@MsDropbear42 [venera] 🐨♀🌈🐧​🦘 Someone is building a bridge between ActivityPub and AT Protocol.

This means that the AT Protocol Servers (currently Bluesky, Friendica) can talk to ActivityPub servers (Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc., etc.).

Some people are so angry that they are flipping out and dropping F bombs.

And there are many protocols in the fediverse. ActivityPub is the most popular, but there are also Zot, Nomad, OpenWebAuth, Diaspora, and more. There is even a protocol called Scuttlebutt.

For example, Hubzilla uses the Zot protocol to talk to other Hubzilla servers, and Streams uses the Nomad protocol to talk to other Streams servers. Streams uses Zot to talk to Hubzilla. And both can use ActivityPub as well.

And far as Friendica federating with Bluesky, the administrator of the server would have to activate that. So not all Friendica servers would support AT protocol since it is an optional addon the admin would have to install.

The reality is that we have over 46,000 independently operated servers on the fediverse, and that is growing every day. Bluesky would simply be server number 46,001.

@MsDropbear42 [venera] 🐨♀🌈🐧​🦘 Thanks for the complements. To answer your questions:

1. Most of the hate was directed at the developer who created the bridge and appeared as replies to his post announcing the bridge. Unless you were following him, or visited his channel on his website, you probably would have missed it anyway. The developer seemed to take it well and listened to people's feedback, but some people were inexcusably mean and hateful. Lots of F bombs directed at the developer. And there was a lot of ignorance about how the fediverse actually works (i.e. most didn't know that their posts are already federated beyond Mastodon).

2. When AT Protocol officially federates, Friendica admins will have the option of turn on AT protocol support natively, which means that Friendica would become a server on the AT protocol network, just like Bluesky. It will probably be one of the first implementations of AT protocol outside of Bluesky itself. Friendica also supports ActivityPub natively as well, so if an admin has both turned on, they are operating on both networks simultaneously. That's why they are listed on both sides.

3. Scuttlebutt is an interesting protocol. It is designed for social interactions using devices that are not always connected to the internet or not connected to the internet at all. Devices basically pass on messages to one another without the use of the internet. (At least that is my limited understanding of it.)

4. The nice thing about platforms like Friendica, Hubzilla, and Streams is that they are big on user choice and control. So even if your administrator activated it, you still have some control as a user as to whether you see posts from Bluesky.

@Shiri Bailem A few corrections here:

"aren't based on ActivityPub" ActivityPub is pretty new in the space, the oldest in the space is Diaspora.

The oldest one is actually OStatus, the protocol behind Laconi.ca/StatusNet/GNU social. It's from 2008. Diaspora* came out in September 2010.

Friendica is native ActivityPub and has a checkbox for native support of Diaspora and OStatus in the admin settings, both of which are older than AP

Friendica is native DFRN. It was launched in July 2010, so it's six years older than Mastodon and eight years older than the ActivityPub standard. Also, Friendica does things internally which AFAIK are still impossible with pure ActivityPub. Like on Hubzilla and (streams) to different degrees, ActivityPub is optional, but I think it's on by default for both nodes and accounts.

"Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky" Not quite true, especially as Bluesky does not yet federate.

Not by Mastodon standards, but by Friendica standards.

In 2011, Friendica federated with Facebook. I'm not even kidding, it actually did. This federation required a Facebook account which was more or less remote-controlled from Friendica while also mirroring the Facebook friends list and the Facebook timeline into Friendica. But Friendica let this count as full federation. This ended when Facebook changed its TOS for external apps: They were no longer allowed to extract data.

Also, both Friendica and Hubzilla have a Twitter "bridge" to this day. It works the same as the Facebook connection, but it, too, counts as full federation by Friendica and Hubzilla's standards.

At least Friendica is also fully federated with Tumblr by its own standards. This wouldn't be possible without a Tumblr account either.

And the WordPress cross-poster available for both counts as federation, too.

"allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica" I haven't seen the claim myself, but the thread above was shared to the Fediverse News Friendica group. Since Groups are kind of a hack in AP (there's no actual group protocol feature), most Mastodon users are completely unfamiliar with them, so they think it's a regular user who's boosting/spamming all the conversation

...which led them into blocking the whole forum or even the entire Friendica node in their fuming rage.

