kopper [they/them]

i’m pretty excited for fedify since i’m unsure if there has been any other activitypub abstraction that feels as comprehensive as it seems right now (from a brief skim, anyway).

one thing i had in mind ever since i first skimmed the docs some time ago is this:

federation.setActorDispatcher("/users/{handle}", async (ctx, handle) => {

i would really recommend you to NOT tell people to use handles here. i assume this is just naming and the framework doesn’t actually require a handle there, but documentation matters and if you follow on the footsteps of mastodon, pleroma, lemmy, and friends everyone who follows your docs will lose the ability to change usernames down the line without more pain than it’s worth (and yes, there are software out there that allow it right now! please do not build fedi software assuming usernames are immutable jsut because mastodon doesn’t let people do it)

just like how you wouldn’t use a natural key in a database, you should tell people to use a surrogate key like an autoincrement id or a uuid on the actor IDs, as they’re effectively permanent. while it may be probably fine for a quickstart thing like this to omit that, a lot of permanent codebases do start up by following these kinds of guides, and nudging people to do the correct thing when it’s not that hard is always a good idea IMO

Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.

(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)

True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn’t. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it’s HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/<link> html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the “search URL to load community” feature in order to make this possible.

Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.

How do you expect for that auto-detection to work? Just a regex on example.com/c/community? What happens when some other instance software decides to use a different URL format? Or do you just assume Lemmy is the only thing out here?

Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)

I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)

There’s no real reason to. Your own instance (in this case, lemmy.world) has the real view of the thread by the virtue of being the instance starting the thread. lemmy.ml only has it’s own copy of this thread that’s likely reasonably accurate (compared to any other random instance out there, considering it hosts the community), but it’s not the original version, which is what the fediverse link points to.

Which instances did you try? I want to check if it was the background radiation of USpol inherent to most online communities you’re sick of (which there really isn’t a solution beyond keeping up with the newest buzzwords to add to your filters for from what I can tell) or the dot-social/kolektiva/twitter-like “my political happenings are too important for a content warning and must be boosted to everyone’s eyes 24/7” variety of USpol (which there is a ton of in Lemmy as well but i don’t think most people are ready for that debate yet)

The second one can be ameliorated a little by picking a smaller, sillier instance (hint: the weirder the domain, the better) and not following The Same Large Accounts Everyone Does.

In fact, I would advise against Mastodon the software altogether and instead point you towards instances of Akkoma or one of the not-Japanese Misskey forks such as Sharkey, Firefish, or Iceshrimp. The vibes of most instances I’ve seen seem to be cozier, and the Bubble timeline (called Recommended Timeline by some software) helps with discovering people to follow beyond the said Large Accounts.

The Pleroma family of ActivityPub servers are on Elixir and their bottleneck seems to be their awful database schema where everything is JSONB, and even then they’re known to be quite lightweight, so I assume with a proper DB schema it’d work quite well…

while i don’t have any specific opinions about this that other people haven’t addressed, i just want to flag up something;

How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.

this seems unenforcable. as in, you can’t really tell where someone discovered a post from. yeah you can just remove the buttons from those views clientside and it’ll probably work for the majority of cases, but alternate clients or modifications to lemmy-ui can simply put the buttons back in (or in cases of unmaintained or differently opinionated clients, just not remove the buttons at all). the backend can’t really differentiate which view a vote comes from. federation especially can’t differentiate which view a vote comes from.

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)