abff08f4813c

If anything we want to encourage this.

I like the example of SAG AFTRA hosting their own instance to be official, for example. Celebs typically have their own domains and websites, so easy enough to hire a team to create and manage their own instance that supports the celeb but federates. And you know it’s legit just because it’s on the celeb’s own domain. Ditto for gov’t agencies having their own instances.

Even without federation and such it’s an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737

We don’t have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it’s already happened elsewhere.

That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person’s web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person’s account with a celeb of the same name.

Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov’t agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren’t open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov’t agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.

A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume ‘@kbin.social’)

On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.

I can’t ask, because years ago I watched a video on twitter. It was funny. I tweeted “That killed me”. I was banned
youtube doesn’t seem to have a direct messaging system.

Does this person have a patreon or something similar? Could sign up and then ask there. Or leave a youtube comment on a recent video sharing your email address.

Heck, I might risk creating a new youtube account over VPN just to ask in a public youtube comment for peertube (so if YT bans the account for mentioning peertube, it’s no loss to me, and the creator has still gotten the message).

They’ve never heard of mastodon.

Makes sense if this was years ago, back when it was younger and less wide spread… I also imagine you just heard and saw this, but didn’t directly ask because, well yeah.

What surprises me is that these seem to be all on other instances - including a few big ones like just.works - rather than someone spinning up their own instance to create unlimited accounts to downvote/spam/etc.

The author (who isn’t OP) is using federated wordpress blogs, so expect to see this pop up if you are subscribing to them.

That being the case, and also considering the rough edges around the fediverse right now, I think the link sharing is reasonable. I’ll add that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it shared.

Piefed? It does, at least somewhat. IIRC the main thing is that you can’t follow specific Mastodon users.

• From a satisfied pyfedi user.

Agreed. It’s quite telling that despite all the asking, no one has been yet able to pinpoint a single issue on the mbin devs.

The most generous interpretation is that it’s just a half-remembered thing of discontent from folks who didn’t want kbin to get replaced (before it was known that kbin was dead).

For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.

Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.

Instead of having it be completely random, I am thinking of a site similar to sub.rehab.

Instances that are open to public signup would register on the site, and give updated states on how many users they have along with a brief description of what they are for.

Users can decide roughly what size instance they’d like to join and view a list of matches. We could add a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that picks a random one out from the list.

Because the Fritzbox uses a DS-Lite tunnel.

Thanks, that pointed me in the right direction!

If I’m understanding https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-3490/1611_What-is-DS-Lite-and-how-does-it-work/ and https://superuser.com/questions/1301857/using-pcp-port-control-protocol-in-practice correctly it seems that it’s technically via PCP (Port Control Protocol) that this is known, rather than DS Lite per se, but also that PCP only comes into play here because DS Lite is being used.

(Why point out the distinction? For future readers. I can imagine some braindead ISP somewhere (likely a super cheap reseller) offering DS Lite but then not knowing about PCP, and either not offering port forwarding at all - or they do but you have to fill out a form and snail mail them and then they snail mail you back a printed letter containing a list of port mappings.)

So, here’s a page from the online manual that specifies how to do this specifically for the FritzBox 7530

https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-7530/893_Configuring-static-port-sharing-in-the-FRITZ-Box/

Based on the original post though I am 100% sure that OP has already seen this page, already tried it, and therefore knows that the warning under 2.10.b. applies to the OP’s case (i.e. FritzBox doesn’t allow it from UI because the ISP doesn’t allow it - that honestly had me wondering just how the FritzBox knows the ISP doesn’t allow it, but that’s a different topic).

And one can prototype this for free by using something like localhost.run or ngrok.com

I guess some people don’t get the joke.

The sayings potato/potahto and tomato/tomahto mean they’re the same thing.

No one in their right mind would say a potato is a tomato or vice versa, just like no one would ever argue Portuguese and Spanish are the same. They’re both of a category (veggies and languages respectively) but totally different and distinct items within that category.

Depends on your POV.

In one sense, if ActivityPub can be a bridge between two protocols (e.g. RSS vs email) then it’s always technically possible to cut out the middle man. In that sense, no not really.

From my POV though ActivityPub shines because it’s more content agnostic. RSS is specific to feeds and posts, while email is for email, Bluesky is Bluesky (twitter), etc, but ActivityPub can handle video (peertube), images (pixelfed), forums - including likes and downvotes (Lemmy), microblogging (Mastodon), etc. (Note that the ActivityPub to email implementation I mentioned currently doesn’t handle likes/downvotes for example.)

