tallship

fediverse

Relatica – the new desktop and mobile Fediverse client

Relatica is a new, refreshing, and promising cross platform #Friendica client in beta now.

#Relatica runs on #Android, #Linux, #Mac, and #Windows. It also has some welcome and ambitious goals on the roadmap:

Testers, packagers, and early adopters are wanted for the official beta program.

Relatica's developer is friendly, accessible, and responsive. The project enjoys an aggressive development cycle and has its own dedicated #Matrix support channel.

It's good to see a novel and dedicated effort to deliver a capable #desktop and mobile client that allows for #social engagement without a browser:

https://gitlab.com/mysocialportal/relatica/-/blob/main/README.md

For those here that aren't aware already, Friendica is one of the earliest and yet most modern and feature rich #Fediverse platforms, #internetworking with other protocols that enables you to do things like directly interface with #Diaspora and even the deprecated legacy silo networks too.

#Friendica has a pluggable addon system and provides direct support for multiple text formats and even direct linking of images in posts.

There's really just too much to list. If you're wanting a feature complete platform for #publishing, #microblogging, #news, #RSS, social engagement and more then Relatica is definitely worth trying out!

If you're interested in trying out Relatica's ease of use and features then you'll need to have a user account on a Friendica server.

You can self-host or get yourself a free Friendica account here:

https://Friendi.ca

I hope that helps!

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

#tallship #FOSS #Relatica #ActivityPub You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

.

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 #ActivityPubthis 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

.

Two Dixie Cups and a piece of string

Oh my goodness!

Okay first of all, I use #Matrix and #Jabber#XMPP w/ #OMEMO, primarily.

I typically don't even regularly give out my email address nowadays, and more and more over the past four years or so, find myself publishing a #Fediverse address for myself too as a contact point.

Most often, if you ask me for my #email address I'll give you my Matrix address.

If someone wants to email me then I figure they can get that from my #PGP fingerprint or #Keyoxide.

If they don't know what a #keyserver is or where any of them are located then I just figure they're to dumb to use email.

Yes. As a technologist, I'm at times, rather arrogant, opinionated, discriminatory, and condescending... But only sometimes. The rest of the time I'm patient, attentive, empathetic, and accommodating.

Basically, if i know you don't know shit I'm a nice guy, yet if you pretend to be an all that jazz hipster know it all, then it's quite likely you'll find that I'm pretty much a full on dikhed. Spelled just like that too.

Beginning in the later eighties I think, and then the nineties they called us #BOFH. That's an acronym for someone who might already have forgotten more than you will ever know. I knew a few old Mainframe engineers with Honeywell and IBM when I was a young programmer – those guys were Gods and could tell you how many wraps of copper to make around a toroid if you had an emergency and needed to make an in the field replacement of your memory – Gods. #SuperFreakyGeeks, having already, back then, forgotten more than you or I will ever know.

They called me #Whizkid, coz I was learning shit that they were never gonna bother with – they're gonna retire soon in Mexico with boats, babes, and beers.

But I digress. I do that.

Back to secure communications...

When it comes to Signal, I know a lot of you really like it. I have little use for it. It bleeds my DID and farms everyone's contact databases – “bing! Ex stalker bitch girlfriend just joined signal. Say hello!” What the fuck?

Well I guess she's still got me in her contacts lolz. Fuckin' bitch.

Ummm... Yeah I'll pass.

I actually only use Signal with people who already have my #DID (phone number) anyway.

Recently, a colleague flew a cray cray route to Thailand, via #LAX to #NYC, then #Qatar. Signal works on jetliner's #WiFi too, and isn't dependant on cellular services.

Good choice, but I'm still wondering why his “safety number” changed after he departed #New_York and before arriving in #Thailand – he neither reinstalled nor switched to a new device. But that's another matter.

Sounds a little cloak & dagger fishy to me.

Anyway, I hadn't actually used #Signal in a while, and left it muted for a few months.

