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#activitypub

91 posts78 participants0 posts today

I’m still using Toot!, a client that hasn’t been updated in years. It’s still working fine, even thought lots of improvements have been made to mastodon. The underlying protocol hasn’t changed though and that’s why things still keep working. That’s why you want well thought out, well defined protocols that care about stability and interoperability. I love it. And that’s also why I love XMPP more than just whatever is hyped at the moment.

In the @newyorktimes: 👏🏼

"#ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as #Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of over 14,000 host computers, as well as start-ups like #Pixelfed and #PeerTube, distributed services that offer features similar to #Instagram and #YouTube."

A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of #SocialMedia

nytimes.com/2025/03/06/technol

Mike McCue, the chief executive of Flipboard, sees its new Surf browser as a tool to help internet users communicate without relying on a single centralized service.
The New York Times · Facing the Looming Threat of A.I., Publishers Turn to Decentralized PlatformsBy John Markoff

Looking 4 a strange sonic experience? Check out…

RADIO IRRTUM! (on air from Berlin)

↓↓↓ Deutsch Version below unten ↓↓↓

Da next issue of
#RadioIrrtum! is approaching: This Saturday, 2025/03/15, 8:00pm UTC+1/Berlin time. At Alex Berlin FM at 91MHz or DAB+ K7D around #Berlin and worldwide at https://www.alex-berlin.de/radio-livestream .

#Radio Irrtum! is a German language #radioShow exploring the sonic vastness of the #underground. Emitted transmissions may raise your attention for new unheard #music all over this planets genre spectrum. Don't worry about the German language aspect - 'cuz it's all about the #music!

This time with focus on sad pop music and strange experimental sonic somethings, specifically:

-
#Pop music from war zones
- South American
#electroPop
-
#SmoothJazz
- Cut-up club-worthy remixes of
#remix.es
- Trauma-technological
#club punk
- Laibach-style
#EBM
- Truly experimental
#junkElectronica
- well,
#experimentalMusic in general
-
#EggPunk for cats
- Heavy
#shoegaze
- Spoken word
#doomShanties
- Dreamy
#EbassRomance

There is
#CreativeCommons licensed music, and also I thought of having at least one (amazing!) Fediverse artist in here. But turns out, the London music legend Scanner is no more part of the #Fediverse, as his instance mastodonmusic.social closed down (a reasonable decision by the admin, no hard feelings). But this is something, we, the #FediverseAdmins should keep in mind: People (especially technical non skilled ones) once lost will be disappointed and unmotivated to come back :( . This is something very deep level in #ActivityPub, I am very aware - I hope there is a way to somehow address this in the future. Scanner wrote me, he is on Bluesky now, so with a bridge, you might still be able to follow hin there (look for "robinrimbaud") – and please don't hassle him about it, he has his hands full and SN's aren't his top priority 4 now.

Anyway: If at least a bit interested in kewl new unusual
#music, tune in! 📻

I'll post playlist + manuscript later here (provided I’m home, else it will come up the day after). And if you have questions? I'll gladly answer! Just ask!
CU all on Saturday! :)


↑↑↑ English version above, the Deutsche welche jetzt ↓↓↓

Radio Irrtum! kommt näher → Samstag, 15.03, 20:00 isses soweit auf Alex Berlin (FM 91MHz/DAB+ K.7D / Stream URL oben).

Also die seltsam funke(ln)de Radiosendung, in der planetenumfassende Weiten des musikalischen Untergrunds erforscht werden

Diesmal mit…
- Pop aus Kriegsgebieten
- südamerikanischen Electropop
- smoothy Jazz
- cut up club
- trauma-techno Club Punk
- Laibach-Style EBM
- Junk-Elektronika
- experimentelle Musik
- Eggpunk für Katzen
- Shoegaze
- poetic Doom Shanties
- Ebass-Romantik

Das wird alles GROßARTiG! Details in englisch oben, Playlist + Manuskript nach der Show (spätestens Sonntag) hier drunter. Fragen einfach stellen – ich antworte (spätestens Sonntag)!

