Digesting the "Child Safety on Federated Social Media" Report
That's actually a really cool incentive. Lemmy seems like a relatively easy target, too, since each node can help stabilize the overall network.
Removed
Musk is a Freemason confirmed.
Jump
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Please don't spam our community.
On that, we agree. While what we have been Spectra and Diode and the handful between us is...fairly decent? Discovery still absolutely sucks.
I think one thing that works well for Lemmy is in how its communities are structured. Like this one! A bunch of servers all connect to the same space, and people passing through trade thoughts, questions, and bits of news.
I feel like part of the problem is that PeerTube has no such communal structure. You just kind of... stumble around and try to watch videos and hope it's interesting. In fact, in the past, people shared their videos through Reddit communities like /r/PeerTubeVideos. It's like we had to bootstrap it with something else.
Maybe we should do the same with Lemmy in the interim?
Hi, so I run Spectra, and would like to weigh in.
I wrote this piece a few years back about the content situation on PeerTube.
TL;DR, PeerTube has a significant problem with spam. I'm not just talking about spammy comments, although it has those, too. No, I'm talking about the videos. For example: there's an option within PeerTube that, when enabled, basically just automatically subscribes to every server that subscribes to yours. I let that setting run for a while, and connected to maybe a hundred random instances over time.
It was all garbage. Either you get far-right propaganda videos, actual nazi videos, or super random weird stuff of little value. Want a video in Hindi for a restaurant with a two-second video featuring a French TV commercial transcribed from VHS? How about that, mixed with thousands of random snippets of media that you will never care about or relate to?
A lot of PeerTube admins kind of informally got together and said: you know what, this is crap, no one is ever going to enjoy this. So, we connected our communities together. We have to do our research on which servers are good, and which ones just serve up bullshit. Good community stewardship, in this case, requires us to do our homework on which servers are worth following. Instead of following as many servers as possible, we're more inclined to check and see if the place is putting out original stuff, has decent guidelines, and isn't spouting hateful crap everywhere. To build community organically, we have to do so with intention.
The reason that you're not seeing your videos in any of the places you've listed is because their servers don't follow ours. This doesn't mean that your videos cannot be seen through federation - it's just that, in any of those places, no one is subscribed to you, and that server isn't subscribed to our server. So, your channel and videos aren't likely to show up there, unless somebody actively chooses to subscribe to you.
I agree that PeerTube is seriously lacking in some kind of Community Discovery feature, and would be greatly enhanced by it.
While this thread has some interesting points in it, the majority of it is chaotic and confrontational. I'm closing this, as I believe we need to have a bit of a cooldown.
God, that book sucked. I read it out of curiosity, but it was trash.
Just cross your arms, smile wryly, and comment on how pathetic the Interviewer's pen is. Cheap material, runny ink, a grip that's painful to hold. Wish him good luck in taking notes on subsequent interviews.
Then lean in, and say "But, you know? I've got a premium writing utensil. It's crafted in the Netherlands by a Space Age engineering firm. It's designed to fit comfortably between your fingers. And the Indian ink that runs through it glistens and glides smoothly through a specially crafted tip."
Pull out a business card with absolutely beautiful handwriting on it. Just as he expresses surprise and interest, sigh and say "But... It's really not for you. It's really more of a thing for your boss, or your boss's boss."
Start getting up to leave, and wait for him to come running after you.
So, the short answer is: different platforms were developed at different times with different goals in mind. It just so happened that something OStatus-based (now AP), with a focus on microblogging, became the popular thing. And basically everything else in the space had to build compatibility for the way it did things.
Digging in a bit more, there are a few things that really contributed to Mastodon's success over other efforts at the time:
- A reasonably polished interface. Many other projects at the time looked worse.
- A third-party API for clients that was easy to use. Prior to Mastodon, third-party clients absolutely sucked. Additionally, projects like Diaspora didn't have a formal API for years. Most people at the time were just shrugging it off and settling for responsive web layouts for mobile.
- Word-of-mouth marketing. Mastodon bootstrapped GNU Social's existing community to make something new, and then began getting people from Tumblr and a bunch of other online communities to try it. Early Mastodon was quirky and weird and fun, and the public-square focus of microblogging didn't really hurt the fact that you didn't really know anybody when you got there. You, an early adopter, would just wade on in and be your weird self.
Up until this point, every attempt failed at one of these three things. Diaspora had an okay interface, and great word-of-mouth, but no support for mobile. (They also had other problems in development, but that's another story). Friendica had an ugly interface, a brilliant backend, and a very small hobbyist community. Mike Macgirvin also has a habit of spinning off new projects from old ones, to chase some wild hair he's got regarding how to do something new. So, you have kind of a fragmented community of "kind-of" supported platforms and no marketing.
Anyway, to the point: while the fediverse does have some NIH going on, many of the foundational technologies are shared, like Webfinger and ActvityPub. Contrast this with Tent, which really threw the baby out with the bathwater, and tried to do everything from the ground up with just two guys building it. It didn't end well.
Anyway, sorry, rant over. 😛
I think I posted it in this community a year or two ago, but that was way before the Reddit migration happened. Here it is: https://lemmy.ml/post/173958
Yep, you're preaching to the choir. I ended up writing an article with some ideas of what goals need to be met: https://deadsuperhero.com/2022/02/towards-a-greater-federated-architecture/
Honestly, I think this is the real selling point of the fediverse, at least for developers. There's no incentive to force people to use Official Mobile Clients™. You can literally spin up something (meaning a fediverse server) locally, if you want, and test against that until you have something that works. And as long as you stick to the API, you can build whatever you want.
Yeah, that's kind of funny. Naming things is hard.
For the most part. There's a bunch of different microblogging and macroblogging platforms that all talk to each other through ActivityPub, but of course there are occasionally quirks when it comes to compatibility.
You know, it's not impossible. But, very few ActivityPub platforms actually support the Client to Server protocol in any meaningful way. Most platforms use some variation of the Mastodon APIs.
Woah, is that a Plan9 / 9Front client?! 🤯
Yeah, that's definitely a reaction I saw as well. At least it's not a web browser? 😛
This is something I'd really love to see, as well. While I'd say that the default UI on Lemmy is "functional", in that it gets the job done...I would love if the backend could support alternative bundled frontends. This is something that Pleroma supports, and it's a great feature. It's something I wish more Fediverse software could officially support.
hoverZoom+
This is really good feedback. I wonder what that would take? 🤔 Is this something where the app needs to be updated with some property, or does this need to be fixed on HoverZoom+'s side?
I dunno if it's time wasted, a bunch of hobbyists built cool things that work on old computers, across a variety of systems and platforms.
It's a bit of an unknown, since the service is a proprietary black box. With that being said, my guess:
None of those things are impossible or out of reach...but, collecting a new database of hashes is challenging. Where do you get it from? How is it stored? Do you allow the public to access the hash data correctly, or do you keep it secret like all the other solutions do?
I'm imagining a solution where servers aggregate all of this data up to a dispatch platform like the one described above, possibly run by a non-profit or NGO, which then dispatches the data to NCMEC directly.
The other thing to keep in mind is that solutions like photoDNA are HUGE. I'm talking like hundreds of thousands of pieces of reported media per year. It's something that would require a lot of uptime, and the ability to handle a significantly high amount of requests on a daily basis.