The fediverse is the network of federated decentralized social media using activitypub to connect. Lemmy (the software on which chapo.chat is based) will be in some months part of this network.
What do you think about fediverse ? Are some of you using Mastodon as a twitter replacement ?
Oh please it would be so cool to have Matrix server / element client for Chapo ! Be aware that Matrix servers scale not really good and become very hard to run very fast. ( I used to administer one)
I've been curious about that. Is that true if the large channels aren't end-to-end encrypted?
I wonder how XMMP compares scalability wise. OMEMO encryption seems nice but it might have the same scalability problem.
EDIT: Maybe large chat rooms should not be encrypted at all. They are public communications- encrypting is pointless.
it is essentially in database that it takes a lot of space. In computing power it is okay-ish. Also e2e encryption changes nothing since it is encrypted and decrypted in the client. Also, XMPP is dead, and has no clients, Matrix is a way better alternative to discord than XMPP, sadly.
In my experience xmpp servers are a lot easier to run and manage and and clients like conversations (Android), dino (Linux/bsd), and gajim(windows/Linux/osx) are all amazing clients. However all the iOS clients suck and for large groupchats with iOS clients and outdated other clients joining they will definitely not be able to use omemo properly.
Matrix on the other hand has an okay, but sometimes slow web/electron client that runs on all platforms, but at least last I checked ONLY that one client reaaally supports e2e encryption and other modern features. Xmpp definitely feels like a more diverse project while matrix feels like it’s nearly completely lead by riot/element. Which definitely is a bit concerning to me.
I'm a huge fan. I run a pleroma instance for myself.
Once lemmy fully supports federation I'll host that myself too.
I think this is my goal. If the federation works the way it does in my brain (which is both broken and dumb), it'd be cool to have my own instance and still shitpost here with that.
I don't post very often, so I didn't even think to mention it.
bilb@p.bilb.info
added you. Feel free to look into the account I follow to find leftist accounts
What do you host it on? I've been considering hosting an instance but I only have an old 2007 laptop to spare atm.
I rent a dedicated server from a hosting provider with a buddy of mine, but I think pleroma would work on something like a raspberry pi. I ran a Friendica instance from a raspberry pi 3 for a while and it worked fine.
How is friendica? It looks like a facebook alternative which isn't bad but is there more to it than that?
It's good and will probably work as a microblogging platform as well as mastodon or pleroma, but it provides a lot of stuff I don't need.
How is Pleroma? I run a Mastodon instance for myself, but it's hilariously overweight for what I need/want.
I've tried to use Mastodon but it doesn't stick cause I have no interest in anything Twitter like anyways. Peer tube doesn't seem to have much of anything on it. The rest of it is to confusing for me to figure out.
Tbh I never really liked Twitter, but I liked mastodon because of the edgy communities. Peertube has like nothing except if you are french speaking where there are a lot of stuff. The rest is either almost dead (pixelfed...) either really like mastodon (pleroma...)
Yeah 75% is just additional Twitter alternatives and most of those integrate with Mastodon. Seems like a lot of people chasing Mastodon's success.
There's a good French community of PeerTube?
yeah, because it is developed by a french association. For example you have skeptikon.fr that is a big skeptic community (for some reason skepticism is really active in french philosophic youtube) and video.lemediatv.fr that is the peertube instance of a leftist news outlet (that is a cooperative). It is somewhat a more lefty version of TYT.
Yeah I'd love to see more on peertube, the only good instance I know is https://tilvids.com but some of the creators are just mirrors.
I like the concept of federation for communication services, with email serving as the classic example. But usually I'm not sure what the benefit of federation is. E.g. for this Lemmy instance I'm typing on, what benefit is there to it joining a larger, de-centralized network? I guess I just have not seen the light, yet.
it has a gain in term of critical mass. It is some network theory but well. For a community to stay alive, there is a critical mass of user below which the site will die because nothing happens. (if there is 2 new posts a day here, you'll not come back). With federation, the critical mass is on the network and not on the individual website. Meaning 15 small websites can survive.
I love federation but I never thought about that. That makes a lot of sense on top of the other reasons.
also I would like to clarify lemmy isn't federated yet, it will probably be another month or two.
Which ever instance you sign up for does not matter that much. joinmastodon.org has a short list of instance. The instance I'm on is radical.town. DM me for an invite.
Tusky app is ok. I use it on a daily basis. Where did you register ? It is similar to twitter. You have an account on which you can write messages (like tweets). Other people can like, share, or comment your tweets. In your home feed, you get every tweets of people you are subscribed to, and the tweets they shared, in an chronological order. You have notifications when people answer, share or like your messages. In the "local feed", you get every public message by people on your instance (meaning on the same website as you), and on the federated timeline, you get every message posted on the network that your instance is federated with (it is a bit technical, but no need to understand, in there you have a lot of messages.
You can follow me if you want to have hot leftist takes : @marsxyz@fedi.toniotti.be
As far as mobile apps go, I like Fedilab. I think I tried Tusky a while back and it must not have left a positive impression on me.
Yeah I love fedilab. I love having as much in one as possible and that is perfectly realized in fedilab. The ability to switch between what is basically twitter, youtube, and instagram as if I was just switching profiles is jsut so cool and futuristic feeling.
Federation only is interesting and useful if you actually want to associate with others. Is it actually useful for this Lemmy instance to be federated with others? I mean, this community got banned from Reddit. Are others going to be interested in federating with us?
I can definitely see how there may be other instances which have a different focus but are not otherwise incompatible with chapo.chat. Letting members of those instances participate in discussions here is probably a good thing.
