enjoy active and ambitious development cycles with new feature releases.

So considering it is so lacking in basic functionality compared to the other more prominent contemporaries, I've assembled a curated list below where you can evaluate and testdrive others for yourself. I've included links to some of the most darling up and coming projects like #Foundkey and #Quanta, that scale to thousands of users, and if you truly want an even smaller, minimalist Fediverse platform I've included #MicroBlogPub too. There's a couple of web tools including databases so you can search for even more platforms, instances, and compare statistics.

Choosing from the list below, you can join existing instances, self-host your own, or even have a professional #hosting_provider do it for you – simply pick a #turnkey provider where in just a couple of clicks your new fully managed Fediverse server will be online in only a minute or two!

There are literally free and privacy respecting Fediverse platforms to replace everything from #Faceplant, #Twatter, #Reddit, #YouTube, #twitch, #InstaSPAM, #Spotify, #Quora and so very much more!