Posts by blog@wedistribute.org
 (DIR) Post #9iEFxNhXWGmyOUcNGK by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-04-27T09:49:42.959334Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       As a platform, Hubzilla holds a tremendous amount of versatility and depth in what it can do. Mike Macgirvin, the platform’s creator, has famously quipped that the system does not  have a commercial analogue to draw comparisons to — it’s not just a social network, it’s not just a forum, it’s not just a cloud storage solution, and it’s not just a content management system.According to the definition on the project website:Hubzilla is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.So  what does that mean, and who is this for? Let’s dive in to the latest  release, and walk through this system one step at a time. There’s a lot of different features and aspects to this platform, which is  partially why it’s so difficult to apply one standard label to it.InstallationBy  default, Hubzilla runs on the LAMP stack — that’s Linux, Apache, PHP,  and MySQL. If you have any experience with setting up Wordpress, Drupal,  or a phpBB installation, you’ll feel right at home here. The project  provides no-frills instructions on how to get a standard Debian-based installation up and running.The setup checklist highlights important libraries and configuration settings, pretty much a standard expectation for apps running on the LAMP stack.If  you’re feeling adventurous, it is possible to go off of the beaten path  and substitute components — for example, you can set up an installation  that sits on top of FreeBSD + Nginx + Postgres,  and you may see significant performance gains in doing so. The caveat is that it’s up to the sysadmin to determine how best to configure those  components.Most of this setup and configuration were extremely straightforward. The  only tricky part I experienced here was in setting up a mail tool to  send out service emails for my hub. Ultimately, I settled on postfix after asking for advice.Channels and YouThe first thing to understand about Hubzilla is that every user has a channel. This is a central concept to how the whole thing works.What is a channel, exactly? Basically, it’s a space on the web that contains its own stream, one of which is populated with various objects and provides a permissions system and mechanism for subscribers. With this in mind, channels can be used for:A personal wallA celebrity or brand pageA bot that pulls content from different places on the webA group where posts are received by all membersMy channel, which was which was altered to resemble a Facebook profile.Conceptually speaking, any channel can be one of those four things. Any channel can cross-interact with any other kind of channel. It’s even possible to set up a channel to act as a feed bot, pulling in statuses and interactions from multiple sources upstream.In this case, the Friendica updates channel pulls in Git Commits, Community News, and developer group communications into a single stream.Forum ChannelsForum channels are particularly noteworthy because they are analogous to  Facebook Groups. Hubzilla uses the bang syntax, a tried and true  convention used by GNU Social and its predecessor StatusNet.Just type an exclamation mark, and you’ll be able to mention entire forums instead of individual people.That’s all you have to do, and in turn everyone that’s subscribed to the forum channel will get your post. From there, they’ll be able to send their interactions back to the relay for participants to retain each other’s responses.This  model is well-suited to ad-hoc group communication, and as a result the community around Hubzilla uses them effectively. Some channels focus on playing chess, others talk about TV series, and some focus exclusively  on the project itself.The StreamHubzilla’s network stream is comparable to what you’d expect with Facebook or Diaspora. It shows all of the content coming in from your channel’s connections, and includes status updates, photos, comments, and  reshares. Because the platform is not a microblogging network, statuses are threaded together with comments.As a bonus, certain widgets can extend the functionality of how your stream  is used. For example, you can filter statuses by Privacy Groups  (comparable to Diaspora’s Aspects) or you could filter by hashtags or dates, or by contact affinity. One  of the most useful widgets I use also connects me directly to forum channels, so that I can easily interact with them without leaving my stream.Incidentally, it’s possible to write entirely custom widgets, but we’ll get into that later.Privacy ArchitectureFrom the ground up, the platform is built around user privacy. The core  design philosophy revolves around giving users a permission system so  that they can define who should receive something, and who should see  it.This is no small undertaking — every feature and every function ties into two things: permissions, and decentralized access. Hubzilla is capable of  defining who is eligible to receive a piece of data, and who is allowed  to access a resource that lives in a particular space online.Decentralized AccessThe decentralized access component of Hubzilla is called OpenWebAuth, and it’s something that no other federated web platform currently offers.Most traditional systems rely on privately sending everything between  mutually connected servers — status updates, images, files, videos, and  likes are all pushed back and forth through a relay system. This can cause significant scaling issues, and as a side effect, most federated  systems are constrained to send only a few types of activity objects to  each other.Hubzilla, by contrast, only sends status updates, interactions (editing a post,  updating your profile), likes, and messages. Everything else lives natively on the host server, and if someone wants to access something  from you, they’ll have to visit you.The beauty of this is that Hubzilla is designed to recognize who is visiting, and grant permissions as necessary. Hubs are contextually aware of who is accessing a resource, be it a page, a comment form, a wiki, or anything else the system can provide.https://video.deadsuperhero.com/videos/watch/008f9693-38cd-4784-8fea-75a73f5d015dThis experience is seamless, and can make two connected spaces on the web act as if they were one. All of the system’s features are built around this concept, meaning that you can play chess, edit a wiki, comment on someone’s photo, access a file, or message a group through someone else’s website.Nomadic IdentityHubzilla’s core is built on a concept called Nomadic Identity, and it’s something that greatly differentiates Hubzilla from other federated platforms.The idea is relatively simple: your channel does not have to be tied to a  specific domain or a particular hub. Instead, it is entirely possible to  migrate your posts, files, and contacts to another server, and you can  connect multiple channels together to act as a relay system for every  post you make.Channel CloningCloning a channel is a relatively straightforward process: export your channel and profile data, and provide it for upload when registering an account on a different server. You can decide at any time which of your cloned  channels will serve as a primary, and which will serve as a secondary relay.Both channels connect to one another and can act as relays to reshare each other’s resources, contacts, statuses, and permissions.It’s worth noting that when you post from one channel, your connected clones will relay that post on whatever hubs they’re on, and vice versa. This actually makes the platform relatively censorship-resistant, as a channel could theoretically have many clones across the federated web.Setting up a ChannelRegistration ProcessThe  initial registration process can seem intimidating at first to  newcomers. Upon registering, users are prompted to create their channel,  set permissions, then edit their profile details and start uploading  pictures. Profiles feature an extensive set of fields, most of which are  optional and can be updated at a later time.One interesting side feature of profiles is that it’s able to create “things” and append them to your profile. What exactly is a thing? It’s essentially a small object containing a few metadata fields that lives in your profile section.You can append things with verbs such as “has”, “wants”, “likes”, or “dislikes”, and you can use that to build small lists on your profile organized by those verbs.Overall, it feels a little gimmicky, but at the same time it serves as a nice stand-in for the lists you might expect on a Facebook profile. It also allows your other Hubzilla contacts to like those objects as well, without relying on a service-wide like graph.Finding ContactsOne  of the first thing you’re going to want to do when using Hubzilla is  find some channels to connect with. By default, Hubzilla connects to a  directory system of known channels who have opted in from all across the  network. It’s possible to use the directory to find active channels  based on interests as well as locations.Some channels in the directory are inactive or abandoned, but many of them are active within Hubzilla’s small, tightly-knit community. Additionally, the directory can show you all channels present on your own hub, which can be handy for people who want to use the platform to build a community of their own.Formatting ContentOut  of the box, Hubzilla uses bbcode for formatting text. For anyone that  has extensive experience in using PHP message boards (vBulletin, phpBB,  and SMF come to mind), the syntax and conventions will be  all-too-familiar.To make things a little easier, the formatting pane includes most of the buttons you would expect when writing a post, and it works as advertised.Posts in Hubzilla give the impression of being somewhere between a status update, a forum post, and a blog entry. In truth, you can easily use it for either purpose, and all posts can include HTML content, media, and attachments. Upon toggling certain features, posts can also include voting tools for proposals, and can even accept sticker responses.If writing all of your posts in BB markup isn’t in line with your tastes (hello, 2004!), don’t worry! It is also possible to switch to using Markdown by default, which ultimately requires you to type fewer characters.Tagged ContentThis platform leverages two methods for tagging: traditional hashtags, as  well as category tags. The main difference is that hashtags are used to  find all related posts that a hub knows about, whereas category tags are  more useful for providing a topical filter on your channel’s landing  page.If you end up using post tags, they’ll be displayed on your channel as a filter for similar tagged content. This is a fairly standard expectation of blogging platforms, but it’s a million times more organized than what Facebook’s timeline can offer. As a bonus, you can use these to filter subscription feeds — for example, if you’re part of Planet Gnome and only want to syndicate your Gnome-related posts over there, you can do that.ModerationIn  some circumstances, you’ll receive comments from people that you aren’t  connected to. Sometimes it’s a person who just wanted to offer their  thoughts on your post. Other times, it’s a spam bot. Hubzilla makes it  easy to moderate comments coming from people you don’t know, giving you  the opportunity to decide what to keep and what to discard.In almost every circumstance I’ve had so far, it’s been a bot. I’m vaguely reminded of how this used to happen to my old Wordpress blogs.FeaturesEventsThe platform ships with an events system, and overall it’s comparable to MeetUp or Facebook Events.Creating an event will place a marker for it on your channel’s calendar, making it easy to keep tabs of what’s going on at a monthly, weekly, and daily view. Clicking any event will bring up a lightbox with a direct link to an event’s post.One added benefit of calendar events is that they get inserted into your channel’s stream upon creation. People who can see your event can decide on their attendance, in turn adding your event to their own calendars.Photo AlbumsAt  first glance, the photo album functionality is quite similar to what  you’d expect from Facebook, DeviantArt, or even Flickr. Photos can be  sorted into individual albums, given captions, and allows users to tag  each other in pictures.If a photo contains EXIF data, Hubzilla will allow a user to show where the photo was taken using OpenStreetMap tiles. Individual albums can also be embedded into different widgets on your site, making it easy to build out an artwork showcase or a wedding gallery.One nice bonus here is that any photos that you upload to your channel will instantly be put into cloud storage, making it very easy to retrieve entire albums from a file manager.CloudOne  of the things that really sets Hubzilla apart from other communication  platforms is its inclusion of permissions-based cloud file storage. When  enabled, the system provides a DAV share that can be accessed either by  way of browser, or through your local file manager.Accessing the DAV share through the macOS Finder is trivially easy; the same is true for Windows Explorer and *nix-based file managersAs far as behavior is concerned, the use case is not unlike using Dropbox or Nextcloud. One interesting feature is that all of your photo albums are stored here as well, so it’s easy to always retrieve your pictures when needed.As a bonus, you can choose to share files in cloud storage with your contacts at the click of a button, and create a status update for a selected audience to see it.It takes a little bit of getting used to, but overall this core feature ranks as one of the more powerful and intuitive parts of the the platform. This feature can effectively replace iCloud, Google Drive, or DropBox with a decentralized solution.Calendar SyncAnother  neat aspect of Hubzilla’s cloud sharing capabilities is the ability to  sync calendars and addressbooks across various different clients. This  effectively allows Hubzilla to act as a drop-in replacement for iCloud’s  Calendar system.The web calendar and my mobile calendar showing the same event side-by-side.In my testing, I was able to connect and sync calendar events between  Android, GNU/Linux, and Hubzilla’s native web interface. There’s a great community guide that demonstrates how to treat CalDAV as a native resource in Android.But…it worked just fine in GNU/Linux…Unfortunately, I had difficulties with getting it to work for the native Calendar app on macOS, but I have no doubt that this may work in the near future — the main issue resided with how Apple’s Calendar app leverages DAV integrations. This is an area of Hubzilla that is a little bit under-documented, as the core audience at this moment is predominantly GNU/Linux users.One other neat thing is that you can import iCal feeds from other websites. This makes it possible to track events from your favorite venues or groups, and each calendar is also provided for any devices that the calendar is being synced with.The only real downside is that the Events calendar and your personal  calendar are two different systems that don’t touch each other, and some  of the functionality does not overlap between these two places. At some  point in the future, it is hoped that these two things will be bridged  together.WikiAnother great feature that integrates directly into channels is Hubzilla’s wiki  system. Users can create an indefinite amount of wikis for a given  channel, and create markdown-formatted pages for each wiki.Creating wiki pages and formatting content is fairly straightforward, and provides the basic set of features for what you’d expect from a wiki system. Pages can link together, images can be embedded from your photo albums, and changes can have a revision message included for posterity.The edit page, featuring standard markdown. One nice addition here is the ability to embed images from your Photo Album, which makes it easy to grab and reference any pictures already in storage.It’s also possible to compare changes between revisions and revert to earlier versions of a page, which could be useful in situations where multiple people are editing the same wiki.Every page reflects edits and revisions, along with information about who contributed the change.ChatroomsThe platform ships with a chatroom that people can visit in-browser.  Because Hubzilla automatically knows who the visitor is, identity is  automatically assigned and permissions are handed out.The chatroom is relatively simple, and feels like a mashup of Facebook  Messenger and IRC, and every interaction happens in real-time. The  use-case is not completely obvious in 2018, given the plethora of  dedicated messaging apps out there, but it’s still a welcome addition to  the platform.PluginsLike Wordpress or Drupal, Hubzilla also offers an extensive plugin system  that allows site admins and users to greatly increase the platform’s  functionality. Some of these plugins are purely cosmetic, such as the ability to set a default landing page for logged in users, while other plugins dramatically extend what the system is capable of doing.Hubzilla ChessAlthough the plugin largely exists as a proof-of-concept, it is entirely  possible to play a game with other Hubzilla contacts. It works as  advertised, and movements are recorded by federating comments back and  forth with the FEN notation format. As a side effect, it’s possible to rewind through the entire game history and watch the breakdown of moves.Cross-Platform FederationSome of the more interesting plugins actually pertain to Hubzilla’s ability  to federate. Out of the box, Hubzilla only federates to other instances  of itself using the Zot protocol. However, the plugin architecture allows users to federate to Diaspora (and by extension, Friendica), Mastodon, GNU Social, and anything else that manages to speak either OStatus or ActivityPub.(Left to Right) The same status as seen between Hubzilla, Diaspora, and MastodonUnfortunately, not all participants in the conversation will be able to see all of the  comments. People on Diaspora can’t see Mastodon comments, and vice  versa. This could theoretically be solved if every actor supported one  common protocol between them, but we’re still a far way off from that.Cross-PostingFor networks that don’t support direct federation, Hubzilla can act as a  client app and send over a copy of a post to networks such as Libertree,  Pump.io, Twitter, Wordpress, Dreamwidth, Livejournal, InsaneJournal,  and hypothetically any other network that someone writes a plugin for.Building With HubzillaAs one of the more active theme developers on the Hubzilla platform, I feel comfortable with developing themes for it. There are several layers to this system that are noteworthy, and as someone who has developed many themes for the platform over the years, I feel that I can provide some special insight here.Creating a New ThemeBy default, the platform ships with a Bootstrap-derived base theme called redbasic. It’s a relatively no-frills theme that provides many views and templates for the core Hubzilla experience.The redbasic theme, featuring very little customization.Because of the platform’s high dependency on this theme, it is generally  recommended to write a “derived theme”, which overrides defaults based  on what is present in your theme folder (CSS, JS, templates, views,  etc). When I started getting into Hubzilla theme development, I used this guide to build my first derived theme.The Layout SystemHubzilla ships with its own templating framework, called Comanche. The project describes it as such:Comanche is a markup language similar to bbcode with which to create elaborate and complex web pages by assembling them from a series of  components — some of which are pre-built and others which can be defined  on the fly. Comanche uses a Page Decription Language to create these  pages.Here’s a quick demonstration of how I’m using it on the Network page in my theme. It lives in $themename/pdl/mod_network.pdl,  and overrides the defaults provided by the base theme that it’s  extending. Keep in mind, this only affects the layout of the Network  page. Other views will need to be modified by their own respective mod_{view}.pdl fileA color-coded legendRegions and widgets, matched up with the color code.In practice, it isn’t all that different from Drupal’s regions and blocks  system, or the widget framework used by Wordpress. It’s incredibly easy to use, and frontend developers can drop their preferred widgets into specific regions.Any existing widget can be inserted into a region via a Comanche template,  and it’s possible to even write your own and use it with the template  system.Writing Custom WidgetsOne of the lesser-explored areas of the platform involves the possibility  of writing custom widgets. Doing this can greatly extend the  functionality of the interface, and fundamentally change how the whole  thing works.A custom user menu that I wrote over a weekendAs someone who doesn’t write a whole lot of PHP, figuring out the  conventions for loading and rendering specific object field data took a  lot of figuring out. Basically, you’ll need two files: one .tpl file for providing a markup template, and one .php file for populating that template with values from database fields.Once you’ve got that set up, you’re in business. Just load the widget into a region on your theme. In my case, it was [widget=usermenu][/widget]. Some trial and error was involved in properly building the channel-specific  URLs for each link, and some additional logic still needs to be written to hide certain menu items from visitors. As a first attempt, though, I was pretty satisfied.Web PagesAny CMS wouldn’t be complete without the capability to create pages, and  Hubzilla leverages all of the conventions I’ve just highlighted for that  purpose.Every single page can have use its own layouts, blocks, widgets, and menus to build any kind of page you want. Additionally, all of this can hook into data provided by Hubzilla’s extensive internal API, meaning that you can populate UI elements with data that lives in your channels.Working with the Page / Block / Widget paradigm is similar to how Drupal or Wordpress approach this problem, but the interfaces for building these different elements can sometimes feel counter-intuitive.It’s not always clear when you should develop a block with an HTML content type, or when you should build a block with something else. Because they can all be intermingled together within a page, it’s not entirely clear whether that matters.CommunityLast but not least, I’d like to talk about the Hubzilla community. It is a  rather small group, with a few hundred installations and a couple  thousand active users. Much of this community has relied on organic  growth, with virtually no advertising, promotion, or hype to speak of.One neat thing is that Hubzilla dogfoods itself for all of its community operations. The project announces its new releases through one channel, community developers talk about their projects through another, and a Support Forum exists to help people who are hosting their own hubs.The Hubzilla Support Forum is one of the best places to ask for help on incredibly domain-knowledge-specific issues. As a bonus, the entire community infrastructure is also federated, since it all sits on top of Hubzilla.As far as developer empowerment is concerned, the Hubzilla community is  second to none. It is very common to reach out to the community with a  request for help, and receive detailed advice the same day that you ask for it. This applies to inquiries ranging from “Why is this badge not updating?” to “How do I hook into specific database fields for a custom plugin that I’m writing?”For all of the endless platitudes about “The Open Source Community”  supporting itself, Hubzilla actually embodies the majority of its positive virtues. A community of people are using a platform and hacking on it together collaboratively, and very little drama exists within the community itself.VerdictMy overall ruling on this system is obviously going to be biased; I have  been running Hubzilla on my personal server for the past few years, and  have followed its development for a very long time.I’m absolutely blown away at everything this system provides and is capable of. The fact that so many of its bespoke technologies are passed over in favor of other solutions feels downright criminal. So much of what  this system provides surpasses what other federated platforms have even  begun to think about — aside from Friendica, virtually none of the other popular federated systems even support organized photo albums, and most can only speak one federation protocol.Hubzilla still has some rough edges, specifically when it comes to mapping  resources that are intended to be accessed through different endpoints.  One of my biggest frustrations is the fact that it actually ships with two calendar systems — one for events, the other for CalDAV. It has been  suggested that eventually events will be synced between the two of  them, and I’m willing to overlook such shortcomings because of what the  platform and community already provide.Who is this for?At this time, Hubzilla is best suited towards people who want to host  their own websites that can also act as a cloud storage provider as well  as a decentralized social communication platform. It is meant for the  homesteaders of the Internet generation, people who want to withdraw  from third-party services and data providers.The good:Highly customizable: views, themes, and templates can be completely written from scratchIf you know how to install Wordpress, you probably know how to install Hubzilla.Content Management features that include web pages, a wiki, file storage, status updates, comments, and photo albums.Identity Management works ridiculously well.An extensive plugin system that can be used for anything, from HTML5 games to mapping systems to git repositoriesYou get cloud storage, address book sync, and calendar sync for freeA responsive interface that works well on mobile devicesA full suite of social networking features — groups, statuses, photo albums, mood reactions, voting tools, pokes, filtering, blocking, tagging, directories, chatrooms, and moreAn extremely engaged community that isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty in answering questions and investigating problemsThe bad:The initial signup and setup process can feel somewhat intimidatingDocumentation is a mixed bag. Some feature pages hold very little documentation, and you’re left to explore hook listsAlthough the block / widget / theme system is highly intuitive, the Pages system isn’t super user-friendly yetAside from file management, integrating DAV resources inside of macOS seems like a non-starter for nowThe ugly:Although it’s not hard to set up manual integration points for your OS, nobody  has written OS-level integrations for Hubzilla yet. Gnome Online Accounts, for example, is far more likely to provide first-class  integrations with NextCloud or Twitter.Although it offers a Twitter-like API that can theoretically be used by some  desktop and mobile apps, nobody has yet developed a featureful mobile application specifically for Hubzilla.For some reason, this project gets passed over again and again in favor of  platforms that can’t even do 1/10th of what Hubzilla does.
       
