FediDB – Developer Tools for ActivityPub
fedidb.org
fedidb.org
My profile: I'm someone interested in principle in the fediverse. I have a Mastodon account, and plan to expand my footprint when I get a chance, maybe install Peertube on my site etc. I'm not a developer for anything on it, thus am not familiar with the nuts and bolts, but I'm at least curious about it.
With that in mind, I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at. Is this for people writing clients? And what form does this take, a software suite? If that's the case I wonder why getting started requires an email address. Some parts of the site (list of instances, list of software) seem to be very general resources, which doesn't give much more of a clue what exactly this is about. And then the FAQ answers very specific questions. There's a middle ground that feels missing to me.
I do get that this is for helping with testing, and somehow with development in general. Is this like an instance that you can point your client at, that works like Pixelfed, Mastodon etc, but gives more useful error feedback? Saying that explicitly would cover what I'm getting at.
Perhaps I'm just not the target market, but it seems like the "what is this" test needs a little more to pass for someone like me.
I don't agree that requiring an account is the only method through which you can submit your authorization for the domains you want to test against.
Hiding _all_ functionality behind a create account pop-up is a pretty dirty pattern.
Something like this is exactly what I need! Looks fantastic.
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
That said, I'm not sure how much much of ActivityPub you could make use of for a static site? You could definitely publish an Actor and create an Outbox listing your content. You could also have deploy triggers to notify followers when you publish...
But how does someone follow you? In order for that to work, there needs to be a server to accept a Follow activity and add them to the Followers collection to be notified on publication.
ActivityPub requires some semblance of interactivity for some operations, I'm not sure just a static site would qualify.
perhaps someone can provide a sort of managed service to act as a backend to support this.
I like decentralized systems but the community is fraught with risk. Hopefully that changes as it becomes less niche.
I personally stopped using mastodon for these reasons.
Right now it's just instance admins deciding unilaterally for their users, which is terrible.
This is, quite frankly, a bullshit model that enables censorship. An instance admin shouldn't be allowed by the protocol to decide who you are allowed to read or follow.
It's just as bullshit when gmail automatically spam-folders anyone sending mail to gmail users who isn't part of the deliverability cartel. Most gmail users are oblivious to the fact that an ad company is managing their eyeballs and attention so completely.
That doesn't make any sense, perhaps you could clarify your position here. It seems like you're saying instance administrators shouldn't have much control over what their users see on the fediverse. That sorta defeats the purpose of it, at least the way I use it. If I have to let someone else decide for my users, that's hardly decentralized. I block single user instances as well, because they're usually a waste of time, but if someone reaches out and makes a case for a whitelist entry, I consider it. That's how it's supposed to be, and that aligns with the guarantees about content quality that I've offered to users.
Again, I'd love to hear a more detailed description of your policy ideas, I don't think I understand.
Because those users want to read and follow users on that other instance? The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow.
Users should be in ultimate control of what they are allowed to read, not instance admins. Users should be able to opt in or out of filter feeds, whether published by their local admin or anyone else, at their own option.
This is a fundamental issue with federated networks, one that has come up with email and again with AP.
of course they do; they run the server. Whether you think they should is a different story.
If you build a road on your property, you can decide who drives on it, at your own terms.
If a road is built with your contributions, there's usually a committee or collective decision apparatus that decides the rules. You don't always get your way in that case, but the road would be bigger than what you could enable on your own.
Hope this helps, love to talk more if not.
I didn't downvote your comment but how would it even be possible using computer science principles to design a protocol that prevents admins from deciding what bytes go in and out of the machines they pay to run?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting but a simple reading of your complaint seems like you're asking for the impossible.
EDIT reply to : >One method is by end-to-end encrypting those bytes, and optionally some of the metadata as well.
If there's a hypothetical new ActivityPub version 2.0 protocol that encrypts everything so that the any and all instance operators are forced to accept messages and images of sexually abused teen girls, those admins will choose to _not_ to run that encrypted protocol.
In the end, you still haven't created a protocol that removes the ability for voluntary admins to decide.
Yes, a limited scenario of 1-to-1 communication where encryption hides a conversation between 2 people (e.g. Signal) from the instance operator can happen but a 1-to-many followers broadcast model like Twitter/Mastodon/etc with federating/forwarding messages like USENET is different. How would a protocol for 1-to-many force admins to accept those bytes?
EDIT reply to: >Yet people are still using freenet.
Yes, of course _some_ are running Freenet. But that doesn't address my point: you can't design a protocol that _forces_ humans (aka "admins") to accept any and all bytes. There are many that choose to _not_ run Freenet.
By designing a peer to peer protocol without admins.
> those admins will choose to _not_ to run that encrypted protocol.
Yet people are still using freenet. Regardless, you can run a protocol like this on top of AP, to the admin it will look as if people are just exchanging encrypted data.
You can't require a client app for a social media service if you want any adoption. It's extremely important to allow at least viewing the content via a regular web browser. And to allow that to be done natively and frictionlessly, without having to rely on protocol bridges.
I can send a link to a Mastodon post wherever to whomever, even if they have never heard about Mastodon. Can't do that with p2p networks.
You can say that the blocklists will be voluntary but instance participation is already voluntary. Clearly that's not enough
with public transparency (I, sure people could/would want and make private bouncers too) - and public comments, people could choose to change their blocker/bouncer - maybe revert to an older version and clone into a new one.
Would be nice to change your choice of censoring based upon your own belief/desire rather than being stuck with whatever some admin or big G decided to let you see without any transparency as to why x y and z are blocked.
I hope this a part of the future that can be built. I too am not a fan of the current censoring cartels.
Mastodon.art (11.7k users - NOT 17k users) blocked the sneak.berlin instance (1 user) because you wandered into the Admin's mentions and tagged other members of the instance to call them "rude as fuck" and lectured them on how to moderate their own instance when they announced other additions to the block list.
Source: https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/103307407459883859
Now, looking through your instance, I don't see anything especially problematic that would make you unpopular to the Fediverse, but just from your attitude towards other Instance admins and your disengenous argument about your value to another instance's users makes me feel as though this suspension was 100% justified.
One of the fundamental purposes of Mastodon is to keep communities niche while curbing abuse. One of the fundamental benefits of Mastodon is that most of the polite instances get to participate in each other's conversations.
But you were not polite, and you harassed and insulted the people who run another instance, and while you would like to pretend that the problem you have here is that those 11.7k people no longer get to see your content, the real problem you have is that your bad behavior has permanently locked you out of 11.7k accounts that you proved yourself too impolite and meddling to be allowed to interact with anymore.
This isn't a flaw of the Fediverse, it's a feature. The system worked as it was supposed to. A rude person was made to shut up, and the users of the Mastodon.art instance won't even feel the loss of your single-account instance that isn't about art.
And this isn't even scratching the surface of the prevalence of far-right/Nazi instances that brigade people and launch harassment campaigns that fundamentally justify the use of these moderation tools.
If you don't like the way that instance is administrated, I recommend not signing up for an account there.
It's interesting that you think rudeness is a basis for an admin deciding unilaterally what thousands of people are allowed to read.
You didn't get censored, you got disciplined for your behavior on a network you don't own. If the members of the instance that blocked you want to see your content, they can visit your instance directly. If they want to interact with you they can join another instance, or create their own.
Your free speech ends where mine begins online. Act however you want on your own server, but don't play victim when others decide that they don't wish to accommodate you.
MAJOR EDIT:
Looks like literally hundreds of instances have you suspended, and it is very justified.
Just saw your last Toot - the one in support the Boulder Shooter: https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/105936796868205796
Absolute mystery why you get suspended from polite corners of the web.
I'll admit, I didn't do an excellent job determining you to be "unproblematic" originally. You deserve every suspension, and they are numerous: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%2Fabout%2Fmore+snea...
You seem to have conflated the two.
Imagine if an email host started dropping all of your outbound emails to a certain domain, silently, without notifying you.
That would be a bad email server, and that admin's decision should be criticized.
Unlike twitter there aren't investors that want to keep growing endlessly so the hard problem of moderation at scale can just be sidestepped by the admin by closing instance signups once they reach moderation capacity.
Do you have any idea why? conspirologist in me says, this could be targeted attack by FB, Twitter to slow down decentralized movement. But I don't want to give my inner conspirologist take over my mind.
There is a desire to be able to sort of soft-publish, accessible to the whole internet, but revocable in some way. That's not how publishing works from an information-theoretical standpoint, to say nothing of the internet.
A lot of people thought their data was being stolen or misappropriated when their own servers provided it to me via unauthenticated vanilla HTTP requests to public URLs.
It sometimes occurs to me that if search engines didn't exist, and you tried to invent them today, profiting off of a downloaded copy of the full text of other people's websites, you would be sued into oblivion.
I think this is not a sustainable view. It is trivial to write a crawler to find people's profiles using open APIs, and even more could be garnered if you scrape pages.
If you don't want to be found but must put stuff on the internet, the answer is to not federate.