CC: @MsDropbear42 [venera] 🐨♀🌈🐧​🦘 @Steffen K9 🐰

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #BridgyFed #Bluesky #Bridge #BlueskyBridge

@Scott M. Stolz

And there was a lot of ignorance about how the fediverse actually works (i.e. most didn't know that their posts are already federated beyond Mastodon).

...much less beyond ActivityPub.

Not to mention that a lot of Mastodon users don't understand how Mastodon works. They think it must have a pool of all accounts and all posts and all that somewhere, and the BridgyFed Bluesky bridge will give Bluesky unlimited access to it all.

They also think that Bluesky will be able to post nasty stuff to everyone, even those who aren't connected to anyone on Bluesky. They think the same about Threads, because in their heads, they're still on Twitter where the secret-sauce algorithm would probably allow for that to happen.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Threads #Meta #BridgyFed #Bluesky #Bridge #BlueskyBridge

@jupiter_rowland

Not by Mastodon standards, but by Friendica standards.

It's good also to have and find a common sense interpretation between two different jargons. In the end, the conversation is fragmented.

You post the same thing on , say, twitter and activitypub and bluesky and your blog.

You got feedback from the two different protocols and for you it's maybe well aggregated under your post, but people watching on twitter won't see and benefit from the feedback you got from a bluesky user. Maybe you answer to a comment from B and C can see your reply but can't fetch the message you're answering.

It's not a constructive collective conversation, you are having 3/4 different conversations.

@small patatas Based on what I read, it sounded like there is no mirroring. It simply converts from one protocol to another and passes on the request.

If you are on ActivityPub and follow someone on Bluesky, your follow request gets sent to the bridge, which converts it to the other protocol, and sends the follow request to the Bluesky server. The Bluesky server then starts sending posts to the bridge addressed to you, and the bridge reformats it and it appears in your ActivityPub app.

So you are actually following the Bluesky channel, not an ActivityPub copy of a Bluesky channel.

There is no mirror. There are no duplicate accounts on each side. You speak English and the translator app spits out Spanish. That's all the bridge does. Translates from one protocol to another.

@MsDropbear42 [venera] 🐨♀🌈🐧​🦘 there is no actual federation with Bluesky yet, it is only an addon for now, which mostly works like the Tumblr addon for example: you have to have an active account there and use it to log in to settings>social networks>bluesky import/export. Also, some servers do not have the addon at all. So there is basically no native federation with Bluesky at all for the moment.

@Steffen K9 🐰 @Jupiter Rowland

although Mastodon uses the ActivtyPub protocol, so I think he's referring to that protocol. It is a W3C recommendation, and has been quite widely adopted. Hopefully it can be improved upon.

I use Nostr as it also is a comprehensive protocol and an extensible one that has been expanding.

no sorry I was thinking it was half of the AT Protocol. Did not read AP as ActivityPub. But OK Mastodon is not the standard, ActivityPub is on Fediverse.

Nostr works pretty well for me, but I try to follow non-crypto posts as that's not what I'm there for. Interactions been very friendly.

@jupiter_rowland
#Mastodon
Hi Jupiter I like the framing of this "How does Mastodon work?" post as it describes 'me' or a typical user and prompts them to then think "so how if not all the account and posts somewhere?" etc etc...

I think it's a good way to educate actually, and could you reply again what you would reply typically to your own post if someone asked "ok so how is it if not that?" since I / they would be ready to hear at that point

- and then kind of rounding your words towards how it will not be true that "Bluesky bridge will give Bluesky unlimited access to it all." (or at least the commercial company access and plans to exploit things unlike existing others on the Fediverse and like never before... (not even the smaller Nazi's probably because they don't have no money or care, but Capitalism... I'm not so sure!)

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love A very good article about the situation was written by @Sean Tilley at @We Distribute and you can find it here:

We Distribute

2024-02-14 02:40:17

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 differen

^{Sean Tilley (We Distribute)}

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love

I think it's a good way to educate actually, and could you reply again what you would reply typically to your own post if someone asked "ok so how is it if not that?" since I / they would be ready to hear at that point

Let's see if I can make this halfway understandable. But it's going to be looooooooong.

First of all, Bluesky only knows what's being delivered to it. Not by BridgyFed. By Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse through BridgyFed. BridgyFed does not scrape any information itself. Neither does Bluesky, also because it can't do that through Bluesky.

No, really. No, no, really. Calm down.

No, Bluesky won't have your profile and your posts right off the bat. In fact, Bluesky won't have any of the posts you've posted until now unless someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts one of your old posts. And even only then, Bluesky will only have that one single post.

So what does Bluesky get from you then?

Well, normally, nothing. No, really.

At first, Bluesky won't even know you exist, much less where. Again, BridgyFed is not a scraper, and Bluesky doesn't have a Fediverse scraper either. And even if it had one, it wouldn't work through BridgyFed because BridgyFed doesn't support that.

And seriously: If Bluesky really wanted to scrape the Fediverse, it wouldn't do that through that tiny third-party keyhole that's BridgyFed! It'd set up search crawlers like Google that crawl Fediverse instances and send everything they find to Bluesky.

But Bluesky doesn't do that. I can reassure you that Bluesky doesn't do that.

Because Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse.

No, really, it isn't. If it were, it would have used ActivityPub right away instead of developing a wholly new and incompatible protocol. Or it could at least have included its own ActivityPub "translators" just like Hubzilla and (streams) have them and like Friendica used to have until it switched to ActivityPub.

But does Bluesky support ActivityPub in any way? No, it doesn't. Even though ActivityPub would have made a whole lot of things a whole lot easier for Bluesky itself already, it doesn't. Go figure.

Which goes to show that Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse. Bluesky doesn't want your data. And, again, if it did, it wouldn't rely on a third-party bridge to get them.

Okay, so again, what does Bluesky get from you?

Again, nothing. At least at first.

Now, let's suppose someone with at least one Bluesky follower mentions you in a public post. That public post also goes to that Bluesky follower, thus to Bluesky, with a link to your profile in it.

Then Bluesky has your name, and it has the URL of your profile. No different from how Mastodon works.

But it doesn't go through that link and scrape all your profile information. It isn't interested in that.

And besides, Mastodon profiles or any other Fediverse profiles are probably completely and utterly incompatible with Bluesky's profile structure anyway. So all that stuff would have to be "translated to Blueskyish". Extra effort for something that Bluesky isn't even interested in. Again, if it were, don't you think it'd use ActivityPub instead of their own AT protocol? Yeah, but it doesn't.

So from when on will Bluesky know your profile?

Normally, not at all.

Only when someone from Bluesky wants to follow you. And you've either got your profile set up so that anyone can follow you without your explicit consent. Or you actively confirm that follow request.

Then you're connected to Bluesky.

And only then will Bluesky know you. As in know your profile. Or what profile information makes it through BridgyFed in the first place. And what of it Bluesky has a way of handling. Maybe not more than your profile picture and your profile text. All stuff that's public anyway, and that Google might have scraped a gajillion times already.

But it will not have your whole backlog of posts.

I mean, if you start following another Mastodon user who has been here for four years, you won't get four years worth of their old posts piled upon your timeline either, right? Or has that ever occurred to you? I guess not.

This is not only because Bluesky doesn't do that. This is because Mastodon doesn't do that. It doesn't send any old posts to new followers, and it doesn't request old posts from new followers.

Let me show this to you from somewhere else in the Fediverse.

I'm on Hubzilla. Hubzilla supports importing old posts to a certain degree. If I follow someone on Hubzilla or (streams), I think, also on Friendica, I get their 10 latest posts into my stream. And I get them as new posts. The perk of this is that I can interact with fairly certain posts that only connections are allowed to interact with (yes, that's possible here) by connecting to the poster.

Also, if I subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed, depending on the feed, I get a certain number of old posts.

But if I connect to someone on Mastodon, I don't get even a single one of their old posts. Because Mastodon doesn't support that.

I don't get their ten latest posts, and I don't get their whole post history either or what's left of it after auto-deletion.

If Hubzilla which supports such stuff doesn't get them, then Bluesky won't get them either. Regardless of what Bluesky may or may not want, and regardless of what BridgyFed is or isn't capable of. Mastodon won't send them, full stop.

The only posts from you that Bluesky will ever get are your public posts which you send after letting someone on Bluesky follow you. And public posts from you that someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts.

And "public" really means "public". Just because you're on Mastodon and no longer on Twitter, doesn't mean you're in a fully safe haven and fully shielded from the world outside Mastodon. Yes, that's an uncomfortable truth if you've believed otherwise up until now, but it's the truth. Deal with it. You'd have to deal with it sooner or later anyway.