 (DIR) Post #9iLWwzCXfUf1jhEgjI by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-04-30T22:03:06.596527Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Purism, the popular startup behind the Librem line of coreboot-enabled computers, recently announced the launch of Librem One, a new subscription service offering secure communication systems. The announcement is a hybrid between collecting signups for the main service, and a crowdfunding campaign for the extended features Purism wishes to offer.A cute, vaguely euphamistic campaign video talking about privacy.The Ecosystem PlayThis announcement is interesting, if only for the fact that it marks a new developmental milestone in Purism's history as a computer company. With the advent of the release of the new Librem 5 phone, along with the upcoming PureOS Store, signifies an end-to-end market solution that covers hardware, applications, and the cloud."Purism does hardware, software, applications, and now—with Librem One—services."By creating an ecosystem that advances social good, societal freedom, personal privacy, and the best security, Purism is changing the world for the better.Librem One siteThe OfferingLibrem One currently offers four main feature components: Chat, Mail, VPN, and Social networking. If this seems familiar, it's probably because the service somewhat mirrors iCloud, except the services are comprised of Free Software and allow for decentralized communication.Chat - powered by the Matrix messaging protocol (most famously used by Riot), this recalls some of the design sensibilities that came out of a blog post called Banquets and Barbeques, where it was decided to develop separate mobile apps for personal messaging and group chat experiences. In addition, the campaign page claims that XMPP support is coming.Mail - likely to be a bog-standard offering with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP support. It might be nice to see Purism invest in a custom web interface for something like Rainloop or even NextCloud Mail in the future.Tunnel - the app itself appears to be a bespoke frontend for OpenVPNSocial - Librem One Social is a flagship Mastodon instance, which uses ActivityPub to chat with the rest of the fediverse.We bundle all the tools together for you to replace the privacy invading, locked-in, exploitative big-tech services. Putting you in charge of your digital life.Librem One siteThere are also a number of stretch goals available that intend to add further features and functionality to the Librem One platform, such as NextCloud-based file storage, contact and file backup, a virtual phone number, and a crypto payment system.We're excited for the company, and can't wait to see how this pans out.
       
 (DIR) Post #9jLiREQRa28WYaTrw8 by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-05-30T22:03:55.968502Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       In a surprising move, Gab, the controversial online platform primarily known for its alt-right community, has issued a press release stating an intent to change their entire platform to a Mastodon base. In other words, Gab will soon be joining the fediverse.We are also finalizing a fresh redesign of the Gab interface. Once these two things are done, we will start porting over all existing Gab data. During this time we will invite Gabbers to beta test New Gab and give us feedback. Once Gabbers give us the go ahead we will finalize the transition and push it to Gab.com. All of these steps will occur over the next few weeks. Gab Press ReleaseA proposed mockup from the press releaseWord of the transition initially spread through a passive-aggressive tweet made by Gab on May 15th, as Gab made idle threats to potentially reboot itself to circumvent being restricted from both the Apple and Google Play app stores.https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1128874408435625984Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, is not amused.Remember that Gab is a sinking ship and they're basically grabbing onto Mastodon like a parasite in a desperate attempt to get attention from the "drama" of doing so. Torba has no self-awareness to see how pathetic it looks that his master race ass is incompetent at making a working website so he has to resort to using software made by a Jew instead. App devs will block their domains, server admins will block their domains, and that'll be the end of that.It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Gab has attempted to fork an open source project or flirted with some form of decentralization. Not too long ago, Gab forked the Brave browser and replaced the Basic Attention Token with Bitcoin. Prior to that, Gab made a failed bid to launch its own ICO.In practice, many community instances within the fediverse will likely block Gab as a provider, as a means of shielding users from hate speech and trolling raids. On the other hand, a handful of instances like freespeechextremist might instead choose a more permissive path, and allow Gab users to connect without any restrictions.
       
 (DIR) Post #9kJrEGRnlRPkZC7xKK by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-06-28T22:25:06.783112Z
       
       8 likes, 13 repeats
       
       Pleroma, the Elixir-based fediverse communication platform, has finally pushed out a 1.0 stable release. This is the culmination of many months of hard work from about a dozen or so active contributors, all poking and prodding at the underlying codebase and discussing the best path forward.The end game for us is to teach you (yes, all of you) how to build a resilient and safe federated Social Web.  we don’t have all the answers, but we have a basic roadmap for getting from here to  that point.Kaniini, one of Pleroma's developersThis release includes numerous fixes and improvements; one of the highlights includes the capability to create and vote on Mastodon-compatible federated polls.A poll in Pleroma, courtesy of Lain's blogOther improvements include a shiny new documentation site, as well as OTP releases, which aim to provide better Elixir / Erlang compatibility for deployment purposes.There's a lot of exciting developments in store for future releases. Although they haven't been officially defined as milestones yet, the Pleroma devs are taking stock of what developments need to happen next - there's possibly some talk about adding federated groups, and Kaniini has expressed an interest in implementing Object Capabilities (OCAP) as a security improvement to Pleroma's ActivityPub implementation. In time, this might replace the HTTP-Signatures method that most ActivityPub implementations currently use. Kaniini has a Patreon available here, if you're interested in supporting them in this effort.Anyway, this is a very exciting step forward for the Pleroma project! Instance admins are advised to upgrade, and newbies can grab the source code and set up their own instances from here.
       
 (DIR) Post #9kLagGP6D4lldRY3zk by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-06-29T18:29:06.627054Z
       
       2 likes, 3 repeats
       
       As media applications begin to emerge and thrive within the fediverse ecosystem, the question of how to financially support the creators using those platforms has been raised. How do you donate to someone making your favorite videos on PeerTube, or a musician putting out work through Funkwhale? And how might you make recurring donations to the people you want to support?Short of suggesting building crypto wallets into fediverse apps, few other solutions have materialized, until now. Elliot Beriot, the creator of Funkwhale, has unveiled an intriguing solution called Retribute.The concept is relatively simple: Retribute can be authorized against user accounts on various federated platforms. parse metadata in profiles, and then find the appropriate donation methods for a given user account, such as PayPal, Patreon, LibrePay, or OpenCollective.The Retribute prototype, authorized against a Mastodon account, parsing the donation links of contacts.Right now, Retribute only connects with Funkwhale, Mastodon, and PeerTube. In the future, more platforms may be supported, provided some kind of integration or authorization is possible for each of them.Because of the complexity and scale of the issue, Retribute can’t work as single app or service. Instead, it will rely on a set of several components and parts that will, together, provide a solution.Eliot Berriot, Funkwhale's creatorThe goal is to build a platform that automates the acceptance of fan contributions for works. Some of the concepts being explored in the future will involve a lightweight protocol, along with budgeting pre-calculated amounts for donation splits between your contacts. Eliot seems confident that people won't need to change how their works are hosted, emphasizing a solution where people making works and people supporting works wouldn't have to do much to set things up. We're excited to see somebody double down on this, as it aims to tackle an age-old problem.Check out the prototype here: https://app.retribute.me/
       
 (DIR) Post #9kLuq5PNwYbdVqdx6u by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-06-29T22:14:59.163066Z
       
       2 likes, 4 repeats
       
       Framasoft, the French free software organization behind projects such as PeerTube (among many others) is currently raising funds for their latest initiative, an events platform called Mobilizon.[we want to create] free/libre software that will allow communities to create their own  spaces to publish events, in order to better emancipate themselves from  tech giants. We want to develop a digital common, that everyone can make their own, which respects privacy and activism by design.Mobilizon fundraiser pageBilling itself as "A free and federated tool to get our events off Facebook", Mobilizon in theory could replace Facebook Events as well as MeetUp groups. As a platform, it's based on Pleroma, but geared specifically towards events and group functionality. Given the platform's base origin, and the fact that it intends to support ActivityPub, some interesting conclusions emerge. Aside from federating with other meetup-like platforms like GetTogether (which hasn't adopted ActivityPub quite yet), it's possible that many types of federated apps might adopt the same activity types.There has been growing interest in the possibility for platforms like Mastodon and Pleroma to adopt a formal groups feature, and the possibility of federated events could mean that both features might end up getting adopted by the wider fediverse as a result.Since Mobilizon has blown past the €50,000 (Milestone 3) point in their campaign already, here's the features they intend to adopt below:Additionally, Framasoft has already done some of the leg-work on UX design studies and developed some graphic design assets ahead of time. The two visual designers working on the project are Marie-Cécile Godwin Paccard, and Geoffrey Dorne, with some contributors from PeerTube to bring in code development work.In all, this is a pretty interesting development, and we wish Team Mobilizon the best with their efforts!
       
 (DIR) Post #9kf8llKUMa4eFVmz68 by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-07-09T04:50:35.386916Z
       
       1 likes, 10 repeats
       
       The days of OStatus are numbered. The venerable protocol has served as a glue between many different types of servers since the early days of the Fediverse, connecting StatusNet (now GNU Social) to Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Pleroma.Now that many fediverse platforms support ActivityPub as a successor protocol, Mastodon appears to be drawing a line in the sand. In a Patreon update, Eugen Rochko writes:...OStatus...has overstayed its welcome in the code...and now that most of the network uses ActivityPub, it's time for it to go. Eugen Rochko, Mastodon creatorThe pull request to remove Pubsubhubbub and Salmon, two of the main components of OStatus, has already been merged into Mastodon's master branch.Some projects will be left in the dark as a side effect of this. GNU Social and PostActiv, for example, both only communicate using OStatus. While some discussion exists regarding adopting ActivityPub for GNU Social, and a plugin is in development, it hasn't been formally adopted yet. We just hope that the Free Software Foundation's instance gets updated in time!
       
 (DIR) Post #9ohYvYK1Wk6PUwjyYS by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-11-07T00:21:31.046409Z
       
       3 likes, 4 repeats
       
       Disclaimer: Sean Tilley is a committee member of Federated Networks Association ry.We're excited to announce a new milestone for this publication. Since its inception, We Distribute has been dedicated to the sourcing and distribution of news relating to Free Software and decentralized communications. The project has provided extensive coverage over the development of new apps in the federated social web space, and interviewed developers at the forefront. Over the years, the publication has taken several different forms, but one factor has largely remained the same: it has all been managed by one sole contributor. After today, We Distribute is opening up as a collaborative project, and will operate as the official news publication of a non-profit organization called Feneas.What is Feneas?Feneas, also known as Federated Network Association ry, is a non-profit organization based in Finland that is dedicated to providing services to federated communication projects, and spreading information about their efforts and the technologies projects in the space use.The organization's committee and founding members comprise of contributors to a handful of fediverse projects, from Friendica to GangGo to Socialhome and more, all of which happen to be supporting the ActivityPub protocol standard.What's changing?The biggest changes to We Distribute will be operational. We're going to open up the writing pool to more contributors, expand the scope of projects that we're reporting on, and follow a more consistent publishing schedule. There's also an opportunity to expand the blog to other languages and locales.The blog is in the process of being cleaned up to improve load times and provide a better visual design, and we're in the process of figuring out how to better coordinate together to pursue our new goals.How can I get involved?If you're interested in being a part of the community or directly contributing to the blog, feel free to hang out in our new Matrix chatroom: #wedistribute:feneas.org
       
 (DIR) Post #9ovc4DnuetoutZpXNo by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-11-13T19:02:39.453395Z
       
       1 likes, 4 repeats
       
       While Funkwhale has supported Subsonic clients for a few releases now, one developer has decided to invest time in building a beautiful mobile app specific for Funkwhale users. Antoine Popineau, known by his developer handle as apognu, has been hard at work developing Otter. In his own words:This project started out because I listen to music primarily on the go, and I was accustomed to have native players for my previous music services.The development was initially announced on Funkwhale's governance platform, and a handful of testers and developers have provided feedback to help further the client's development.The login screen is straightforward, but can initially be a little confusing. You absolutely need to log in as your username, not your email address. This might change in the near future.This pane shows all of the tracks you've favorited from your Funkwhale instance so far.A nice thumbnail view of your albums.The Artists view shows all of the collections associated with artist metadata in your Funkwhale server.A nice bonus! Otter automatically loads your playlists and can play them without issue.This is the search function, returning everything related to a given search term.This is the detail view of a single album, with an option to play all of the tracks.Otter also offers a dark mode.This is the player queue.An early beta version of the client is available on Google Play, and APKs can be obtained via Github Releases. The developer has stated his intent to also bring Otter to F-Droid in the near future.These are still early days for the app, and there's a handful of minor bugs in the current release. When I tested it, I noticed that all tracks from a given collection would be added to the player when I selected one of them. That said, the app is surprisingly stable and well-designed, and works really well with Funkwhale.One final note: you might want to make sure that your server version is higher than Funkwhale 0.19.0. I had troubles with logging in until I updated to the latest stable release.
       
 (DIR) Post #9pADbQnrlWAjHjwiwa by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-11-20T20:09:12.213066Z
       
       1 likes, 3 repeats
       
       The world's first conference for ActivityPub took place in Prague back in September this year. Billed itself as  "A conference about the present and future of ActivityPub, the world’s leading federated social web standard", this served as a golden opportunity for implementors, developers, and advocates to network, exchange ideas, and present their perspectives and findings.A gathering of friendly faces.          Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, ActivityPub ConferenceMany of the talks from APConf were recorded, and can now be watched through PeerTube, which uses the ActivityPub protocol. Whether you're using a social platform like Mastodon or Pleroma, or using PeerTube to share and interact with videos, you can follow the conference and watch those videos at these addresses:Direct Link: https://conf.tube/video-channels/apconf_channel/Fediverse handle: apconf_channel@conf.tubeRecommended TalksActivityPub: past, present, future by Christopher Lemmer Webberhttps://conf.tube/videos/watch/2b9a985b-ccdd-49ce-a81b-ed00d2b47c85"ActivityPub: Past, present, future" - Keynote by Christopher Lemmer Webber"An overview of ActivityPub: How did we get to this point? Where are we now? Where do we need to go? We'll paint a chart from past to a hopeful future with better  privacy, richer interactions, and more security and control for our users."“Is ActivityPub paving the way to web 3.0?” by Malokihttps://conf.tube/videos/watch/7d0aa9a1-d9fb-4dbd-9183-aec6cdf1ec35"A talk about how we're walking away from Web 2.0, and paving the way to Web 3.0 with ActivityPub development. We'll discuss what this could mean for the future of the web. We'll look at some of the history of the web, and also consider the social implications moving forward."“Decentralised Hashtag Search and Subscription in Federated Social Networks” by Trolli Schmittlauchhttps://conf.tube/videos/watch/340eb706-28c0-4a43-9364-700297ca96cb"Hashtags have become an important tool for organising topic-related posts in all major social networks, even having managed to spark social movements like #MeToo. In federated social networks, unfortunately so far the view on all posts of a hashtag is fragmented between instances. For a student research paper I came up with an architecture for search and subscription of hashtag-posts in federated social networks. This additional backend for instances augments the Fediverse with a little bit of P2P technology."
       
 (DIR) Post #9pOwVq4jfdroBImmfI by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-11-27T22:38:22.473381Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Pixelfed, the fediverse's answer to Instagram and other photo-sharing services, has been seriously stepping up its game over the past few months. The lead developer, Dansup, has been extremely forthcoming with teasers for new features in development, along with announcements regarding when they're officially available.New FeaturesCompose v4This one's admittedly been live for a while now, but it's honestly so good that it bears being called out. The new Compose UI for Pixelfed is fantastic, and can directly compete with services such as Instagram. Better yet, this works great on mobile web browsers!Applying a filter.New built-in crop and rotation toolsCaptions, Content Warning, Location Data, VisibilityAdvanced SettingsMedia descriptionsDiscovery TopicsAlthough the Discovery page and Instance-defined topics have been around for at least a few releases now, the feature has been visually polished to a shine. Now, it's easier than ever to dive into a denoted subject and see what other people have pushed to it.Each topic can have a dedicated graphic and header color, along with associated hashtags to group things together.EmbedsPixelfed now allows users to embed their posts into other websites. Right now, users will need to directly use embed codes, and will only be able to embed public posts with no Content Warnings enabled. The lead developer is interested in supporting CWs along with collections.In DevelopmentThere's a boatload of exciting new features in the development pipeline. The following have been lifted from Pixelfed's official Mastodon account, and most of these are due for an impending major release, possibly 0.10.7.Instagram ImportOne very exciting feature offers Instagram users the opportunity to migrate their photos directly into Pixelfed. Imported posts will need to be approved by the uploader once the process is complete, and the resulting posts won't show up in timelines. Imported posts can still be federated, though, so if someone wants to interact with something you've imported, they absolutely can do that.Metro 2.0Metro ships as the default UI for Pixelfed, and historically has served as a visual analogue to Instagram's own timeline-based interface. The new Metro is more polished, more streamlined, and allows users to leverage a grid-based timeline to access more pictures at once.Opt-In Profile DirectoryThe Discovery problem is a tough nut to crack for federated platforms. One way that Pixelfed is trying to address this is to offer an opt-in feature that allows users to be listed in a Pixelfed directory. It's not yet clear whether the directory is strictly local or includes accounts from connected instances, but this could go a long way towards connecting users on the platform.Community Guidelines & Moderation ToolsModeration tools and Community Guidelines have had a growing importance in the fediverse over the past few years, and an increasing amount of platforms have been pursuing ways to build in such features in a sensible and useful way.Pixelfed will soon ship with a new Moderation user role, an improved dashboard for content moderation, and an accessible way to write and update the community guidelines for a given instance. In addition, users will be able to see whether their posts have been changed by an instance's moderation team.Dedicated App / Developer APISupposedly, a dedicated app is in the works, but there aren't a log of details regarding its development yet. All we know is that it's officially an initiative of the project, and that the Developer API is stabilizing.Pixelfed Engineering post here.StoriesStories is, admittedly, the feature we know about the least right now. Supposedly, Stories will federate with other Pixelfed instances, and any other fediverse platform capable of supporting the Stories activity type. All in all, these are some super exciting developments for the platform. If you want to support the Pixelfed creator, check out the links below!Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/dansupLiberaPay: https://liberapay.com/pixelfedPayPal: https://www.paypal.me/dansup
       
 (DIR) Post #9pufqJk1RDEIZZrLrk by blog@wedistribute.org
       2019-12-13T06:02:21.281893Z
       
       1 likes, 4 repeats
       
       With the recent gloom and doom about changes coming to Soundcloud, there's a growing interest in having an alternative right here in the fediverse. Reel2Bits is trying to fill that gap, and serves as an amazing social platform specifically geared towards people creating podcasts or sharing their own original music.Federation between instances works using ActivityPub, and there's some growing interest from Funkwhale in maintaining compatibility with it. However, the project's lead developer needs help with polishing up the platform, closing some python-specific bugs, and building out new features.We're going to do a review of the platform soon, but in the meantime, you can connect with the project through these channels:Project Site: https://reel2bits.org/Matrix chat: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#reel2bits:otter.shIssue Tracker: https://github.com/reel2bits/reel2bits/issues
       
 (DIR) Post #9sCxTrC4Ts4k00djCS by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-02-19T21:28:59.509556Z
       
       2 likes, 5 repeats
       
       Funkwhale has taken off in popularity in recent months, touting a web-based music platform with cloud storage and an open API for clients. Although it already offers ActivityPub support for federating music collections between multiple instances, one criticism has involved a lack of connection between Funkwhale and the rest of the fediverse ecosystem.One exciting effort from the Funkwhale project to address this is the development of a new fixture to the platform: channels. The feature is still very much in early development, but the underlying pieces allow for creators to build their own media channels for podcasting as well as music, with the initial emphasis being on the former.Work-in-progress UI for a test podcast channelThe project developers and designers are making great progress on the feature already. Funkwhale has an official test group for podcast creators to try out the UI, and basic federation from a Funkwhale channel to a Mastodon stream is also reported to work.A proposed UI for subscribing to podcasts, both with traditional RSS and ActivityPubAlthough these are still early days, this is an exciting initiative, and could give indie creators more tools to publish directly to the fediverse itself.
       
 (DIR) Post #9sFIUWYBCkZ1cN3mam by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-02-21T00:33:50.426489Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Mobile apps are of growing interest to the fediverse. While users have asked for apps since the very early days of the fediverse, the presence of stable APIs and capable developers has turned those requests into reality.PeerTube's own APIs are starting to reach maturity, and developers are working to incorporate them into new apps that people can use on the go. One such app is called Thorium, which is currently in Beta and is "currently missing a lot of features" according to the lead developer.The overview. Most tabs will be styled like this, with channel details and large thumbnails for the videosThe individual video viewAs far as watching videos is concerned, the app works pretty well. The client ships with a simple video player by default, but an experimental WebTorrent player is also available in the settings. Unfortunately, that particular player isn't terribly stable, and introduces longer wait times just to get the video to play.Although Thorium allows users to log into their PeerTube accounts, the features are a little bare at the moment. You can't really do much with your account other than like or dislike videos, and the client won't be able to supporting commenting until a future release supports it. Additionally, you can't upload any videos with the client yet.Still, it's a nice freshman effort, and hopefully the app will get updated to account for all of the new improvements that have come into PeerTube since its 2.0.0 release.You can try out the Thorium client here:Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.schueller.peertubeF-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.schueller.peertube/
       
 (DIR) Post #9smD9SKJhLXbIFE2Oe by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-03-07T21:39:28.862991Z
       
       2 likes, 2 repeats
       
       Many developers were pleasantly surprised recently, when the maintainers of the Diaspora project merged in a long-awaited pull request to the aging codebase. This particular PR introduces a full-blown programming interface for third-party developers, allowing for the possibility of mobile apps and alternative frontends to leverage it.The original efforts to bring in this feature have been going on for years, and have passed from one volunteer to another as the pieces have slowly been put together. Initially, Kent Shikama started implementing the API routes and scopes in 2015, leveraging OpenID Connect to manage the connection to apps.Frank Rosseau then took up the mantle in 2017 to work on the controllers, which would handle the logic for what the API would be allowed to do. A lot of adjustments needed to be made to conform to the proposed API draft, and over the course of the next year, the work started to take shape into something coherent.Hank Grabowski took an interest in the aging PR, and began investing time with a series of development experiments. He blogged about his progress extensively, and his efforts helped revive interest in the possibility of this feature being finished.Screenshot from Hank's blog of a post made via the API, with an attached image, poll, and location dataOther developers pitched in. Senya, a long-time contributor who spearheaded development on Diaspora's pod migration feature, helped tweak the security scopes. Frank also stepped in to handle some of the core changes, and the group quickly found ways to collaborate together on the remaining effort.All of this work has been rebased to clear compatibility with Diaspora's main development branch, and was finally merged in on January 21st, 2020. After five years of development, where several people contributed thousands of lines of code and changes, one of the most-requested features of the Diaspora project has finally landed.The project hasn't officially cut a new stable release with the feature yet, but it's estimated that this may likely happen by the time 0.8.0.0 comes out. Soon, clients such as Dandelion will be able to properly use it, opening up a whole new world to Diaspora users.
       
 (DIR) Post #9tJ75mWi97qsbicKY4 by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-03-23T18:37:03.610061Z
       
       1 likes, 3 repeats
       
       Pleroma, the lightweight Elixir-powered microblogging platform, made waves earlier this month by pushing out the 2.0 release of the platform to their project's "stable" branch.So, what's new? The biggest updates to Pleroma involve Emoji Reactions, the removal of OStatus, and a new configuration system for the AdminFE interface. (Note: some bugs appeared in this release, and have since been addressed by a 2.0.1 update. Admins are highly encouraged to upgrade.)Emoji ReactionsA demonstration of Emoji reactions on PleromaFE, taken from the Pleroma announcementOne of the more dynamic changes made with the Pleroma release involves support for Slack-like emoji reactions, meaning that statuses can now receive reactions other than the standard "favorite" icon. Additionally, these reactions are compatible with the ones that MissKey provides, which could be seen as a win for the wider network.Currently, the version of GlitchFE that ships with Pleroma has yet to support the emoji reactions, and most mobile clients haven't made a commitment to support such changes.Goodbye, OStatusOStatus has been increasingly on its way out from the fediverse ecosystem ever since Mastodon announced that they were phasing out support for it. While other platforms such as Friendica and Hubzilla ostensibly still provide some level of support for the aging protocol standard, at this point Pleroma and Mastodon are going full ActivityPub.Also noteworthy: GNU Social instances are capable of using an ActivityPub plugin to remain connected to the fediverse.New AdminFEA screenshot of AdminFE, taken from the Pleroma announcement.Pleroma's AdminFE has been in development for some time, and has been available in the development branch for many months. That said, this stable release brings in many improvements, and also allows instance admins to update their configurations from a web interface. This forgoes the necessity of making configuration changes from within a file, and for the most part makes instant management much easier.In addition to these three major changes, the platform has gone through a lot of adjustment and streamlining, and I recommend taking a look at the changelog from the announcements. The Pleroma frontend is faster, the theming system has evolved more, users can now mute entire domains from their timelines, and much more!
       
