@Jedi Agreed! Am I on Mastodon or Lemmy when I read and replied to this thread? Doesn’t matter :D

@asklemmy

This is not about software licensing nor the spirit of FOSS.

There’s some inconsistent messaging that’s genuinely confusing me. I’ve shared an anecdote below (from a time when I was developing open source software) in the interest of generating discussion to clear it up for me and perhaps others, too. I don’t mean to imply I know what is happening right here.

@pop @fediverse

Ha nice analogy. Might steal it if that’s ok! :)

Reminds me of a place I used to work at. Small place; 10 people. I started as a sysadmin but later started programming. They encouraged me; “yes we suck at this we need help!” so I kept going. But as the work became more involved and I needed a bit of co-operation from their side, it was torture. They didn’t “suck” at it, they just didn’t respect or bother themselves with that kind of work.

@Ghostalmedia @fediverse

Dev publishes unreadable website:

“Some developers are bad at CSS and design/CSS (like me)”

Implying some innate incapacity.
Same dev:

“Or these people could learn Rust and contribute to the existing project.”
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8855579

Man I just don’t get it. There’s a kind of wilful ignorance here or something? It’s jarring. All due respect for what’s been made but this attitude… I’m not offended or have disdain, just dumbfounded at the messaging.

@Ghostalmedia
@fediverse

@Zaktor There is some influence. Two things that come to mind:

* default post length limit (500 characters)
* how the server renders “Page” ActivityPub objects (e.g. Lemmy posts)

For example, many comments made in this thread could not be made from a Mastodon server. All Lemmy posts show as just a title and link with a blank body. These application behaviours have a direct influence on what types of conversations take place by people from Mastodon servers.

@fediverse

> Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?

Oh the usual: makes a batter headline.

I guess I’m spreading toxicity by replying to a post from a Mastodon app…? Or something?

@fediverse @finkrat

@onlinepersona @fediverse Haha good question! They’re light on details (“we moved to Wordpress”)
and after testing it seems like it’s not even working :(

WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Here’s a wordpress blog that is available via activitypub: https://solarbird.net/blog
We can address it like so: @solarbird.net
We can’t see the posts on Lemmy (doesn’t support ad-hoc fetching of ActivityPub Notes)
but in a Mastodon web UI: https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/27/kosa-again-yes-again/

RSS is kinda different. Subscribing is really just polling a file. ActivityPub messages are primarily sent around by first requesting a server to send messages to you. It’s a pull versus push thing.

I love RSS because it’s so simple. It actually goes a long way in the fediverse where most activity, which is read-only. Only a small percentage of users ever comment/post stuff.
@electricprism @fediverse

@jimmy90 @zeppo For sure. One major lesson off the top of my head is with ActivityPub is how errors are presented. I’ve written software to fiddle around with ActivityPub and found servers have terrible - if any - error messages. SMTP provides a bunch of standardised status codes that servers can give back to you, along with diagnostic info. In theory this is possible with apub but in practice it is not addressed at all.

@fediverse

> more compact tab bar, saving space

Not sure if you’re aware, but there’s a hidden setting to make Firefox’s toolbars more compact:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox

@Pantherina @linux

Really? AV1 & webp support, Quantum engine, process-per-tab, reader mode, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 support, cross-site tracking protection…?
Browsers have a lot of features. Some convenient, some come and go. That’s ok.
Firefox is an ideological choice for some people so both cynicism and unconditional support is expected.

@AMDIsOurLord @linux

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Installing Linux on old PCs and laptops is what got me into Linux (and other OSs) in the first place.

I still love it. There’s a joy of breathing new life into old hardware.
Perhaps it’s similar to how people like fixing up old cars even if people aren’t really going to drive them again.

@linux @VanHalbgott

If you’ve done any programming, you could hook up a script to fdm (https://github.com/nicm/fdm).

Rough logic, for each message:

* match body with several timestamp regexps
* parse matched messages
* find dates in message body
* parse final match
* discard message if that is date earlier than now - x days

@Pantherina @linux

@poVoq Agreed. It got me thinking. But feels almost entirely ideological, conflating social media (e.g. Twitter, Reddit) with “the digital world”.

Saying git is a “failed attempt at decentralisation” just because GitHub is popular misses that GitHub is less critical infrastructure than it would be if we only had CVS or Subversion.

I’m encouraged by incremental, practical decentralisation efforts outside of social media. It’s slow, kinda boring but it’s real and happening today.

@fediverse

Ah sorry yes I read the article, was just checking I understood the comment.
The workflows enabled by git that were painful with, say, Subversion or CVS, are significant. The overwhelming popularity of GitHub is regretful in the sense there is authority captured there, but the development of the tech (DVCS) means that GitHub is not *as* critical as before. For me this is something to celebrate!

Perfect? No way. Failure? Seems over-the-top.
@astrojuanlu @maegul @fediverse

Failed attempt at decentralisation? Is this referring to the popularity of GitHub?

@astrojuanlu @maegul @fediverse

@DarthYoshiBoy @dez It shouldn’t matter: thankfully both ActivityPub and AT protocol have open source implementations, so we can have ways for it to work together.

I think we have had so many years of app == platform == protocol that we’ve forgotten what interoperability really means and looks like. Even the distinction between Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin et al. feels like a holdover from those times.

deleted by creator

@Pantherina You might be interested in looking into the Plan 9 operating system. The original designers of Unix (on which Linux and BSDs are based) created the OS with lots of interesting ideas built into the core of the system, rather than bolted on afterwards. No root, userspace drivers, others you mentioned are explored.

Take a look: https://p9f.org