the whole reason why they are separate platforms is that they are for different use cases.

The reason they’re separate platforms is because they were developed by separate people/teams. They’re not even vastly different usecases. Link aggregation isn’t far from microblogging. The comment you made is even represented as a Note which is what all the microblogging fediverse platforms use for their posts. If you make a Note from a microblogging platform and include a link, that is represented differently from Lemmy’s posts (which is a Page I think?) but semantically they’re the same thing.

a Mastodon user would want person to person conversations, a Lemmy user would want topic-based discussion with less emphasis on who they are talking with, etc.

A conversation on Lemmy is started by a posted link, but again, there’s no real difference in this thread we’re participating in and a thread on a microblogging platform. In fact, microblogging users can participate in this thread. And this thread could have been started from a microblogging platform and it could be the exact same thread.

A fediverse app should display Actors (which could be a human user, Lemmy community, Kbin magazine, bot user, etc) and its list of posts and allow that actor to be followed (assuming the current user’s server supports following that actor type). The functionality is basically the same on every platform and the UX should be the same; the tricky part is showing/hiding features based on what the current server allows (e.g. if the app is displaying a user, it should show a follow button on microblogging platforms and kbin, but not on lemmy) and handling the side effects which are different for every platform

ah you’re right. I misread the section that mentioned that and thought there wouldn’t be any public post pages. Thanks for the clarification.

Modern browsers can retain your scroll position for pages in your history. But Lemmy is a SPA (Single Page App) which means it uses a Javascript framework to manage most things that the browser normally does. When you go back to the feed in Lemmy, Lemmy loads your feed and positions you at the top not the browser.

I believe the dialog element has support in all the mainline browsers now, so again, if you want to load a page in an overlay, that is something browsers can do but Lemmy has to be written to do it that way.

Unlike plane autopilot where it can always be overriden by manual interaction as fallback

To be fair, pilots undergo actual training and in the U.S. I think they have to get relicensed every so often. Drivers take a written test and then a single driving test and they’re licensed for the rest of their life, regardless of any new circumstances.

Without cloud connectivity, it would presumably operate like a normal completely human controlled vehicle, so no capability would be lost.

Here’s hoping that the mastodon team actually pays attention to this when they start their group implemenation

And there can’t ever be a guarantee that fediverse content will include a language. I think selecting a language should only filter out content with an explicitly set language that doesn’t match but allow unspecified-language content through.

Not only is it exciting that they’re adding ActivityPub support, but its great that they’re basing their implementation off of Lemmy. Up til now, most implementations have been from scratch and implement federation after the project has gotten up and running and then do federation testing. That leads to different assumptions about models/flows and inconsistencies and hacks to get it working. Working off of another implementation’s federation guide will mean less hacks but still leave room for impl-specific features and workflows.

While I agree with the EFF that the fediverse could become “the fabric of the social web”, I think this article is slightly off. Their argument is about the fediverse and how it’s based on ActivityPub and so could be used for many different types of interactions. But they were arguing against the idea that mastodon is a failed twitter clone. I think the article they’re replying to is right; mastodon is a twitter clone that misses what hardcore twitter users like about it. Everything the EFF wrote about the fediverse is right, but that has nothing to do with whether mastodon is a decent twitter alternative or not becuase mastodon is not the fediverse.

I’ve also run into this issue since the upgrade to 0.17.0

I don’t know much about open source licensing. What’s wrong with the SSPL and what does that have to do with mongo?

Complaining that you’ve been banned for a seemingly innocuous post isn’t proof that you deserved to be banned. If the author is telling the full story, the admin(s) of their instance were in the wrong.

And this is a legitimate issue. If new fedi users try out an instance and get banned without warning, they’re unlikely to try another instance. I want the fediverse to have a wider array of people and conversations happening, but that can’t happen if admins are quick to ban instead of engaging their users.

Last time I used it, Fedilab also supported PeerTube. The same developer also released a specific PeerTube app, though so I don’t know if they split the video functionality out or left it in.

just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should

The web worked this way before there was a large corporate presence. Scraping was common during the blogosphere period and robots.txt was the solution everyone at the time agreed on and that’s been the standard ever since.

I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it

We’re not intruding on this space. We’ve been in the fediverse for just as long or longer; the fediverse has been scrapable since 2008.

I think votes are represented by ActivityPub Likes and Dislikes. Likes are already federated by every other software so it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to federate dislikes.

cool bot. thanks to whoever wrote this

But unlisted toots are still technically public. If you scrape my profile, you will get them

Then that’s a scope issue with your server software.

the fact that they are public in the technical sense does not mean I consented to them being scraped etc.