To my surprise... #Stories! Yay! Stories!

Wait, what are Stories? You mean like #YouTube or #InstaSPAM? And I'm assuming like they have in #Whaaaasup (never used it, never will)?

Ummm... I just tucked that little nugget of, I guess, good news away, not really knowing even how to process news of the introduction of such a useless fucking feature.

Until now.

Without further adieu, I defer to @how@ps.s10y.eu , one of our more prominently distinguished members in the Fediverse community, for his novel, clever, and appropriate recommendation:

https://ps.s10y.eu/@how/109308591992363124

#tallship #FOSS #communications #privacy #shenanigans

.

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!

And most are so light on system resources that you can run then on an old laptop or #Raspberry_Pi in your home.

Without further adieu, here's a list of [some of] the most prominent Fediverse server platforms in operation.

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Btrf.ly

https://JoinPeerTube.org

https://Mitra.Social

https://Epicyon.net

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey

https://Pixelfed.org

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps

https://microblog.pub

https://socialhome.network

https://hubzilla.org

https://owncast.online

https://join-lemmy.org

#tallship #FOSS #Soapbox #Rebased #PeerTube #Mitra #Quanta #Pixelfed #Epicyon #Friendica #WriteFreely #Plume #FunkWhale #MicroBlogPub #Socialhome #GotoSocial #Owncast #LoTide #Lemmy #ActivityPub #Privacy #DeSoc #Federating #Decentralize

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

.

After lying in wait until now as yet another, self-defederated, #deprecated, #legacy #monolithic silo based on mastodon – an identical model to #GAB and #TruthSocial... #CounterSocial has finally stepped from the shadows to challenge #Twatter on it's own turf – to what end? Another big #silo?

Joining big #Fediverse servers does little to alleviate the #twittermigration and #twitugee problems.

Here's what does:

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/Linboard/status/1603598950593744897

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub #smallweb #self_host

.

08 Dec – 12 Dec 2022

rPi sets the snot nosed kiddies straight

A lesson in reality for little Marxist children

Was it the enticing aroma from pigs in a blanket?

Okay so PR folks do that thing where their reach exceeds their grasp. Maybe this is one of those times, and maybe not. It does however, illustrate the pent-up teenage angst and folly of adults subjugated by adolescent mob psychology.

It's factual enough to say that rPi was dogpiled by miscreants triggered by virtue of not having validated demands of idiots who think that pictures of 🍗🐔 🍖🥓🥩🐄🐖 should have a content warning (please block and/or defederate yourself, or your Fediverse instance – no one likes you anyway, nobody cares what you think, and no one will miss you when you've vanished into the ether).

Hiring an innovative maker is s good thing.

So rPi hired an ex-cop. So fricken' what? Big deal.

This is how you can tell they're miscreants. A company hires someone with expertise in a field where the product does exceedingly well in sales and deployment applications and a bunch of spoiled children either begin to dogpile because of the wise company decision, or because they're not finished attacking the company out of sport stemming from their bloodlust to agitate. It's a common past time – one that people who enjoy mostly peaceful riots and arson can all agree upon: “It's fun to burn other people's stuff down and bludgeon them!”

Defending your integrity is not cool, bruh! I'mma cancel you.

Yeah. This is where the rubber meets the road actually, and where the irony of it all is exposed – naked. As in, Look mommy! The Emporer has no clothes!

  1. ) The first irony
  • Not all, but certainly a hefty amount of people new to the #Fediverse aren't here because they were going to something better, but rather, because they were running away from something they were told was bad.
  • The irony here is the notion that they were trying to escape a deprecated, monolithic silo platform that had long since become historically characteristic of evil dystopian despotism. And just as it was beginning to be cleaned up in the middle of taking out the trash that made it such a shithole in the first place (I hear Marlon Brando whispering, “Oh... The horror.”). And they migrated as refugees to a place antithetical to the evils of censorship and manipulation, from that terrible dystopian place they came from.
  • Now they want that censorship back – you can't have it. The Fediverse doesn't work that way at all, bitches. In fact it's the opposite, it's censorship resistant.

