• 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 22nd, 2023

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  • But do we need some kind of SSO layer with DID verification? All I need to prove my identity anywhere, technically, is my private+public keypair. As long as I hold on to this keypair, distribute it between apps/computers, back it up, I could log in anywhere on a federated platform and use it.

    I hope we’re going to see key-based decentralized identity on ActivityPub at some point… Having accounts tied to instances is just not very robust or scalable.




  • YunoHost “packages” are just scripts. In the case of Lemmy, Lemmy_ynh’s install script actually fetches the Lemmy Docker image and extracts the files (including pre-built binaries) from it. And then it writes the config files to use the system Psql instance instead of a containerized version.

    FWIW I don’t care how YunoHost installs the apps. Whether it’s fetching and running containers, or building from source, or grabbing binaries. As long as the apps work and the reverse proxy gets wrangled it’s fine with me. Just in this case refusing to run the Docker images directly is, at least momentarily, a problem for updating the app.


  • Well it is “working” for me. I’m using a YunoHost Lemmy 0.16.7 to type this comment :). But I agree there should be some kind of warning on the project that it’s only really partially working, and very outdated (thanks to the recent flurry in activity and changes).

    Mainly though I wish YunoHost would just support Docker idiomatically and install Lemmy “as intended”. Yeah Docker can be a bit of a pain and it uses more resources, but it also has many real advantages like siloing the apps from the host system…



  • The main blocker, at least so far, was Lemmy is designed mainly to use use Docker containers to version itself and its main dependencies like Postgresql, while YunoHost runs on the bare system. And since YunoHost is still on Debian 11 it only has access to Postgresql 13 while Lemmy now wants 15. This unfortunately is hard to resolve. YunoHost doesn’t want to introduce Docker, and upgrading the entire platform to Debian 12 is slowly happening but it’s a lot of work.





  • Yeah, this happened to Mastodon (aka the microblogging part of Fedi) also. I was on Mastodon on-and-off for years before the Twitter exodus, and it was a very different place back then. I can see why people miss the overall community on a platform before it became popular, but then I feel like ActivityPub gives us the tools to shape the communities we want, so we have to engage with it and be more selective than we were before.







  • I think a difference between email and ActivityPub-based social media is there’s arguably less of a need to have federation between any two servers. If you can’t email the government, your sister living abroad, or a client, that’s a big problem. But if you can’t follow a cat pictures account or your friend’s constant stream of baseball rants because the servers don’t federate it’s not quite the same.

    If Meta becomes ActivityPub interoperable instances may or may not federate with them. Either way it’s not necessarily going to change my social media experience.


  • Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

    • Owning user accounts
    • Exclusively host communities
    • Serving local and remote users webpages and media
    • Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

    Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

    I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

    I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.