It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
Folks should take a look at the #fullTextsearch function that Eugen is proposing for #Mastodon and how closely it resembles the #search patch of the woman who he kicked off the Mastodon repo GitHub & Discord a couple of months ago. Also, her patch was more configurable that the thing he's bringing to main that has zero attribution of her work. #fediverse#mastodev#MastoDevs
Hi Fediverse admins / devs! I've got a question about instance software.
Up until now, I've been running a fork of glitch-soc that has served me well. Unfortunately, however, I'm starting to run up against some of Mastodon's limitations and the effort to maintain my own fork is just too much. (seriously, fuck Rails and especially Webpacker :blobfoxangry:) I'd like to switch instance software to something with more features out-of-the-box. I'm considering Calckey, but I don't have any experience with it or any other Misskey derivative. The feature set looks great on paper but I'd like to hear from someone who has actually run it (or at least seriously evaluated the software). I'd greatly appreciate any and all input! I'm especially curious about these questions:
The "Fediverse Software Comparison" table has a few mistakes in the Mastodon and glitch-soc columns. They're minor, but it makes me wonder if that table is really trustworthy? The table is based on personal knowledge
Looks like yet another new #Mastodon app (for Android) @rodentapp with "Home Summary" timeline that seems quite similar concept to @terhechte 's #Ebou but even more collapsed 🤔
We should introduce "Community ALT text" on Mastodon (and other fediverse softwares which has similar ALT text implementation), much like the Community notes feature on Twitter. This would be really helpful for situations where it's challenging to provide a proper description for an image.
Holy smokes! 🫨 It's been FOUR WHOLE YEARS since we launched oslo.town 🎈
I would like to extend a big THANK YOU to all the people that have taken the time to sign up, and especially to those who have stuck around, that post regularly, that tell their friends about oslo.town and - of course - to those who donate their hard-earned cash to keep the site running. 🙏 🙏 🙏
Is there an #ActivityPub server where I need to parse HTML for <link type="application/activity+json" href="..."/> to get to the JSON representation of an object? I want to add support for this in #Smithereen but I need something to test against.
Is there a more efficient way to check if two accounts follow each other via Mastodon's API, other than fetching followers of both accounts and finding a match?
So, #Smithereen no longer requires a username when signing up. You instead get assigned one automatically, of the form "idXXX" where XXX is the ID for your user record. You can change it later in settings if you wish. Current Mastodon versions handle this change no problem.
The username is only visible in two places:
The URL of your profile
When someone mentions you
So it's not very important. Definitely not important enough to be a required field when you register.
I'm adding new profile fields to #Smithereen, so I would like to ask the fediverse about what kinds of contact info one would expect to be able to add to their profile. So far I've seen:
Personal website/blog
Matrix
XMPP
Telegram
Signal
Phone number
Twitter
Email
I've not yet seen these in fediverse profiles but they are mainstream enough that won't hurt to add:
We'll now throw errors when doing POST /api/v1/push/subscription if the endpoint is an invalid URL, or if the keys values can't be used to encrypt a message.
That prevents you from registering a push subscription that just wouldn't work. We previously lacked input validation here.