One thought I’ve had about this: for a self-hosted gaming instance, it could be incredibly interesting to take inspiration or code from RomM and perhaps Funkwhale’s user library concept?

Basically, RomM is a server / launcher that supports tons of different platforms, allows you to stream games to the browser, and provide game library access to friends. It could be an extremely compelling building block.

We’ve seen this happen a lot with Mastodon instances, where people have various beefs and disagreements, and it sometimes results in people advocating everyone blocks an instance regardless of what actually happened. Unfortunately, people are more likely to hit the block-button based on hearsay than they are to do research on whether the instance is actually a bad actor.

It gets super ugly sometimes, and has been abused in the past.

Servers are hosted and operated by different admins.

It’s self-hosted. Originally, Funkwhale was an open source Grooveshark clone, where users uploaded music libraries to stream to various devices. A newer update introduced Channels, where artists could create their own profiles and upload their songs. So, Funkwhale kind of straddles a line between federating user libraries and artist uploads.

For the time being, it seems like they’re primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it’s one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn’t directly target individual artists.

Hey, thanks for sharing this! Yes, we could absolutely use help with writing articles and managing our social media accounts. There’s a lot we try to cover, but we’re a very small team.

I’m just saying, there’s tangible things to point to which explain the current situation, and how we got here. At the end of the day, compromises had to be made to have a working thing in the first place.

We can sit and wring our hands about a piece of software not being open source, but ideological purism doesn’t always get things made. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Besides which, a larger problem is that FOSS devs of critical projects aren’t really making much money, either. You could advance the argument that FOSS isn’t about money, but funding sure helps the longevity of FOSS projects. The Fediverse is practically anemic in this regard.

Look, open tools are great. I assume you’re referring to FediSeer, or efforts like it.

For IFTAS’ purposes, they found themselves in a weird situation. Their CCS system for fighting CSAM had to be developed independently, by contractors that were paid. This is because they needed a service that:

• Could integrate with a national database of CSAM hashes
• That could be plugged into a federated, open source network
• That could report on hash matches detected on the public network to the requisite authorities (a legal requirement for instance admins)
• That would be willing to work with them and take on risk.

There are off-the-shelf products for this. But, they’re prohibitively expensive, typically geared towards large corporations, and generally unwilling to take on a network of thousands of instances. As a consequence of going their own route of development, their work is beholden to a number of constraints. For example, access to the hash database for the National Center of Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) more than likely has legal constraints on implementations not releasing source code.

TL;DR - they built some things that were designed to solve very specific problems. That development depended on grants and donations. Some things, like FediCheck, may actually be open source and simply exist in parallel with FediSeer as using a different scope. They probably have more plans in the pipeline for stuff that generally doesn’t exist for a big part of the network to use today. They’re running out of money.

So, we’ve actually been covering IFTAS for a while: https://wedistribute.org/tag/iftas/

The org was initially founded in 2023, and they started as a high-level community effort to try and tackle the following issues:

• Fighting CSAM in the Fediverse (massive undertaking, requires collaboration with NCMEC)
• Giving admins tooling for coordination against known troll instances and curation capabilities
• Providing documentation and guidelines for how each platform is distinctly different
• Providing mental health resources and digital privacy protections to moderators
• Surveying admins across the network regarding needs their organization could provide.
• Policy recommendations for instance admins, such as how to handle EU’s Digital Services Act

I’m probably missing some additional things here. My point is, they weren’t some rinky-dink organization that just emerged uninvited out of nowhere, they developed out of common needs instance admins and moderators in the community have.

The two systems they offer (as listed in the article) Fedicheck and CCS, as far as I am aware, already have open source alternatives in db0’s Fediseer and whatever his anti-CSAM tool is called.

This may come as a surprise to you, but overlap between efforts can and does exist, and does not lessen the value of the things overlapping. FediSeer is a perfectly legitimate tool and effort, but these other things were being done at an institutional level, so a different approach was taken. Developing tooling to fight CSAM is complicated, regulation-heavy, and in this case depended on the org having to develop their own tooling after spending a long time talking to existing services that did not want to take on that risk.

Anything this group is doing should be open source, should be well advertised, and should be well discussed Fediverse-wide.

While I fundamentally agree, I believe there are reasons their software contractually cannot be open sourced. Presumably because of the integration and reliance on NCMEC and their CSAM hash database. As for being discussed Fediverse-wide…I mean, a decentralized network has no center? There’s a pretty big part of the network that knows about them and has worked with them, but your perception of reach is relative to your vantage point.

Just because your Scout Troop and the AA meetings use the same building, that doesn’t mean that AA members have any interest in supporting the scouts, or in having the scouts tell them how they should run AA meetings.

This analogy doesn’t really make sense in regards to the Fediverse. This isn’t “two different groups in a building”, this is a community-developed Non-Profit organization that mostly emerged out of a desire to help make life easier for instance operators. Nobody has to use anything they produce, but a lot of people have benefited from what they’ve provided.

I run Spectra.video, and the only reason we have manual registrations is to ward off spam and trolls. Anyone is welcome to apply for registration, we just manually curate the list first to make sure you’re a human that actually wants to use PeerTube and create stuff.

I think you’ll find our instance fits with the rest of your criteria pretty well.

I was working on a Friendica theme conversion a while back, with the goal of making the theme elements compatible with old-school Myspace layout generators. Unfortunately, Friendica doesn’t support a user wall anymore, so I’d maybe have to rewrite the whole thing for Hubzilla?

It’s profoundly depressing. Developers are the lifeblood of open source projects, and we’re all kind of just scraping by at the moment. Loads of people end up investing years and years of labor for free, only to get toxic interactions in return.

Sorry, our provider had an outage around that time. We should be good now!

Frets on Fire definitely comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frets_on_Fire

Gah. Sorry that it’s still happening, I’m not totally sure why it happens, beyond the server choking while federating. I’ll keep investigating. 😞

To my knowledge, the project isn’t dead…but, it has been moving at a horribly slow pace for a very long time.

Funkwhale is a pretty cool project, but it’s one of those things where the ActivityPub implementation really was bolted on well after the core experience was defined and developed. It was meant to be a Grooveshark clone, while a lot of people were hoping to use it in a more social way, like SoundCloud.

Should be working now. Occasionally, the server gets a little janky due to post federation and caching, but it should be settled at this point.

Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It’s one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I’d explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.

In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment’s notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It’s the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.

In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?

I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.

I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I’m married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.

I think it’s a big opportunity that the Fediverse has largely slept on. A lot of people shrug it off, but Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and a number of other places offer an export archive of your data.

Some of it isn’t all that usable, but there’s something extremely appealing about being able to take old parts of your social graph with you, and merge it into a new identity. A fixation I’ve had for the past few years is consolidating all of my data into one place, under one identity, and I’m exploring the possibility of writing data converters.

Interestingly, Pixelfed allows you to import your Instagram archive, and it’s fantastic.

So, to be clear: it’s not a concept like Nomadic Identity. Rather, it’s a demonstration of importing data archives from other social networks and platforms, and integrating that data into an existing Fediverse account.

In other words: it’s not a singular managed identity for all your apps, it’s a mechanism for marrying data from different systems to a Fediverse Actor. Paired with something like Nomadic Identity, it would be a game changer.