I disagree. Decentralization has its own quirks when it comes to usability. This is not a call to exactly emulate centralized platforms, but a recognition of where many of the pain points are, and how we can collectively improve the UX to make it a better experience for newcomers.

Yeah, this is something I’ve been slowly exploring, too. There aren’t a lot of great options yet, and my personal opinion is that we have yet to see a platform that’s purpose-built to be a Fediverse CMS. Hubzilla comes the closest conceptually to this idea, but unfortunately it’s closer to Drupal than it is to WordPress.

Bonfire remains an extremely interesting prospect, I feel as though it might be possible to create something very similar to the Ghost experience with Bonfire and extensions. It might be worth reaching out to their devs and having a discussion about publishing capabilities.

This is what the thread looks like on Wafrn’s side: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/39562254-048e-4224-8445-36bba052ea91

1. From what I can tell, there have been successful tests with posting to the Threadiverse. I’m not sure how good this experience actually is on Wafrn yet, but it’s promising: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/5fa12345-e4ff-4da3-8a95-d1ef1c4bd186/wafrn-a-tumblr-clone-that-federates-with-fedi-and-now-also-has-opt-in-native-bluesky/
2. I don’t think it will natively support RSS anytime soon. It’s not a bad idea, but I’ve only seen platforms from the Friendica family tree and maybe Emissary supporting this. That being said, a lot of publications are on the Fediverse or Bluesky, and it’s not too complicated to set up an RSS bot?

Oh, I misunderstood, I didn’t realize this related to Tumblr specifically…

Still, it might make some of the dev work easier, if they do end up migrating the backend over to WordPress.

That might be more related to what they’re doing with the WordPress-ActivityPub integration, as a way to work around some of the weird limitations WordPress has for representing notifications and activities other than comments. It’s fairly standard for Fediverse stuff.

My pet theory is that PeerTube is slower on the uptake because of two primary reasons:

1. YouTube Monetization
2. Content Production

Many YouTubers are comfortable staying right on YouTube, where they have the maximum impact, audience size, and money-making opportunities. For this group of people, moving off of YouTube just isn’t viable.

Because of this, alternative video platforms have to rely on people who are willing to give PeerTube a shot. This is a combination of early adopters who are also on YouTube, people fed up with YouTube for whatever reason, and people in various social and political bubbles that would benefit from a more dedicated space for the things they care about.

The other thing is, video production is time consuming compared to other social mediums. Microblogging by comparison has incredibly little friction, to the point that people can do it potentially dozens of times per day. Making a quality documentary, review, or soapbox piece? A single episode of that can take multiple weeks or longer.

I actually think PeerTube is seeing some healthy growth, but discovering things I actually want to watch remains a challenge.

No, the GPL is strictly a software license. Even then, most Fediverse platforms are AGPL at best, which only really deals with modifications to the source code of AGPL projects. Content licensing itself is more nebulous and more complicated.

I do all of my writing by hand, the old-fashioned way.

So…while biology does account for male and female reproductive systems across a variety of species, they have found that, as they continue to study many different forms of life, that they actually have to keep adjusting the model of what they once thought. Life is weirder, more complex, and accounts for a tremendous amount of variation in how this whole thing works.

I’m not a biologist, there are experts who can speak extremely well on this subject. Within the field of biology, the whole “two sexes” thing is kind of an oversimplification. Even if we just focus on humans and not, say, some form of algae with 500 different sexes, there are plenty of divergent forms of human beings that manifest as some form of intersex, with quite a few different variations.

Even if intersex people are a fraction of a fraction of the population, they are a compelling case study for why things don’t definitively boil down across some kind of sexual binary across the board for absolutely everyone. Heck, even males and females in the traditional sense of sexual dimorphism tend to exhibit traits of the other sex in one way or another.

TL;DR - it’s a huge complicated can of worms, and people who try to shutdown discussion of nonbinary or transgender identities with “there’s only two sexes, it’s just science!” tend to have a grade-school understanding of biology.

To be fair to Johannes, I think he ultimately made the right decision. The main problem lie in communication, and timeliness.

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

One thought I’ve had about this: for a self-hosted gaming instance, it could be incredibly interesting to take inspiration or code from RomM and perhaps Funkwhale’s user library concept?

Basically, RomM is a server / launcher that supports tons of different platforms, allows you to stream games to the browser, and provide game library access to friends. It could be an extremely compelling building block.

We’ve seen this happen a lot with Mastodon instances, where people have various beefs and disagreements, and it sometimes results in people advocating everyone blocks an instance regardless of what actually happened. Unfortunately, people are more likely to hit the block-button based on hearsay than they are to do research on whether the instance is actually a bad actor.

It gets super ugly sometimes, and has been abused in the past.

Servers are hosted and operated by different admins.

It’s self-hosted. Originally, Funkwhale was an open source Grooveshark clone, where users uploaded music libraries to stream to various devices. A newer update introduced Channels, where artists could create their own profiles and upload their songs. So, Funkwhale kind of straddles a line between federating user libraries and artist uploads.

For the time being, it seems like they’re primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it’s one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn’t directly target individual artists.

Hey, thanks for sharing this! Yes, we could absolutely use help with writing articles and managing our social media accounts. There’s a lot we try to cover, but we’re a very small team.

I’m just saying, there’s tangible things to point to which explain the current situation, and how we got here. At the end of the day, compromises had to be made to have a working thing in the first place.

We can sit and wring our hands about a piece of software not being open source, but ideological purism doesn’t always get things made. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Besides which, a larger problem is that FOSS devs of critical projects aren’t really making much money, either. You could advance the argument that FOSS isn’t about money, but funding sure helps the longevity of FOSS projects. The Fediverse is practically anemic in this regard.

Look, open tools are great. I assume you’re referring to FediSeer, or efforts like it.

For IFTAS’ purposes, they found themselves in a weird situation. Their CCS system for fighting CSAM had to be developed independently, by contractors that were paid. This is because they needed a service that:

• Could integrate with a national database of CSAM hashes
• That could be plugged into a federated, open source network
• That could report on hash matches detected on the public network to the requisite authorities (a legal requirement for instance admins)
• That would be willing to work with them and take on risk.

There are off-the-shelf products for this. But, they’re prohibitively expensive, typically geared towards large corporations, and generally unwilling to take on a network of thousands of instances. As a consequence of going their own route of development, their work is beholden to a number of constraints. For example, access to the hash database for the National Center of Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) more than likely has legal constraints on implementations not releasing source code.

TL;DR - they built some things that were designed to solve very specific problems. That development depended on grants and donations. Some things, like FediCheck, may actually be open source and simply exist in parallel with FediSeer as using a different scope. They probably have more plans in the pipeline for stuff that generally doesn’t exist for a big part of the network to use today. They’re running out of money.