the Fediverse may be missing a clear, cohesive narrative.

I think this is because it’s not a clear, cohesive place. Developers keep trying to make it look like centralized social media, but I don’t think that’s going to work in the end; it certainly isn’t working now.

So true. It’s impressive and laugh-inducing to me how complainers seem to demand from the Fediverse something that you can’t even get from GRR Martin. And to be intellectually honest, you are not getting it from Facebook Twitter etc because the “narrative” there is a fabrication a fiction. There’s no real thing that has to be coherent there other than branding and fascism.

Thanks for the reminder, there’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it already, as a Firefox extension.

lol, didn’t even notice it when I wrote it. Good catch!

Essentials? Difficult to decide, it depends on why you are even selfhosting in the first place.

At a first glance and looking at my attempt at a homelab:

• some sort of basic web service (eg.: nginx + PHP setup)
• some sort of repo manager service (I do Fossil, but I hear most people use eg.: Gitea)
• XMPP server
• Jellyfin server
• Minetest server

and can even be extended to act as a Unified Push distributor.

wait wait wait wait.

That works? Teach me how!

Sounds like just repeating an inherent truth to me? You can find toxicity anywhere on the internet that is not tightly regulated by a BDFL. That said, I would not adscribe any undue weight to this kind of statement. It’s like saying sky is blue. Intentions don’t matter, mass of users vs limited work of volunteer admins does.

You federate with Threads

Nice try, fed.

Honestly if the feds are going to even take the effort to move personnel to your house and knock your door, when it’s quite unlikely the server is hosted physically at your house in the first place, you could take the opportunity to offer them cheap consulting on technology, international cultures (anime and stuff) and federation.

Heck, you can aim at their ego. “I tricked you, right guys? That means I’m pretty good.”

It’s not as much about seeing, it’s about using, and profiting from.

This post under CC-BY-NC-SA.

Dunno where have you been the last year, or the last 55, but those who “never experience God’s grace” still experience all the graces of capitalism and techno-feudalism, which is what currently matters.

There’s nothing unique to the current Fediverse situation. In the days of old people had their own web pages and web servers too, and we had protocols to announce changes to people too (hello? RSS? X-Headers?), we linked to each other as well (directories, webrings) and we had chat (IRC). Yet we still landed on CorpoNet.

In fact I’d surmise the current situation is worse. Whereas with the old ad tried protocols you could actually host a web server with content on a potato, or on an old beeper, nu-protocols tend to be quite resource hungry. I oft hear that people have to pay two bills for Mastodon: one for the web service and another one for the amont of storage and traffic that it generates; from what I hear Matrix is similarly heavy compared to, say, IRC or XMPP. Dunno if it’s still true or not but I also recall that stuff like Lemmy depends on DNS, meaning you have to be able to buy your own domain and depend on that kind of central authority (wasn’t the point of Fediverse stuff to be decentralized?). Rather recently a good amount of Lemmy servers were oopsied because one of the .tld authorities pulled the rug from under an entire top-level domain name.

We’ll probably have to move to a new internet. Dibs on calling it the “Freediverse”.

From my perspective, a big bull is charging right at us. We can either jump on it, ride it and try to taim it; or get trampled dead by it.

It’s already proven that it is a mistake to jump on the bull (or, for matter of analogy, the smart truck) and try to tame it. it’s already engineered and moved by big money so that its controls will never be available to us. Smarter than trying to tame it (a useless fight) or leave ourselves be trampled by it (a useless sacrifice), we can simply jump aside.

You sound so innocent it’s almost cute. Option 2 will never happen because people are already aware the Fediverse exists and that still doesn’t make it for them, what the want is the closed walled gardens, when (not if) the time comes to cut off Threads they’ll just return to their posting there. With Threads closed off from the Fediverse, there is no incentive for them to keep their activity here.

And the fedi is full of that.

[citation needed]

Better comment section? Youtube is basically an incel / right-wing / flatearther comment pile.

You saying that XMPP is not dead?

Name 10 active generalist servers.

No, really, it would be good to know. I haven’t been able to find active XMPP communities since ca. 2015.

But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.

The problem is, that’s always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers. I’ve been around for the wrecks that were (and still are) Pulseaudio and Systemd. Wayland is even worse: it doesn’t even fully start a session in my machine. If as devs you want to “iterate”, sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don’t try to sell me Wayland again until it’s actually over.

That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already

Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance’s cultural identity and it’s a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.

Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it’s likely most of everyone would’t even be able to participate in hexbear’s. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a “Reddit” instance.

I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”. Like, I get that it has a “cost”, I just don’t understand why that cost would be an issue since it’s basically fixed, marginal cost (and has been since like 2015): the software is already mature, so it’s unlikely to see relevant changes, or even minor changes (if that’s what we want to mean with “dead”). That means, it can be affixed to a specific toolkit and environment to build (if this isn’t being done already - which any mature project like RedHat should be!) basically guaranteeing it’ll build forever. You can just set a virtual button or a yearly crontab to do it. Fixed, marginal cost.

Contrasted to that, what Wayland is doing is kinda a representation of the worst ways of capitalism: centralize the profits, socialize the costs and the externalities (redesign, recode, rebuild), and blame society (the Linux communities) for it, all for a variable cost that is unbounded in time and space because you never know what’s gonna cost a small project like a text editor to reimplement the entire desktop stack “just” for Wayland.