With the possible exception of email, I’d also say that ActivityPub has something these other protocols do not - ownership over your own data. If you run your own instance for yourself, you always retain a copy of your content - you don’t have the situation of ello.co where if the site suddenly goes down without warning you lose years of work. Even if you use someone else’s instance, if that goes down you may be able to recover your content from another instance that was federating to it (retrieving content posted to kbin.social from the copy at fedia.io for example). That’s the beautify of federation.

(This is also true of traditional email, but things like gmail and Outlook - where the email is simply hosted on someone else’s server - are moving away from that.)

The really intriguing thing about ActivityPub, at least to me, is it’s capability and potential to be a bridge for many other protocols.

For example, here’s ActivityPub via email: https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html

That page also references the longstanding NNTP(Usenet)-email bridge that existed for the linux-kernel mailing list, so we could get ActivityPub to Usenet.

In fact there are a couple of RSS->Mastodon projects out there already, such as https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub or https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder

Someone creates a version which adds a Lemmy compatible api to pyfedi and tested out a couple of mobile apps against it, https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/13#issuecomment-1814982

So it’s not impossible - but it’s also very much a YMMV thing (I suppose it’s really still only for developers atm)

I can’t currently log into lemmy.world, and browse peer-tube, yet if I leave my instance, I’m no longer in my account. So you say to just create a peer-tube account. Ok, but now that’s fragmented. There’s two accounts. And then maybe I want to share pictures. Well now I need a pixelfed account. Ok, now that’s 3 accounts for 1 fediverse. And the list only grows. Mastodon? 4 accounts.
I see a future where you log into 1 account from your instance. From that home page on your instance, you can interact with any service that hasn’t banned you, or defederated from your instance. ANY fediverse service. With one account. You can write mastodon messages, post a video to peertube, check your email, post some pictures, whatever. And all your notifications will be in one place. Organized. A centralized decentralization if you will.
I just see a world that doesn’t exist, and I want it to hurry up already

Hey, I think maybe you misunderstood me. The “all under one account” thing is possible for the most part - here’s the PR which allows mbin (and thus mbin accounts) to do peertube https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/pull/782 and in pyfedi (and thus piefed accounts) there seems to also be peertube integration https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/community/util.py#L75 along with pixelfed integration ( https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/user/routes.py#L981 ) - though I’d grant that you’re correct about there still being rough edges that need to be cleaned up, but I am confident that they will get cleaned up over time.

So that part of the vision is pretty much already here. The only thing is if you want to create and own the magazine/community (the 3%) … well see https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/869 (but I think even remote account ownership is on a wishlist somewhere, so even that may get taken up some day.

There’s even an open item about being able to transfer your account to another instance (account portability), see https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/171

So I tried to search for pyfedi, and the only things I found are some repos. Not quite sure what to do
with that. HOWEVER, a few different repos seemed to list piefed as the thing it do.
So is pyfedi the same as piefed.social ?

piefed.social is the flagship instance while pyfedi is the software. By analogy, lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of Lemmy, kbin.social was the flagship instance of the kbin software, and while it doesn’t offically have a flagship fedia.io is the largest instance to run the mbin software.

I am enjoying the layout of piefed. It’s quite tasty! I hope this is the thing that does the other thing.

Yes!

But what if I transfer my Lemmy account to Piefed? Will I still be able to create communities on Lemmy.World?

My understanding is that unfortunately, to be the owner of a community or magazine (such as !Fediverse@lemmy.world ) that’s local to given instance (lemmy.world here) your account would also have to be local.

Or am I going to just end up with two different accounts, on two different sites, that do 97% the same thing?

From what I understand, most folks pick one favoured instance as their primary one for that 97% - but create the local account to own the magazine/community as well as the rest of the 3%. (Note that you can add your primary account as a mod though, even if it’s not local - so you have to create the community on lemmy.world with your lemmy.world account, but then you can add your piefed.social account as a mod to that community and then manage the new lemmy.world community mostly from piefed.social.)

Or am I just wrong all around, and pyfedi has nothing to do with piefed, and I’ve stumbled onto a different thing that does the thing that the other thing couldn’t do, but is still connected to, but not in the same way, but still uses the same services?

What can I say? The fediverse is complicated. But in a good way.

Honourable mention to piefed.social / pyfedi which can do both as well.

However, it’s newer than mbin and I’m not sure about mobile apps working with it.