Sorry I've not been on here for a while. Been busy.
Mastodon vs the Fediverse
I don't mean this title as a comparison, but as an antagonistic relationship...
I've been off-and-on in the fediverse for longer than Mastodon has existed, I've followed the building of the fediverse since before ActivityPub ever existed.
I still consider it a blessing the explosive growth that happened within the fediverse... but I'm honestly sickened by the Mastodon effect of it...
So many of the new people hopped on Mastodon and thought that fediverse is just another name for Mastodon... some people even got so far as thinking fediverse is just another name for ActivityPub...
And people came with so many flawed views of what they think the fediverse is as well as completely unrealistic ideas of what it should be.
So many people see it as this miracle pill against all the evils of corporate social servers like Twitter, fixing every single problem that's ever existed in those communities.
... Those people are completely delusional... but they're loud and violent.
They get pissed off any time they run into the actual fediverse... they get pissed off when they realize there's platforms other than Mastodon that don't even remotely behave like Mastodon or especially their imaginary version of Mastodon.
And frankly... I'm getting pissed off at the entitlement of these people.
They think the fediverse is all about their consent on who can see their posts... this is like going to a waterpark and complaining that you didn't consent to getting wet... you went to a waterpark! When you post on the fediverse, you have consented... if you don't consent then you don't post to the fediverse. Reminds me of the annoying cycles of people sharing blocks of vaguely legal looking text to Facebook to try and override the TOS, thinking they can just say "I don't consent to the TOS" to get out of it when you explicitly consented by joining and you revoke that consent by leaving.
They think this is the place for private insular communities... because they walked into an empty park and thought "this public space is mine and will never have crowds of people wandering through". They get pissed at the idea of Meta joining the fediverse with Threads because it means there might be actually be a crowd walking through this public space...
They fuss about community as if their little tiny corner of the fediverse is the whole thing. They mistake their standards and agreements as those for the whole fediverse.
And worst of all these people will actively harass someone over expanding the federation of the fediverse in a way that's not only normal, but part of the specific design of how this place works... especially as these people are so damn clueless they think this is a single instance they can just tear down with pitchforks as opposed to just the one that briefly crossed their attention.
People who want to actively destroy the fediverse by isolating it, breaking it, and otherwise trying to "control" it can get bent.
reshared this
This. This. This.
Great read that breaks down everything wrong with the whole bridgyfed drama.
A libre networking project that’s designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-…
Tear Down Walls, and Build Bridges
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it's designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak differenSean Tilley (We Distribute)
Jamie Booth reshared this.
Heads Up For Possible Outage
A reminder that I'm located in the US, and more particularly in Texas and this is a server run out of my home.
With the massive freeze incoming this weekend, there is a decent chance of a significant and extended power outage (Texas has a notoriously awful and poorly managed power grid, notably run completely separate from the rest of the country).
Vanessa likes this.
The server has been updated.
Friendica 2023.12 released
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2023.12. Finally wrapping up the changes since May – the highlights of this release are
- the bluesky connector has been made bi-directional,
- moderation reports can now be send by users and reviewed by the node admins,
- user defined groups are now called Circles and forum accounts are now Group accounts, and last but not least
- users now have a better control over their network streams with the new Channels feature.
Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.
What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralized communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr.
How to Update
Updating from old Friendica versions
If you are updating from an older version than the 2022.12 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as it contained some breaking changes.
Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on thestablebranch, the commands to update your installation to the 2023.12 release would be
cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git pull
If you want to use a different branch than thestableone, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
Using the Archive Files
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from friendica-full-2023.12.tar.gz (sha256) and friendica-addons 2023.12.tar.gz (sha256)) and unpack it on your local computer.As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say
friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.phpandconfig/addon.config.php) and.htaccessfiles. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) tofriendica_oldandfriendica_newtofriendica.The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2023.12 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Known Issues
Following the release of Friendica 2023.12 the following issues were reported:
- S3 addon unusable [13760]
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
friendi.ca/2023/12/24/friendic…
Confused likes this.
DDOSed by... facebook chat?
Apparently some facebook interface decided to DDOS the site a little over an hour ago.
It's not overwhelming the network, just an absolutely ridiculous number of requests.
I've solved it by instituting a global rate limit. It should be high enough to not affect anyone actually using the server.
Basic gist is that any more than 10 requests a second gets a 429 error (Too Many Requests, like all error codes with this site it'll give you a cute cat picture specific to that error). This is purely per second, so if you see that error at any point the time it takes you to refresh again the limit will already be reset.
Vanessa likes this.
Confused
in reply to Server News • •Server News likes this.