Bis zur Sendung… vielleicht? :)

Continued thread

Finally, our team had a wonderful time at #SXSW on Sunday and Monday, where Flipboard and @surf hosted the first #FediverseHouse. Our CEO @mike and the whole team are 100% #TeamFediverse, and were thrilled to meet and talk to so many other open social web advocates. Here’s a feature by @Markoff for @newyorktimes, where Mike, @Gargron and @reckless1280 discuss the rise of decentralized social media, and how it can help publishers and media companies survive and thrive.

nytimes.com/2025/03/06/technol

Mike McCue, the chief executive of Flipboard, sees its new Surf browser as a tool to help internet users communicate without relying on a single centralized service.
The New York Times · Facing the Looming Threat of A.I., Publishers Turn to Decentralized PlatformsBy John Markoff
Continued thread

“The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.” Here’s yet another brilliant feature by @Daojoan. “The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it. If they reject the idea that being trapped in someone else’s ecosystem is just the cost of existing online. If they stop believing that “free” means surrendering ownership of your own connections, your own history, your own data. If they see that the internet wasn’t built to be a factory for engagement metrics and AI-generated content farms. It was built to connect us, not silo us to pad a wealth-extremist’s bank account,” she writes.

joanwestenberg.com/the-fediver

westenberg. · The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—

The upcoming possibility of browsing to remote federated categories/communities has me thinking about interesting use cases for it.

Note that Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, and other "community-centric" software already do support this, so it's nothing new, I'm actually playing catch-up.

One interesting use case centers around NodeBB's /unread route, which tracks new topics since your last visit. Since ever, and even now in v4, this is only for local categories, but if you're able to "subscribe" to a remote category, then we could enable use of this page for that content too.

Think about waking up and seeing a self-curated feed of new content from your subscribed communities! There are some interesting parallels to RSS here, too.

What other forum-centric use cases do you think would be enhanced by the ability to browse remote categories?

So many people in Denmark now talk about building a Danish/European social media platform (I proposed it 12 years ago and was laughed at) They want to start from scratch, but I keep saying we can build it on the ActivityPub protocol (alternatively Bueskys but I don't trust that in the long run). Anybody here who has experience with that? And know of other countries having done that? Contacts to people who could help build it? #activitypub #socialmedia @mastodon

Hi @andrew_s@piefed.social/@freamon and @nutomic@lemmy.ml —I'm working (not-so-secretly) on refactoring NodeBB so that it is able to "browse" remote audiences/group actors, and that would include things like PieFed and Lemmy communities.

N.B. Given varied nomenclature (group/category/community/subforum), the ForumWG calls this structure an "audience".

Where I am at now is working through the logic for slotting an object into a category.

The most obvious choice here would be to look at as:audience. It's even specified in 1b12, and the majority of threaded implementations follow 1b12.

I am making this post because nutomic explicitly removed the audience from being served in Lemmy (as of January this year), so I don't think relying on that property would be wise.

I asked in that issue whether Lemmy finds community via to/cc (it does). Does PieFed do the same?

Would this also open up the possibility of a topic/context being part of multiple audiences/communities? Interesting...

NodeBB Communityfreamon

Destroying Autocracy – 13 March 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

DA comes out on Thursday and is updated through the end of day on Friday. Then we start over. So take your time in perusing it and check back in over the weekend.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

Featured Item

Tech Policy reports:

Describing the technologies that make all of this possible as “AI” masks what they really are: government surveillance targeting free speech. Today, the government’s use of (Big Tech) data threatens to deny rights while slashing government services, and the risk of being singled out hovers over anyone who disagrees with the administration.

A system linking the views expressed on an individual’s social media accounts to the platforms gathering government data is an immediate threat to the freedom to express ourselves and live without fear of government interference in that expression.

Through fear of service denials, investigations, targeted audits, and other potential abuses, the existence of this apparatus leads citizens to curtail Constitutionally protected speech acts. Creating a situation where citizens reasonably fear that their speech will lead to a suspension of rights, denial of services, or taking on other risks that threaten democratic participation and debate.

What is clear, however, is that the moment such an incursion into rights can be articulated, there is a vast legal precedent under the Privacy Act that can be brought forward in response. For that reason, Americans need more, not less, public expression of diverse ideas and robust rebuttals to the intrusion of this public-private partnership into our civic life.

The AI State is a Surveillance State

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes and other douchebaggery

The Next Web reports:

4 European satellite firms are vying to replace Starlink in Ukraine

Politico reports:

EU-US rift triggers call for made-in-Europe tech

The Next Web reports:

European cloud hosts are offering an escape from AWS, Azure, and GCP

Clayton Computer reports on:

Community Tech: Moving Beyond Free and Open Source Software

The Verge reports:

‘Careless People’ publisher won’t pull the book Meta is trying to stop

Media Matters sues X to stop lawsuits outside of the US

Krebs on Security reports:

Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

404 Media reports:

NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider ‘Scientific Exile,’ French University Says

TechPolicy reports:

Ukraine’s Hard-Won Approach to Strategic Communications and Counter-Disinformation: Lessons for Europe and Beyond

DOJ Sets Record Straight of What’s Needed to Dismantle Google’s Search Monopoly

TechCrunch reports:

UK competition probe of mobile browsers finds Apple-Google duopoly is ‘anti-innovation’

Could deeptech serve as Europe’s path to autonomy from the US?

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues

Open web initiatives Project Liberty and Solid could be teaming up

Meta faces publisher copyright AI lawsuit in France

Judge allows authors’ AI copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward

ArsTechnica has more:

Meta mocked for raising “Bob Dylan defense” of torrenting in AI copyright fight

The United Nations announce:

The OSI First to Endorse United Nations Open Source Principles

Neutral

Tech Policy reports:

Out of Balance: What the EU’s Strategy Shift Means for the AI Ecosystem

BleepingComputer reports:

X hit by ‘massive cyberattack’ amid Dark Storm’s DDoS claims

Usually this would be in the cybersecurity section. But, since it was against the box of c^nts known as Shitter the story gets moved here.

OpenSource reports on:

Overcoming barriers to Open Source procurement in the European Union

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Tech Policy reports:

How Disinformation Is Undermining Trust In Brazil’s Most Used Digital Public Infrastructure

The Guardian reports:

ICE accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show

404 Media reports:

Here is NASA’s Contract with Clearview AI

The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring

Corporate Europe Observatory reports:

Huawei corruption scandal shows EU has learned no lessons on ethics rules

TechDirt reports:

Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers

Pariah States

The Register reports:

Expired Juniper routers find new life – as Chinese spy hubs

BleepingComputer reports:

Undocumented commands found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices

North Korean Lazarus hackers infect hundreds via npm packages

TechCrunch reports:

North Korean government hackers snuck spyware on Android app store

Big Media

The Associated Press reports:

Washington Post columnist quits after her opinion piece criticizing owner Jeff Bezos is rejected

The Bulwark reports:

‘State Propaganda’: Anger Erupts Inside Univision Over Airing of Trump Ad

Ethan Zuckerman reports:

Jay Rosen and Taylor Owen: Can journalism survive Trump? Can democracy?

Big Tech

Not a Tech Bro says:

The government is not our business

The Index reports:

The Fascist Tech Bro Takeover Is Here

Unfortunately, it’s true.

The BBC reports:

Facebook was ‘hand in glove’ with China, BBC told

Radio Free Asia reports:

Hong Kong media urged to back up Facebook protest videos

MalwareBytes Labs reports:

Android devices track you before you even sign in

One of the many reasons I have a Fairphone with the e/OS operating system.

The Guardian reviews:

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams review – Zuckerberg and me

Terror

Michah Flee shares a:

Step-by-step guide to reading the leaked militia chats yourself

Very cool.

Cybersecurity/Privacy

DarkReading reports:

Democratizing Security to Improve Security Posture

OpenAI Operator Agent Used in Proof-of-Concept Phishing Attack

Binance Spoofers Compromise PCs in ‘TRUMP’ Crypto Scam

He, he.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares:

Choosing the VPN That’s Right for You

BleepingComputer reports:

Critical PHP RCE vulnerability mass exploited in new attacks

CISA: Medusa ransomware hit over 300 critical infrastructure orgs

Fediverse

The Fediverse Report has:

Fediverse Report #107

Hamish Campbell explains:

Why the Fediverse Needs a Connection Between Mainstreaming and Grassroots

The Nexus of Privacy shares:

Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the Fediverse and the ATmosphere

Ghost has an update:

Actually, I take that back

Mastodon has:

Trunk & Tidbits, February 2025

SplitBrain details:

Mastodon to GoToSocial Migration

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

TechCrunch reports:

Open social web browser Surf integrates with Bluesky in latest beta

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

Keep fighting!

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#107 #ActivityPub #AI #ATProto #ATProtocol #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Bluesky #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Ghost #GoToSocial #Mastodon #StopChina #StopIran #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine

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