Alex L @alexl@mstdn.io

for what it’s worth, I mostly agree with @denschub about his post. especially acknowledging that litepub has had a lot of difficulty gaining traction, but some good has come out of it.

a large part of why litepub failed to gain traction is because it didn’t go far enough, but it is still an activitypub dialect, and is probably the most widely deployed one verses the mastodon dialect. and, for the most part, these are cross-compatible.

i am probably going to write some response to his blog at some point, but i need to think about what i want to say about it.

what i will say is this: of all the AP implementations, I think Pleroma and some of the smaller implementations like Kroeg are the only ones that are seriously trying to deliver a universal experience. in my opinion, Mastodon and many other implementations either drop or degrade non-native content to the point that they have less functionality than RSS readers.

in particular, i don’t understand how the Mastodon developers can say:

The social network that is Mastodon isn’t really Mastodon. It’s bigger. It’s any piece of software that implements ActivityPub. That software can be wildly different in how it looks and what it does! But the social graph–what we call the people and their connections–is the same.

… when rich media objects (or hell, even Article objects) are degraded into Note objects. after all, what good is a social graph if you can’t fully interact with all of the nodes in it?

i will also say that Pleroma hasn’t been out there promising the entire world the moon. we have not been saying “yeah, implement ActivityPub and then you will automatically interoperate with us in a nice way,” because it simply isn’t true.

the main problem with ActivityPub and ActivityStreams is that the designers failed to observe or at least mention that the interpretation of objects induces side effects: each implementation has to know what a Video or an Article or a Page object are in order to be able to present them in a useful way to the user. there’s a couple of approaches that can be used to do this, you can degrade the unknown objects to an object type you understand and hope for the best, or you can define a way to present the object that makes sense. Mastodon does the former, and Pleroma does the latter.

ask yourself: who should be the ones actually pushing projects to link into the fediverse? the ones implementing a project that degrades everything to a Note, or the ones implementing a project that tries to be a universal client of everything the fediverse has to offer?

the implementations which are working hard to provide a rich experience are staying quiet about ActivityPub, and the implementations which degrade the experience are talking up a serious game about ActivityPub. i think that speaks for itself.

anyway, you should definitely read dennis’s blog. i’ll expand on this some point later.

https://schub.io/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html

I wrote up the API I'm thinking about for my #ActivityPub #PHP library! If you're interested in building federated PHP applications, I'd really appreciate if you check it out:

https://github.com/pterotype-project/activitypub-php

I opened an issue where people can give feedback and discuss the API so that we can make sure it will meet the needs of Fediverse developers. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contribute to the discussion:

https://github.com/pterotype-project/activitypub-php/issues/1

The EU will support a number of #FOSS projects by paying for a #security #bugbounty program, like the one #nextcloud has. While 'just' a bounty program isn't enough, we think it is a crucial part of a security strategy.
https://juliareda.eu/2018/12/eu-fossa-bug-bounties/

Have your say: #European expert group seeks feedback on draft #ethics guidelines for trustworthy #ArtificialIntelligence

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/have-your-say-european-expert-group-seeks-feedback-draft-ethics-guidelines-trustworthy

#AI #Europe #Law #Politics #Government #Security #CyberSecurity #InfoSec

Article 13 is almost finished – and it will change the internet as we know it

https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/article-13-almost-finished/

#Copyright #Law #Freedom #Europe

So, turns out #GoDaddy is sneakily injecting a #spyware into your website. This is how to stop it:

https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2019/01/13/godaddy-is-sneakily-injecting-javascript-into-your-website-and-how-to-stop-it/

(Huge thanks to Igor Kromin)

This is a public service announcement: by saying "IT is crap because users still buy it" you are effectively blaming the victim.

There is a huge information and resources asymmetry between large companies creating software and hardware, and regular person who just wants their Internet-connected device to, you know, not do harm. Companies effectively made a business model out of that asymmetry.

We need education and regulation to make IT not crap.

I miss the old internet so much sometimes

KDE Applications 18.12.1 is out. Contains improvements to Kontact, Cantor, Dolphin, JuK, Kdenlive, Konsole, Okular, and many others.

https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-18.12.1.php

Since #Linux has adopted the penguin as its logo, it would be great to see the #LinuxFoundation donating to some organizations that are helping to save threatened penguin species like the Hoihi, or Yellow Eyed Penguin. Maybe the #GNUProject could contribute something to wildlife conversation on the African Savannah, where the real Gnu live? #NoSoftwareFreedomOnADeadPlanet

Okular: PDF Signature + Certificate support has landed \o/ https://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2019/01/okular-pdf-signature-certificate.html #pdf #kde #signature #freeSoftware #poppler

Librsvg is almost rustified now - https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/librsvg-is-almost-rustified.html

New to #mastodon, I'd like to connect with other #python developers. Any advice on how to do that?

#noob

I will be presenting at #IFF2019, on resilient publishing - or, how to make Internet censorship hard again in 2019 (as a publisher/website owner).

Code will be released, practical examples provided, and 4 years of experience in running websites that get DDoSed or censored drawn upon. Yes, including how @OCCRP dealt with #PanamaPapers traffic.

And no, solutions will *not* include CloudFlare nor Google Shield. The whole point is that they're not really needed.

See you all in Valencia!

I really like the design of GNOME Web, but it's hard to keep using it without extension support.

So I compromised and made Firefox look like Epiphany with a handy CSS theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ban7wspkrNQ&list=PLb7YRKEhWEBUIoT-a29UoJW9mhfzjpNle

cool wayfire demos (another wlroots-based Wayland compositor)

oh also, @write_as has an onion address for Tor users:

http://writeas7pm7rcdqg.onion/