indeed, they have a public firehose, as of this PR: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/pull/205

and this site’s code which consumes it is very short and conveniently not minified: https://whenitrains.glitch.me/script.mjs

for one thing, a lot of “non-tech” people do manage to buy their own domain names somehow.

but, also: domains-as-handles doesn’t actually mean everyone needs to get their own domain. For instance, if/when feddit.de adopts ATP, you can be @sexy-peach.feddit.de on bluesky (and everywhere else that uses ATP).

🎉 thanks to the developers and everyone who helped!

one bug i noticed after the upgrade: my notifications page shows unread notifications for (what i guess is) every reply i’ve ever received which was later deleted. the count in the bell icon only reflected the actual new unread notifications I had received since I last looked, but when i click to view my unread notifications then all of these old ones about deleted messages appear to be unread now.

This is a nice overview of this absurd situation, but Tim Bray’s conclusions are a little surprising to me.

Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever in certain government offices with addresses near Washington DC and Beijing, and quite likely one or two sketchy Peter-Thiel-financed “data aggregation” companies. That’s extremely hard to prevent but isn’t really the problem: The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets.

Here Bray appears to be missing the fact that those people will often end up with access to those Thiel-financed private intelligence services that will have the full-text search, while the rest of us won’t. Making things public and pretending they’re private by shunning search effectively lobotomizes everyone who abides by this custom, while still allowing the worst people to have the capability (and not only the ones working in state intelligence agencies).

What success looks like: I’d like it if nobody were ever deterred from conversing with people they know for fear that people they don’t know will use their words to attack them. I’d like it to be legally difficult to put everyone’s everyday conversations to work in service to the advertising industry. I’d like to reduce the discomfort people in marginalized groups feel venturing forth into public conversation. (emphasis mine)

This is a conflation of almost entirely unrelated issues. The first half of the first sentence is talking about non-public conversations. The solution there is obviously to use e2e encryption, so that even the servers involved can’t see it, and to build protocols and applications that don’t make it easy for users to accidentally make private things public (ActivityPub was not designed for private communication, it was designed for publishing, so, it is unlikely to ever be good at this). The second sentence is about regulating the ad industry… ok, cool, an agreeable non-sequitur. But the last sentence is talking about public conversation… and in the context of the second half of the first sentence, it carries the strong implication that Bray somehow entertains the fantasy that conversation can somehow be public and yet be uninhibited by “fear that people they don’t know will use their words to attack them”.

Contrary to what the title suggests, it sounds like they aren’t actually planning on implementing ActivityPub on medium itself, but rather they are just launching a new medium-branded mastodon instance. 🥱

serious investors

🤦

aside from the other tragically confused bits here, fwiw the BDFL of mastodon thankfully came to his senses and dropped the word “toot” six months ago

Happy Sysadmin Day today to all Lemmy instance operators! Thanks for keeping things running.

Arguably USENET was actually the beginning of the fediverse, in 1979 :)

The quiz says “On May 18, 2008 🐣 the first public post appeared on a site called identi.ca powered by free software. The idea behind it was that anyone could download the source code and run their own social network connected to other nodes. This was the beginning of Fediverse.”

It doesn’t link to that first post though, because the first ~5 years of identica posts are mostly gone now (modulo what you can find on the wayback machine) 😞

I’m not certain, but if I remember correctly laconica (the software behind identica, which today lives on as GNU Social) instances couldn’t actually federate at the very beginning, but that was its goal from the start so I guess May 18 is a reasonable enough day to celebrate if that is actually when identica launched. I wish I could see that actual first post, though!

First, I want to say thank you for making Lemmy and for running this instance!

But, this “promotion initiative” strikes me as questionable idea for two reasons:

1. Having many instances hosted on the same infrastructure defeats a lot of the purpose of the federated model. If/when this infrastructure goes down for whatever reason, many instances will be affected.

2. If I understand your offer correctly, you’re actually only offering free hosting for one year? So, after a year, if the admins aren’t able to provide their own infrastructure, will you stop running their instances? This seems like it will inevitably leave a lot of users with a very negative impression of lemmy, when all of their posts and comments evaporate in to thin air.

Maybe the overlap between the set of people who are capable of running their own server and the set of people who would use a service like this is larger than I’m imagining, but I’m quite certain there are a lot of people in the second set who are not in the first.

It seems to me that a better approach would be to focus on making it as easy as possible to deploy lemmy, to encourage more instances on diverse infrastructure. (I see you already already have Docker, Ansible, and AWS instructions; as an aside, I recommend replacing the AWS instructions with a note recommending that users boycott Amazon…)

I noticed an unexpected side effect of blocking: I am apparently blocked by a user I’ve never interacted with, which I discovered because I cannot upvote their posts or comments. Is this intentional? I wish I could ask them why they blocked me, but I of course cannot message them to ask. It makes sense that blocking prevents messaging, but, why can’t I upvote their posts?!

I regret having wasted time trying to figure out what this is all about.

It’s crypto!

it is neither cryptocurrency nor cryptography

It’s blockchain!

in name only

It’s decentralized!

until you spend a few minutes looking at their architecture diagrams.

👎