If you don't like someone, you've always had ordinary controls over what you're going to permit in your inbox (feed/stream/wall). You can simply mute, block, or otherwise choose to let your machine disappear them “infernal undesirable types” on your own behalf for your personal account.

Problem resolved.

Not quite, you say? Well now here's where the insidious nature of these bolshevik social justice warriors start to flex their evil ulterior motives – if they don't like somebody, it's not enough that they make that other person disappear, they want you to make them disappear too.

What's even more despicable than that? I'm glad you asked!

They also want to take away your ability to make those decisions for yourself. They want the powers that be (instance admins) to defederate themselves from the entire other Fediverse instance where that person they don't like has their account.

Now that's ridiculous – but it's how a filthy Communist thinks. Bolsheviks rule by fear and terror (they murdered the mensheviks) – that's why wherever you see something like this it almost always includes doxing and death threats from the community by people that say they're so against that in their terms of service in the first place.

I know. It makes no sense. Oh, the irony.

Okay, I guess they're just guidelines, not rules for them, only rules for others.

  1. ) The second irony
  • In the words of Red Foreman, “Hey dumbass! You're not de-federating them, you're #defederating yourself you idiot!”

It's called, “Painting yourself into a corner”, and these children, with their knee-jerk reactions to edit their MRF settings are only doing a couple of things.

  • Removing the choice of your users to engage with the people of the site you just blocked them from. You've got 300 active user accounts and most of them like and purchase Raspberry Pi products and accessories. They also engage with the users on that Fediverse server for tips, tricks, and advice in their rPi adventures.
  • You've got an immoral minority, a very loud, and vitriolic vocal component of about 11 rabid bolshevik SJWs that first reported the rPi server for posting pictures of meat without a CW, and again because when they trolled a user over there they find themselves unceremoniously blocked by that user – as it should be.

Nothing pisses off a hater more than to be summarily dismissed, knowing that their bigotry and enmity will never again cloud the skies of those they have fixated their projections for their own self-loathing.

So next they begin to bully their own instance admins. A few outcomes are likely...

  • Admin says screw these diks. I'mma ban them.
  • Admin says STFU or find another server to join where you are free to hate other people.
  • Admin says, “I'm a spineless sissy wimp, the people of my instance have spoken, and I will defederate my Fediverse server instance from that other one that those 11 in the angry mob don't like, for not putting CWs on pictures of meat and daring to hire ex law enforcement officers.
  • Admin says, “Fuck the patriarchy! Prepare for defederation!” (This gizmo is a true chump).

The smart money is on the second scenario. A modicum of civility is in order here. Trolling, hate, doxing, and ad hominem are certainly against the AUP/ToS/CoC/Rules – whatever you call yours, and these self-loathing haters have absolutely broken the tenants of their social contact with you.

Sure, those types of behaviors do warrant a ban, but you're a seasoned Admin, having managed a lot of public forums over the years, and you know it's probably best to give them a warning in lieu of a ban for this first offense and avoid them engaging in the same type of fruitless campaign against the good users of your community Fediverse instance... Coz these kinds of entitled subversives live for that, and again, you know this from experience – there is nothing new here.

But there first option works too. You just don't know where those cockroaches will next come at you from. But just like what started this whole thing? You know you can just filter their voices out and be done with them.

The third option is probably the most disturbing, because that admin is an enabler and wants to be liked – at the expense of her own users. She will continue to appease these evil people until almost all of her users have moved their accounts to Fediverse instances that are vibrant, happy communities, and she will wonder whatever it was she could have done that was so wrong.

Now I like the sort of server administrator that is so immature and reactionary that he is just looking for a reason to pull the trigger – these are often, but not always, overwhelmingly of the teenage demographic. It really means very little to them when they disregard their userbases and pull the lever. They are in congruence with the haters hammering the report button and demanding that this instance defederates from the object of their bloodlust; they also relish their growing #fediblock list as a collection of trophies – for them, the Fediverse is sport, s blood sport, yet they don't comprehend that “In space, no one can hear you scream”

Eventually, they actually do find themselves in the vacuum of space, having completely defederated themselves from the Fediverse, save for a few instances of ascerbic, hateful bigots; all of the nice, upstanding citizenry of their userbase has long since migrated away.

These pathetic sort of sdmin types discover their personal echo chambers are nothing more than a few whispers here and there, with the memory of the ghosts that once made it a vibrant and engaging community – people from all walks of life, engaged in civil discourse....

So they close down the server, and get a job bagging groceries at the local market because their parents want them to finally move out.

The aftermath

But what about our naive little hater admin?

Eventually, the paint in her bedroom dried, and she was able to get out from the corner of self-imposed exile in her bedroom, get that job bagging groceries, growing into a fine adult, and contributing member of society.

She went for her MS in electrical engineering, got a job as a C-Level suit, married, and is now raising three children with her wife. Her future is bright. She grew up – that's what most kids eventually do. And she now commands a healthy modicum of decorum.

She's also her own patriarchy, but she takes turns filling the responsibility of that role with her wife, sometimes delegating that responsibility to their oldest child while they're working long hours, and he just got his driver's license so he can take his siblings to games and practices...

But he's still a little bit immature – kinda like she used to be. 🙂

whatever became of Raspberry Pi?

Why, what do you mean whatever happened? After all the evil haters removed themselves from federation, life simply went on as before. Sure. There were issues, mostly related to supply chain issues, but that only increased demand, and the good folks that brought us computers for under fifty bucks did their very best to keep prices down during those precarious times too.

And everybody still loves them. The good people on those Fediverse instances administered by stupid people? Well they all found other servers that weren't being run by assholes, or got really enlightened and deployed smallweb single user Fediverse instances with no regrets.

And that ex-cop they hired? Well that guy introduced a brand new line of FOSS based rPi packages and kits for residential customers, empowering homeowners and ranchers to setup easy turnkey surveillance networks to protect their own property, safeguard their families, all without having to be afraid of how evil deprecated legacy silos (like Google and Amazon) were themselves engaging in government sponsored surveillance of their own customers!

Everyone was happy, and we ate from bowls of porridge that weren't too hot, weren't too cold, but were just right.

And we all lived happily ever after...

Except for the bolsheviks – they're still hating themselves and projecting that hatred towards everyone else. But fuck 'em. They've painted themselves into a corner.

Epilog

Nope. That's it. Nothing else really to add to any of that. It's all just common sense.

Wait! I did forget something.

  • If you're wondering why you're seeing traces of pretty formatting, but instead it's not at all pretty, with paragraphs scrunched together and such – that probably means you're in s Mastodon server.

I might be tempted to say it sucks to be you, but that would be mean spirited, and if you're a #newcomer, you probably didn't know any better anyway. So you can just deal with it like all other Mastodon users have to when people format their articles in #Markdown, or try one of the other solutions below:

  • Create an account for yourself on pretty much any other kind of Fediverse server. Most all of them offer support for rendering in Markdown.
  • Feel free to unfollow me – that's what started this whole calamity and it started to exacerbate in the first place... When @Raspberry_Pi@raspberrypi.social kindly suggested that a known Internet troll “just chill” out a bit. Of course they blocked that twit – he was being a dik to other human beings (in violation of his own servers policies), and most folks can appreciate that they just don't have time for that nonsense from high schoolers, or “YouTube Personalities”, lolz.

brief list of Markdown enabled Fediverse servers

https://Btrf.ly

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Mitra.Social

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

And much more!

impetus

I was compelled to publish this article in the Fediverse after reading the following article (because it got pretty much everything wrong), and also the buzzfeed interview article it linked to:

https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy