RFF is amazing, and offers so much high-quality music. Historically, it’s all been done by one guy, supporting 500+ artists.

The connotation has more to do with the long tradition of Pirate Radio, not a bunch of random CIA stuff.

The difference here is that you literally sign in with your existing Fediverse identity.

Yeah, I’m aware. I think the Nostr space in particular is doing a really great job, and has some good ideas on how to make it work. Why this development is significant, though, is that it’s happening in ActivityPub space. It’s not as robust, and doesn’t have all the answers. But, the existence of such a project means that people within the space are already thinking about how to make this concept viable for the Fediverse.

Good question. For now, we have a basic process for submitting icons, which requires adding details about the project repo, information on the icon, and Copyright attribution for whoever created / owns the brand.

We recently incorporated a JS library that allows us to generate the font from the SVG files themselves, which also builds the preview pages that can be viewed at icons.wedistribute.org. With a bit of extra automation on Codeberg, we could basically update the preview page and generated set every time a new icon gets merged in to the main branch.

Our goal is to get to a point where new releases automatically get created, and an archive of the assets gets attached as well. That way, once a milestone gets completed, a new release will get put out with minimal amounts of work.

Interesting insights!

The original reason we started this was actually for our own development. Our site includes project icons and colors in dedicated tags, which link to dedicated topic hubs. As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn’t a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.

Those symbols that you see are typically Unicode. Icon fonts are generally a CSS hack, in that a collection of SVGs have been converted into a font. The Unicode strings can be thought of as “letters” for that font. You’re absolutely right that there are accessibility limitations, but the tradeoff is that people get an easy way to use their favorite project icons to represent where they are on the Web.

At the very least, you won’t have any uBO problems with our site, as the font is incorporated directly into the theme we’re using. We’ll likely explore making a WordPress plugin next, so people can add these to their profiles and menus and other places.

Honestly, this is the first I’m hearing about it. Maybe we’ll try to submit project SVGs.

That’s not really enshittification, is it?

I was under the impression that Cory Doctorow’s definition was largely based on how social media platforms entice people with “free” offerings, then gradually tighten the screws over time to make service worse. This usually happens when a platform becomes the dominant player.

Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.

They kind of fucked up everything in approaching this by not talking to the community and collecting feedback, making dumb assumptions in how the integration was supposed to work, leaking private posts, running everything through their AI system, and neglecting to represent the remote content as having came from anywhere else.

The other thing is that Maven’s whole concept is training an AI over and over again on the platform’s posts. Ostensibly, this could mean that a lot of Fediverse content ended up in the training data.

I’m like 99% sure that this is just WordPress with BuddyPress extensions. I could be wrong! But, if that’s the case, it’s likely all open source already. It might be interesting to see if they can get it working with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress!

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there’s constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can’t say for sure. What’s weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I’m not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It’s also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

It’s an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they’re both flawed:

1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.

2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn’t match ends up not being used.

3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it’s simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it’s not as efficient as it could be.

It’s the WordPress competitor.

Yeah, I don’t have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

There may be a “minimum threshold” for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I’ll readily admit that this is conjecture.

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven’t tried anything else.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

Basically, it’s the second half of ActivityPub that’s for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

What’s cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says “whatever, that’s valid.”

It could be brilliant for prototyping.

Let me think…

• Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
• Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
• Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
• Wordforge - federated novel-writing
• SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
• GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That’s just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there’s more.

There are a handful of decent instances, but you really have to dig to find stuff, sadly. I run Spectra Video and basically have to curate sign-ups and which servers we follow.

It helps cut down on a lot of the crap, but it takes work.