 (DIR) Post #9v7Jt2wTQf2aAKlJwW by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-05-16T21:48:05.422633Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Newer releases of the Nextcloud platform offer capabilities for collaborative online document editing. This is made possible through one of two potential connectors: Collabora Online, and OnlyOffice. Both suites have their pros and cons, but today we'll be taking a look at how to work with OnlyOffice.It's a common misconception that OnlyOffice is either proprietary, or a paid-only SaaS platform. In spite of its enterprise-heavy corporate site, OnlyOffice is in fact available under v3 of the GNU Affero Public License, which is pretty standard for libre web platforms.Before we begin, it's worth noting that this installation method is better suited towards small or personal Nextcloud instances. For medium to large-scale instances of Nextcloud, it's generally recommended to instead install the official external document server.Step 1 - Install the Community Document Server AppThe Nextcloud App Store offers a convenient backend application that installs the OnlyOffice Community Document Server within an existing Nextcloud application. Installation is relatively straightforward, as the app itself can be found within the Apps management section.Some users may experience an error message when attempting to install the package through the Nextcloud admin UI. If that happens, it's recommended to attempt the installation through the Nextcloud command client tool like so:occ app:install documentserver_communityIt's also worth double-checking that your Nextcloud installation is up to date, as older versions may still have problems.Step 2 - Install the ConnectorAfter setting up the Document Server app, you'll still need to enable the OnlyOffice connector, so that Nextcloud can associate Microsoft Office and OpenDocument files with the OnlyOffice app you just enabled.Step 3 - Start Using It!Now that the connector is installed, you'll be able to start using the Document Server right away. Instead of having a dedicated tab specifically for document editing, the integration is baked right into the file manager. You can easily create new documents as actions, like so:Note: currently, this actions menu only creates Microsoft Office files.Or you can click on existing documents within the Nextcloud file manager, which automatically takes you to the editing interface.
       
 (DIR) Post #9v7sv6RasPi00A2CPo by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-05-17T04:20:38.283902Z
       
       2 likes, 3 repeats
       
       Lemmy is a link aggregation platfrom geared towards community discourse. Styling itself after sites like Reddit, Lobst.ers, and Hacker News, Lemmy aims to integrate into the wider fediverse ecosystem through the adoption of the ActivityPub protocol. Lemmy's front page.The overall goal is to create an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.Lemmy Project RepoRecently, the project hit a major milestone by unveiling preliminary support for federation. Currently, it only works between Lemmy instances, and objects such as comments and votes don't get passed along through federation yet. (Update: As of May 5th, comments, votes, and delete activites now successfully federate)These are still early days for the project, but we're hopeful that this development might lead to new kinds of communities within the wider fediverse. Developers can track the open Github issue here. If you'd like to support Lemmy, you can donate to its development in the following places:LiberaPayPatreonOpenCollective
       
 (DIR) Post #9vDXVJAvzGSVrvrPyC by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-05-19T21:48:56.318259Z
       
       1 likes, 2 repeats
       
       For some time now, people in the fediverse have expressed a desire for a dedicated Pixelfed app. The federated photo-sharing platform continues to explode in popularity, as new instances continue to open up, and the amount of users sharing photos to the fediverse increases. To date, relatively few dedicated clients have existed for Pixelfed. FediLab can serve as a capable client, but many people desire a tailored experience for the platform specifically.The PixelDroid project intends to rectify this by providing a full experience to people on the go. In honor of the fediverse being 12 years old, the app developer has pushed out an alpha release for users to preview. The developer was cautious to set expectations about the current alpha quality:Broken things related to API problems: search repeats results, likes/shares don't work correctly, can't click on a hashtag to see a list of posts with that hasthag, can't see comments, 2FA-protected accounts cannot be used (of course these things could also be broken client-side, but that's more of an academic question at this point)Broken things that might be solved with changes server-side: thumbnails saying "no preview available" sometimes (more debugging is needed to pinpoint the problem)You can install the APK directly through the release announcement, compile it from source, or make use of a dedicated F-Droid repository while efforts are underway for official packaging in F-Droid proper. In the meantime, we've included a gallery of alpha screenshots below!Logging into an instanceProviding auth to a Pixelfed serverThe side-draweris somewhat hidden from view and requires a swipe gesture.The app supports multiple accounts, kind of like Tusky does.The main timelineUser profileSingle post viewThe local timelineThe built-in camera appCropping and rotating a pictureApplying filters
       
 (DIR) Post #A0zCpKLvDcYCPLp4YS by blog@wedistribute.org
       2020-11-08T11:03:54.025470Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       There's a meme currently floating around that Pleroma, the Elixir-based microblogging platform that competes with Mastodon, is now directly sponsoring the project. While this alone would be considered a great joke, the Mastodon's project sponsor page now officially highlights the project.Whaaaaa?It's not the most uncommon thing in the world to see open source projects occasionally sponsor one another's development effort, and the notion of two competing platforms in a space supporting each other is a welcome change of pace from some of the animosity that has crept up between both groups in the past year.Lain, head of the Pleroma project, had this to say:I always said that Gargron (Eugen Rochko) isn't getting rich from his work on Mastodon...He made good software that's useful to many people, so I'm happy that this sponsoring is made in Pleroma's name. We all have to live together in this fediverse.Kaniini, another dev from the project, chimed in:We did it on purpose actually. there are some who want to have closer collaboration with Gargron.Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's creator, has yet to offer an official statement on the new sponsorship, but all signs indicate that this may be treated just like any other ordinary donation to the project, opting for monetary contributions to have little bearing on the developmental directions that Mastodon takes. Earlier this month, he decided to refund donations from Keybase to remove conflicts of interest surrounding a new code push offering integration between Mastodon and Keybase.