This is what I was trying to say with the analogy to a public announcement. Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Just as wearing a short skirt is not blanket consent to sexual advances

This is a ridiculous analogy. Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades, is not remotely similar to sexual assault.

Yes. Business that can afford it have security cameras. And more relevantly, nobody talking in a cafe thinks their conversation is private and that nobody will overhear it. We use a combination of location within the space, voice level, and body language to show how we want others to interact with us. If you walk into the cafe and make an announcement at the front, you have no right to expect that nobody will respond to that announcement, or tell others about it, or even record you while you make that announcement. That is what posting on the fediverse is like. If you want a quiet conversation in the corner, you can post unlisted.

Yeah, I know. I shoulda put a /s on that; my bad.

Disappointing. It’s too bad there’s not a standard API that clients could use to communicate with servers.

EDIT: That was a sarcastic response. ActivityPub has a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that would solve this problem if anybody would ever implement it.

But that helps the student get better at overseeing the AI, not at writing or critical thinking. I don’t even think it would help them get better at analyzing writing. Most students would just turn in the first result, unless the teacher requires them turn in the whole transcript of their session and then the teacher is just grading them on AI overseeing. And that’s one case. Every bit of homework I ever did (before higher education) has been shown by ChatGPT: analyzing literature, writing in various styles, physics problems, foreign language translation, etc.

I doubt that AI will increase the percentage of students that want to cheat, and it is easy to cheat.

What? Cheating right now requires a human somewhere to do the work. A student can steal their work from online or pay someone they know to do it, but basic work will have available answers. A teacher may be able to come up with a unique format for their specific questions in their subject, but that takes extra work for the teacher. If a student can literally just type the question on the paper into ChatGPT and get an answer, I can’t imagine many teenage students not doing that, at least some of the time.

It sounds like you’re suggesting they rewrite their curriculums around ChatGPT (or similar AIs). That would require the teacher themselves to have a good understanding of the AI. So they have to gain proficiency in a brand new technology and then design a way of teaching around that. This is a ridiculous ask of a group of people who are already under-resourced and not keeping up with their current goals (at least in the U.S where I am).

That’s the main point of my previous post. It’s irresponsible and immoral to develop and release a technology for your own profit and just say everybody else needs to adapt to it.

But how? Calculators can help you do arithmetic , but to solve real problems you have to know how to apply the mathematics. A calculator cant solve a problem for you until you break the problem down into discrete operations. You still have to learn how to break that problem into those operations.

If you’re trying to teach students the basic skill of writing, there’s nothing to break down. Write an essay is a pretty atomic operation.

Altman’s response is an incredibly typical response from a silicon valley style technologist. This will be really beneficial one day and the downsides aren’t really bad because you can just adapt to it so my company can continue making money

This seems to be relying heavily on the mastodon markup and prolly won’t work with other fediverse software.

EDIT: After looking more closely I realize all the markup was the author’s own markup, not the mastodon markup. As the author is using the Masto API, this should work with any software that implements that API. I still think this is not a good solution because it prioritizes mastodon over the rest of the fediverse. Comments from some people will be displayed, but not those of people using other software.

I’m not a lemmy contributor so everything i’m saying here is conjecture.

The problem is when any software does a webfinger request to get the Actor (which could be a user or community) they send a request that looks like GET lemmy.ml/.well-known/webfinger?acct=community@example.tldand lemmy’s response may contain multiple actors but mastodon expects only one actor. Lemmy handles this by fetching both actors in the webfinger response and checking their type, which will be User or Group (which is what lemmy calls communities).

Note that the webfinger request doesn’t include the leading @ or ! character because those character are just UI affordances to linkify the community. The !community@domain.tld format isn’t a part of any standard and is never exposed to other software.

A favorite is treated like an upvote

Yes, lemmy allows communities and users to have the same name. Other software may not be able to handle this, e.g. mastodon. This causes compatibility issues with mastodon if you search for a user and a community with the same name. I think mastodon will just ignore the community because the name is already reserved on that instance. But if you search for a community that doesn’t overlap with a user, mastodon will resolve it correclty

Copy the post’s link and search for it within pleroma. This is also how I upvote and comment on lemmy posts from pleroma.

Sure I’ll try mocking something up in the browser devtools. On mobile, lemmy displays body text for posts (p.s. I’d like that on desktop too). What I’m talking about is just showing that in the position the title would be, still in an anchor tag so it links to the post but with body text styling instead of in a header.

EDIT: Here’s a quick mockup.

The first and third posts are title-less posts and, to me, look good interspersed with titled posts. To get this, I replaced the entire h5 element that serves as the post title with <a class="preview-lines" href="{{post.link}}">{{made up body text}}</a> The preview-lines CSS class applies a visual truncation so even if the text we render is too much it won’t overflow.

I don’t know how to write Inferno templates but in Vue this would be

<!-- this is the current markup -->
<h5 v-if="post.title">
    <a class="text-body" title="Comments" :href="post.link">
        {{ post.title }}
    </a>
    <button class="btn btn-link text-monospace text-muted small d-inline-block ml-2" data-tippy-content="Expand here">
        <svg class="icon icon-inline">
            <use xlink:href="#icon-plus-square"></use>
            <div class="sr-only"><title>plus-square</title></div>
        </svg>
    </button>
</h5>
<!-- this is new markup i'm suggesting -->
<a v-else class="preview-lines" :href="post.link">
    {{ post.content.substring(0, 250) }}
</a>

If they wanna do both, they can. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s the best use of their resources because running a mastodon instance is a huge task. And companies having a Twitter profile was only necessary to get their blog posts noticed. On the fediverse, there’s no reason for that extra step when you could just follow the blog directly. That’s less work for the reader and less work for the poster and no extra service required.

It probably makes it more likely.

I disagree. Running an instance doesn’t give you any insight into how to implement ActivityPub and anybody can study the source code without running an instance. There are quite a few orgs running instances, but, as far as I know, WordPress is the only widely known software that has actually integrated AP and they never ran their own instance.

I’ve never personally received any messages from a pleroma or akkoma instance, that I’ve noticed. My understanding is that they only send Deletes to followers of the deleted acct.

It’s great for the author that their site was able to withstand the load, but it’s ridiculous that this issue has existed for years. Mastodon is incredibly spammy and it seems like the dev team just doesn’t care. They also send Delete messages to any server they know about, even if that server isn’t an AP server and has no relationship with the originating server. My website is not an ActivityPub server, but i get thousands of spam messages from mastodon servers a day. I’ve filed two different issues related to that but neither of them has received much attention (and none from garg).

Having an official fediverse presence makes sense for a company, like you say. But I think there’s better ways to do it than running a mastodon instance and encouraging your employees to make their acct their is a bad idea.

Medium is a blogging platform and companies usually write full length blogs for announcements. To me, integrating AP into medium and using that as a direct fediverse presence makes more sense.

Individuals shouldn’t have to make multiple accounts (like a personal, fun acct & an official, professional acct) and having your acct controlled by your employer is a pretty shitty situation.

In this thread, the CEO mentions they might add AP but he believes shortform and longform content should be completely separate. I don’t think he realizes there’s no way to keep them separate on the fediverse. Any long form content that is federated can be found on microblogging fediverse software (as it should be; the idea that they should be separate platforms is dumb)

If someone’s only reading Lemmy through Mastodon, why not just stay on Mastodon?

They are staying on mastodon. But mastodon, pleroma, misskey, lemmy, etc are on the fediverse. They should all be able to communicate without arbitrary boundaries.

so it seems vulnerable to spammy @'s.

Posting to a community from lemmy is no different from posting to a community from other software. A post is a post. Moderation should be able to handle spammy users regardless of the software they’re using.

You don’t even need a special format. If you remove the pipe in your first example, that’s a normal microblog post. It would look perfectly normal and readable for other microblog users and lemmy could parse it into a representation that fits its UI easily (The @acct will be the community its posted to and the first line, up to a newline, punctuation character, or max character limit, will be the title.)

Examples

@asklemmy@lemmy.ml Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?

Yes they should. I don’t see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

would parse to something like

{
  "to": "lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy",
  "title": "Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?",
  "content": "Yes they should. I don't see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
}

@asklemmy@lemmy.ml Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy? Yes they should. I don’t see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

would parse to the same thing because it could use the ? as delimiter.

I think it’s a good idea. I don’t see any reason to limit which posts are available based on the presence/absence of simple fields. That’s just a UI problem and using the first sentence (up to a certain character limit) as a title is a good solution. Savvy microblog users could even write their posts specifically for lemmy by writing a title and adding a newline, obviating the need for custom code in microblog software or lemmy

EDIT: Another reason in favor of this proposal just came to me. Mastodon has group support on their roadmap, but my worry is their team won’t look at prior art and make their group support compatible with existing Group implementations. If Lemmy allows external users to create post to its groups, mastodon users may start actively posting to lemmy groups. Then the users would expect any native mastodon group implementation to be compatible with what they’re already using.

But that’s just a UI issue, right? Post listings in Lemmy is essentially the same as a feed reader and I’ve used feed readers that display posts with/without titles.