Seriously, what the Fediverse desperately needs is 10-minute videos from a true Fediverse expert, done in the style of "Academic expert explains science like I'm 5 years old" videos with colourful animations, that explain the Fediverse to journalists as well as to fresh or aspiring 𝕏 converts.

And that would take someone who

• really knows the whole Fediverse inside-out, all the way into its deepest nooks and crannies
• still doesn't only "speak dev" or "speak admin" and can actually make things understandable to your average tech-illiterate 𝕏 user with only a phone
• can make such animations
• can also make these videos fully accessible, not only with a verbatim transcript, but, if necessary, with additional real-time audio descriptions that optionally tell blind or visually-impaired users what happens on-screen, even if what happens on-screen only serves as illustrations for the explanations

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Bluesky #Bridge #BridgyFed #BlueskyBridge

@jupiter_rowland So I'm happy with that explanation and seems like you've put yourself in with half a chance to do such a small video and even prepped it now!
Even this as audio with pics... even here native... I'd listen (not sure elsewhere if I'd click).

So as side-note I'll be happy to help you produce such a thing and even invite you to send similar points by audio (your text above as script already pretty much lol) and I'll arrange it and send back to you complete!

Ok so suggestion and a offer aside, it makes sense what you say and I think I can move on!
(great huh!)

If I can move on to next major point... without too many left...
Here is the next thing people feel:

The whole difference between almost any Fediverse instance and then one owned by Massive Corporate Entity - call it MCE just for fun is clearer a different fish 🐟 (or shark 🦈 we don't know but any big business I guess has to do it's thing)

So the next point is trust vs. commercial entity.
In the same mindset as before where you explained about people scared about "copying my data", could you also have a stab at "how can you trust capitalism" lol... I mean trust Bluesky not to exploit and use everything it can for profit or other political reasons... or not be taken over, rug-pulled etc" lol asking the world 🌐 here :)

Again that point seems prevalent as others, and as we have instances now, even if they could get data they don't care and are too small.

It's a heroic thing to read my words and answer in similar way but seems we can both handle it (other are in short text world)

What we know historically as capitalism (through no fault of Bluesky or even /Meta/Threads - but the nature of those things means it's an entirely different beast we invite... 🐻 🦈 !

As a slightly fun or typical extreme take - "what about the Nazis" is usually a serious fear too but seriously even they care less online and have more innocent fun, whereas I can imagine corporations suddenly changing the game or suddenly changing their position that could leave any believer or Jack Dorsey stunned... just very little control or too much control from top...

So some here think we are growing overall nicer smaller, more innocent hubs of cmmunity and separation of protocol made that choice easier and fairer in terms of these politics / commercialisation considerations... I think we know the politics of capitalism... POWER!

(ending only for theatrics but helps you answer if you wish how these differences are in people's minds)

Thanks and liked your last writing and not too long at all for me!

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love

So I'm happy with that explanation and seems like you've put yourself in with half a chance to do such a small video and even prepped it now!
Even this as audio with pics... even here native... I'd listen (not sure elsewhere if I'd click).

So as side-note I'll be happy to help you produce such a thing and even invite you to send similar points by audio (your text above as script already pretty much lol) and I'll arrange it and send back to you complete!

I'm not going to produce any videos. That'd be way too much of an effort, especially meeting Mastodon's accessibility standards plus my own standards.

If this sounds weird, allow me to elaborate.

This is not a general-purpose personal channel. This channel is mainly about 3-D virtual worlds. I sometimes post pictures from these virtual worlds. But whenever I do that, I add an image description that's amongst the longest and most extensive anywhere in the Fediverse. I have to put the image description into the post text itself for several reasons, one reason being that they're too long for alt-text. Not only does Mastodon only support alt-text up to 1,500 characters internally, it also cuts off any alt-text from outside that's longer. And mine are longer.

I think I have very good reasons for writing such long image descriptions.

I've actually thought about making in-world videos one day and uploading them to PeerTube. I've decided against it. Accessibility would make it too much of an effort, and it'd make the videos essentially unwatchable. I'd include an audio description that describes the visuals in the videos on at least the same level of detail as my image descriptions.

So with an audio description added, the video would have to pause every few seconds for several minutes to give me some time to describe what's on-screen at that point, or what has just appeared on-screen, and explain it if necessary. If I didn't stop the video, the audio would not have a chance to catch up with the ever-changing visuals.