You see this kind of thing happen on the existing fediverse already. There are mastodon and pleroma instances set up for specific groups or interests, but they all communicate more or less freely with each other.
This way, the larger network does not live or die by one central point of failure.
See but if federation only just provides portability of usernames so you can carry your clout across lemmy instances, honestly WHO CARES ABOUT THAT
I didn't need an account to shitpost on 4chan and bunkerchan, and need everyone to know who I was.
Shitposting on an anonymous board is a different use case. Being identifiable across servers is useful in its own way that goes beyond clout chasing.
Being identifiable across servers
See, but again who cares about this. What is it meant to provide? Trolls aren't going to care if their handles are federated across instances, and the only reason anyone that is acting in good faith would care is for clout. Same thing with federating topics and comments and posts. If I wanted to know what one community thought about a topic, I'd go there. Seeing what some moron on another lemmy instance is thinking, and having that show up in this lemmy instance is just not interesting to me.
Anonymous conversations have their place certainly, but in other cases it's useful to know that you're talking to the same person you were yesterday. If you see posts from bilb@chapo.chat posting on teawareenthusiasts.club, you know it's the same account posting here. That's not about clout, it's about being able to have coherent conversations over a period of time across a network. That said, if you're unconvinced of the benefits of being in a decentralized network rather than a monolithic siloed service that's another discussion.
. That said, if you’re unconvinced of the benefits of being in a decentralized network rather than a monolithic siloed service that’s another discussion.
See but we already are decentralized, just by the very fact that chapo.chat is its own DNS name, running on its own infrastructure, as opposed to being a community run on someone else's infrastructure (like it was on Reddit).
Federation is not decentralization. You are conflating terms.
Federation, in super simple terms, is like interconnecting different platforms doing similar things, like crossplay does for games, right?
Yes crossplay is a good example of federation, when it comes to identity management. Each network (xbox live, PSN, PC) has their own identity providers (steam, xbox, psn) and crossplay allows people from different networks to play on the same game session.
This is seperate from the discussion around interoperability, meaning the sharing of gamestate between different versions of the same game, running on these different platforms. It's an important distinction, that I think sometimes people take the interoperability concept and roll it up into the term federation.
Everyone keeps saying it's like e-mail, which makes sense to me.
In some ways, yes, in other ways, no.
SMTP is a protocol laid out by the IETF in RFCs. Everyone got together and hammered out the protocol, and everyone agreed to abide by the RFCs so that data could be interchanged between all the independent systems. That's why you can send an e-mail to a Gmail account from an MSN account and it will transit the network and end up on the other end, still able to be processed and displayed.
So, to me, that means that there is interoperability. That's what the IETF strives for.
Lemmy is talking about using ActivePub, which is is being developed by the W3C. It's sort of like the IETF, but at a higher OSI layer. So, that's why they talk about "federation" - so that different lemmy instances can exchange data via ActivityPub. Since I work at a lower layer in the OSI model, that's why I am focusing on the identity federation part of Lemmy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_identity - and why I don't think it's all that useful to have identities persist across lemmy instances.
Maybe I played a bit fast and loose with those words, but federation enables decentralization while allowing these services to talk to each other. I know you find the latter part pointless, but yeah.
Federation does not enable decentralization. Federation enables the sharing of resources across different independent systems. This is used to remove duplication of resources. Identities, for example.
If you see posts from bilb@chapo.chat posting on teawareenthusiasts.club, you know it’s the same account posting here.
Why would I care that it's the same user. I only care about the content of their post. Why would I care to know that bilb on chapo has great posts on chapo.chat but has absolutely the worst taste in teaware patterns? It's not worth the technical infrastructure and code to implement
If you don't care to socialize beyond reactions to content, then yes, identity doesn't matter. I like the idea of creating and fostering relationships between people though.
because my identity is metadata I'd rather control. federation allows me to set up my own lemmy instance (for myself, close comrades, etc) and choose what gets shared with other instances.
fully separated identities fragments that data instead and splits control over a bunch of parties.
There is 2 points in federation. 1. No central authority controlling what you can and cannot post. If you don't like the rule, go to another website in the federation or make your own. 2. It lowers the critical mass necessary on each website to be able to survive.
It would also allow other users to post here, and us to post in other places. It'd allow more potential users to be drawn to the site, since if they see people tagged as @thomasdankara with chapo.chat at the end, other users might come check us out.
Worst case, it'd let us crosspost from other communities to shit on people.
it is useful in that the critical mass of each individual website (or instance in fediverse jargon) is smaller due to the fact interactions come from the network.
The Fediverse is dominated by leftists, so yes. Other instances can decide for themselves whether they wish to federate with us. If they do, great, we'll be a source of constant amusement for them and more liberal instances might have their users radicalize. If not, oh well, we don't want to federate with reactionary instances anyways.
It also means we can have dedicated instances for particular tendencies so people can have their own ideological breathing room, people who dislike the rules here can have their own space without splitting the userbase, et cetera.
The Fediverse is dominated by leftists
A big chunk of it is, anyway. Did gab remove their activitypub federation?
Yeah they went federated and got immediately blocked by nearly every single instance. They got fucked so hard they went back to their little troll hole for good. I also think I remember them having a big fight with the only other instance that allowed federation by them that resulted in them blocking each other but I cannot back that up right now.
for the end user it's transparent. You tweet on your local mastodon instance ran by a friend or idk, and speak with someone on a totally different instance that is hosted at the other side of the world. Just like emails. There is a short presentation video if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE
