PeerTube, the decentralized YouTube alternative, has just made a new milestone release. The project has come a long way, and already sports a vastly improved UI and federated comments.
Pleroma, the lightweight elixir-based social networking server, recently unveiled full support for the ActivityPub federation protocol. Stylish and lightweight, and it works with the most popular apps for Mastodon
Beim #NetzDG war es ja relativ einfach festzustellen #Fediverse und #Federation sind wahrscheinlich nicht betroffen, bei den kommenden #UploadFiltern in #Europa sieht das derzeit wohl anders aus.
Es scheint allerdings auch noch nach der genauen Definition der betroffenen "Plattformen" gesucht zu werden und die involvierten Entscheider ggf. auf vorgetragene EinwÀnde zu reagieren.
Das ist insbesondere ein Deal zwischen Frankreich (pro) und Deutschland (eigentlich dagegen [Koalitionsvertrag]aber so richtig Einsetzen tun wir uns nicht damit die Franzosen dem europĂ€ischen Leistungsschutzrecht zustimmen). Deshalb lieĂe sich in DE eventuell noch ein wenig Druck aus der Ăffentlichkeit aufbauen um das Schlimmste abzuwenden.
Man kann sie sich wohl mieten, diese Filter. FĂŒr so 2500⏠Einrichtung und 1000âŹ/Monat. Ich denke die groĂen Knoten kriegen das an Spenden rein oder? Mal abgesehen davon, dass so eine Zensur-Infrastruktur eher uncool ist.
Ich hoffe die Aufzeichnungen vom gestrigen Netzpolitischen Abend kommen zeitnah online.
The Hiveway platform raised more than a few eyebrows today with an announcement by none other than John McAfee, unveiling the startups rebrand from Etherhive to Hiveway. At this time, McAfeeâs affiliation with the project remains unclear, but he nevertheless appears to be providing consultation to the team. This is all fine and good, however, one detail sticks out like a sore thumb: Hiveway is a complete and utter ripoff of Mastodon.
As a platform, Hubzilla holds a tremendous amount of versatility and depth in what it can do. Mike Macgirvin, the platformâs creator, has famously quipped that the system does not have a commercial analogue to draw comparisons toâââitâs not just a social network, itâs not just a forum, itâs not just a cloud storage solution, and itâs not just a content management system.
What does this mean? Well, it would be nice to take in a few more maintainers to ensure the site code gets some desperately needed improvements, for example. There are several things that have been requested by community members which I (Jason Robinson) haven't had time to implement due to work ongoing with #Socialhome.
My personal wish would be to make The-Federation.info even more into a nice landing page for all #TheFederation / #Fediverse projects. This would mean not being constrained to just following servers running the #Diaspora protcol, but also including servers from #ActivityPub and #OStatus side, for example. The information is available out there, if not in exactly the same format, at least to some level.
If you are a #federated social web enthusiast, possibly even a maintainer of one of these projects and interested in improving the site, please get in touch, for example by replying here or chatting on FreeNode #thefederation channel, or directly to me. Please don't use private messages since those are not supported by this account yet.
The Jabber network (a federated set of thousands of servers with many tens or hundreds thousands of users) is under a continuous flood of spam messages for multiple years. Similar to the open email relays of the mid-1990s, public (and often abandoned) XMPP servers are being abused to deliver those messages.
We, as the operators of public XMPP servers, commit to the following Server Policies to fight spam on our servers, and we announce our intent to block incoming communication from public servers that distribute spam messages and do not adhere to the Server Policies. Furthermore, we will inform other Public Server operators and the general public of domains sending spam and not reacting to abuse reports.
Server Policies
A Public Server is an XMPP server that allows both the registration of accounts by third parties (either via [In Band Registration][XEP-0077] or by other means, like a web form), and federation to other XMPP servers, making it possible for its users to reach out to other XMPP domains.
The operators of a Public Server shall perform the following actions to fight spam:
Implement [XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services][XEP-0157] and react to incoming abuse reports in a timely fashion.
Limit the number of new user registrations per IP address and hour.
Monitor or block registrations from IP addresses with bad reputation (open proxy servers, Tor exit nodes), or enforce additional checks on those users, like a CAPTCHA or a valid phone number.
Throttle the traffic from local clients, especially unsolicited subscription requests and messages.
With our signature under this Manifesto, we assure that our servers are already following the above stated Server Policies.
Starting with July 1st, 2018, we will start blocking incoming server connections from Public Servers not following the Server Policies above, if those are forwarding spam messages to our users. The blocking message will contain a reference to this Manifesto.
So, I just published a tiny little blog post with my thoughts on #ActivityPub, #ActivityStreams, and related specifications. If you manage to finish reading it, you should have a pretty good understanding on how I see the world of social networking protocols, and you will get an answer to the question if whether is likely for #diaspora to support ActivityPub any time soon or not.
Faces of the Federation â Jason Robinson of Socialhome
Jason Robinson was a long-term volunteer dev to the Diaspora project who made several important code contributions before deciding to roll his own federated platform. An avid Pythonista, Jason has specializes in Django development, and continues to tinker with decentralized communication.
This requires some adjustment and fine-tuning, but you can subscribe to it through Diaspora, Friendica, GNU Social, Mastodon, Socialhome, Hubzilla, or anywhere that can use #OStatus, #ActivityPub, #Diaspora Protocol, or #Zot.
Jason Robinson was a long-term volunteer dev to the Diaspora project who made several important code contributions before deciding to roll his own federated platform. An avid Pythonista, Jason has specializes in Django development, and continues to tinker with decentralized communication.
One of my largest concerns over the past few years has been in the decline of quality news coverage of Free Software projects and the shuttering of outlets such as Free Software Magazine and other Linux-friendly outlets. Indeed, even at the peak of such outlets, there has been a long history of awesome projects getting completely passed over because it is deemed uninteresting to "the average consumer". Even popular outlets such as OMG! Ubuntu have been on a decline for years in terms of meaningful coverage.
In 2018, I hope for We Distribute to become a full-blown publication, a periodical that syndicates content throughout The Free Network and covers technical advancements in the decentralization movement. Most of this will still be federation-focused, but I've decided to expand my definition of The Decentralization Movement to include:
Free and Open Source Software - GNU/Linux, BSD, desktop environments, applications, etc
Distributed Systems - This includes Peer-to-Peer projects, as well as initiatives such as i2p and Hyperboria
Cryptocurrencies - AltCoins as well as other types of distributed ledgers / distributed value storage
Mesh Networking - Scuttlebutt and other initiatives
The idea for this publication is to write articles in a structure and format similar to Ars Technica or The Verge. The core difference is that, instead of trying to sell you products, it provides exposure for an ecosystem of digital counterculture, all of which provides free knowledge as a basis to build on. It would also provide simple news updates alongside chunkier articles, interviews, and in-depth reviews.
I'm still evaluating how I want to build it out, but I'm looking very seriously at using #Hubzilla as a base - that way, every single article can be dispersed in a federated stream across OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub protocols. It could even get cross-posted to Identi.ca and Libertree.