Imagine this:

• Two and a half seconds of actually moving pictures.
• Voiceover describes the camera movement.
• A building comes into view.
• Video stops.
• Voiceover describes the building and explains what needs to be explained to someone who doesn't know anything about anything in the video.
• Ten minutes later, the video starts moving again.

The audio description would inflate a ten-minute video to something between six and ten hours.

Okay, now, a video about the Fediverse would not be a video about a virtual world that nobody knows. But still, I expect there to be blind or visually-impaired users who come across such a video, play it and wonder, "What is being shown on the screen? What does this video and all that stuff in it look like?"

I mean, the visuals wouldn't carry any additional information. They'd be purely illustrational. They wouldn't contribute any content to the explanation, only enhance it. Content-wise, the explanation would work all the same with and without these visuals.

But not describing them feels kind of ableist, kind of like not letting non-sighted people experience the video in the exact same way as sighted people. And I always expect there to be non-sighted people who want to have all visuals in a video described in audio.

So I might spend weeks making one 10-minute video which would then be inflated to 30 minutes or an hour by the audio description.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Accessibility #A11y #MediaDescription #AudioDescription

Description of Visual Information

Helps you understand and create description of visual information (called audio description, video description, or described video) for video accessibility.

^{W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI))}

@jupiter_rowland Ok great to learn more about you - most skip this part or take offence too quick so I can work *with* how you are already like or what you like more than not... Kudos I wanted to say before anything

So even not doing much now I'd agree and say video not for now or not yet. Even for me video is so much bloat (unless really impactful or people loving per second)... but I can see some solutions to what you might see as a problem currently just for warming up to idea of 'something'

It might be a deal breaker now but really seems these things below might not be or can be simplified..

So for the video there are techniques that solve these problems:

█ about talking more than the video and needing it to stop to explain
● answer: that's what B-roll is for
BUT yes I'd also think b-roll is unneeded and even bullshit for this long but it is done currently or does need drastic reduction in time talking (unless your B-roll is really good)

- good example of above is how many times have we 'watched' a user in operating system play with his mouse on screen, kind not doing much or waiting for next part to click! (we have watch a lot all of us!)
So I mean it's enough for you to be inside app or on screen with what you talk about (your Mastodon interface for example) and that would be watchable and 'kill' time (even though I'm a audio person for ecological reasons and for more-pure education)...
●but yeah I'll help with that even I can screen record or suggest enough... I think for key things like setting up a wallet or scary stuff it really helps and people care for higher things than eye-candy
●ALTERNATIVE you can also do audio parts with pictures in between (like a blog post) so to modularise your presentation and even use it in different order in other presentations (you need to cut things anyway for naming it all individual parts so this can help by default to move things like you would in a playlist and even put it into next video by putting in video joiner, sorting the order and clicking "join videos" )

Anyway basically we can test our smaller parts of the idea quite quickly like this and call it workable or failure... but yeah you might have to roll with me and believe a bit :)

==================

█I hear you coming from 3-D world so appreciate you looking here :)
I would like to know what your goal is or even why... to enjoy that with you as mostly we are coming from these types of 'normal' video or ideas as a world but happy to see or hear more...

█Not sure what to say about catering for visually-impaired users but

● I'd solve that with audio commentary track or alternate video version describing what's on screen or background
I do assume some of that is not even important to visually-impaired users like it isn't to anyone else as videos have LOTS of unneeded filler stuff... so mostly it's * if * it's worth it for people either visually or for the audio...
● even better would be if author summarised or explained it all... audibly... less-impaired would also like that...

I appreciate you care about those things, and hope it's ok it's unusual or uncommon for me to see but I think we can change that with whatever we like!!

█The way I do things or the way I enable others is always this kind of "let's do this test" way and calling fails out so happy to have done or do most of the work to see what can work -

Overall
I think if you can lower yourself to audio then it is possible and then from there even could prep that for video (by me or others)
(creative commons release hopefully would help that)

@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love Thanks for your offer, but I'm still not going to do anything in that direction.

But to answer this:

I would like to know what your goal is or even why... to enjoy that with you as mostly we are coming from these types of 'normal' video or ideas as a world but happy to see or hear more...

I had a number of ideas, but nothing with a script behind it. Present places by walking around in them and talking about them, about what I come by. Another idea was to review houses that you can pick up for your own use; I would have done that the same style, often even without knowing the building beforehand.

All of this would have been rather spontaneous with lots of on-screen movement, constant unscripted and largely unprepared talking, pretty much like a Let's Play.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost