Fediverse enabled microblogs about FOSS game developments

[Julius]

https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/com ... to_follow/

Some interesting Fediverse accounts that you can interact with from our Hubzilla instance (or any Mastodon / Pleroma or Friendica etc. one).

[rubenwardy]

Here are two accounts that I run:

https://fosstodon.org/@Minetest
https://fosstodon.org/@rubenwardy

[Julius]

Cool, thanks for sharing!

For those wondering: You can either cut and paste the above urls (or the webfinger "minetest@fossodon.org") into the add connection box top left on your connections page in Hubzilla, or alternatively go on any Mastodon page, click the "follow" button, type your Hubzilla channel id like mine: "povoq@social.freegamedev.net" and press proceed to be redirected to your Hubzilla page for confirmation.

[Julius]

Nice diagram on the overlapping protocolls and services that can be considered to be part of the fediverse:

https://snarl.de/proxy/f2/aHR0cDovL2Jsb ... BuZw==.png

[fluffrabbit]

Helpful. I'm trying to get the rundown on this Hubzilla thing, and I am puzzled by this comment:

Hubzilla’s network stream is comparable to what you’d expect with Facebook or Diaspora. It shows all of the content coming in from your channel’s connections, and includes status updates, photos, comments, and reshares. Because the platform is not a microblogging network, statuses are threaded together with comments.

Threaded conversations are helpful. Nobody acknowledges that deficiency in Twitter. However, Friendica is apparently equivalent to Hubzilla according to the diagram, so are Friendica's conversations also threaded? And what is the structual difference between a microblogging social network and a non-microblogging social network?

[Julius]

Yes Friendica also has threaded conversations.

I recently tested Friendica for FGD extensively, plus point is that ActivityPub support is a first class citizen there compared to the rather afterthought way it is handled in Hubzilla, but overall it feels much less polished and the only modern theme is mostly unmaintained and an ugly hack. Threads in Friendica are also visually more obvious but at some point the theme breaks rather badly along the tread tree. Hubzilla puts linear forum style replies more prominently but since the recent version you can actually reply to specific posts, but it is only visible by a small double arrow that links to the post. But overall I decided Hubzilla is the better option.

what is the structual difference between a microblogging social network and a non-microblogging social network?

Hmm... I guess like the above quote was outlining. Microblogging (Twitter, Mastodon etc.) is UI wise geared towards short blurbs of text as with a shout-box, and while comments are possible they are quite hidden away and more of a personal feedback mechanism for the original author than a multi-user conversation. I think this creates a structural problem and everything is out of context but people still insist on posting very context sensitive things. In the end microblogging works best as a sort of RSS feed aggregator like system, where comments are pretty much limited to posting thumbs-up or additional related links or so.

[Julius]

Uh, I noticed that I never linked to the Disroot Hubzilla tutorials:
https://howto.disroot.org/en/tutorials/social

[fluffrabbit]

I think this creates a structural problem and everything is out of context but people still insist on posting very context sensitive things.

You're damn right. Intelligent debate is almost impossible on Twitter because of this.

One strike against Friendica is that all posts are CC-BY, so there is no way to legally pressure nodes to remove things, like how people sue over reposting family photos, etc. I think free content licenses have their place, but not necessarily on social media.

I'm considering installing Hubzilla on mobilegamedev.org, but I'm also considering that I may never actually use it.

[Julius]

One strike against Friendica is that all posts are CC-BY

Huh? Where do you get that from? There might be some public instances that put such rules in their ToS, but the software Friendica does not and can not impose such a rule on your own selfhosted version.

I'm considering installing Hubzilla on mobilegamedev.org, but I'm also considering that I may never actually use it.

If you are not planning to use it much, it is probably a waste of server resources. Hubzilla itself is quite lighweight but the database quickly grows to a significant size (ours is currently 2.5GB).

[fluffrabbit]

Huh? Where do you get that from? There might be some public instances that put such rules in their ToS, but the software Friendica does not and can not impose such a rule on your own selfhosted version.

https://github.com/friendica/friendica/ ... /dfrn2.pdf

If you are not planning to use it much, it is probably a waste of server resources. Hubzilla itself is quite lighweight but the database quickly grows to a significant size (ours is currently 2.5GB).

I will have to check, but I believe my cloud provider provides something like 1 GB.

[Julius]

Eh, I see. Thats an very old documentation of the legacy protocol that has been mostly replaced by ActivityPub in Friendica. IANAL it is not possible to impose such on the protocol level, but I guess where this comes from is that a federated network has by its nature a copyright problem, as posts are automatically mirrored on other connected servers (hence the big databases). Now the problem is that of course the original home server can have some sort of ToS in place that allows storage of personal content of its users, but if that ToS doesn't also include some sort of transferrable license provision to also allow other servers to store that information (e.g. CC-By) then IANAL strictly speaking the other servers are on legally tricky grounds and would have to block the connection to that server.

[fluffrabbit]

IANAL, but the best license would be a limited gratis license like with freeware. As in, "you can distribute this but as soon as we say you can't you have to stop". That would provide a legal basis for enforcing post access control and deletion.

[Julius]

Made a small app for Hubzilla to use it on my Ubuntu Touch mobile device:
https://open-store.io/app/hubzilla-web.povoq

The upcoming Hubzilla version 4.6 also looks quite promising, lots of nice improvements regarding ActivityPub compatibility and also some performance improvements etc.

[Julius]

Will update to Hubzilla 5.0 soon, I hope it all goes smoothly. (edit: Done was super smooth it seems)

There is the summary of changes:

Zot6 Protocol
Zot6 has been implemented as the primary messaging protocol in Hubzilla. Most work in this development cycle has gone into this project. What you will notice is that the network field in your connections list will turn from zot to zot6 as soon as your contacts' hubs will be upgraded.

Direct messages
Direct messages are messages that are addressed to one or more single connections. They are accessible from your network stream. A direct messages filter has been added to the stream filters widget for quick access. The Mail app has been deprecated in favor of direct messages.

Mail app moved to addons
There is no concept of private mail in the zot6 protocol. If you require access to your legacy mail, you will need to ask your hub admin to install the mail addon. This will allow you to install the legacy Mail app.

Forums
The way we interact with forums has changed. To post to a forum you can now simply select a forum from the ACL selector.

Polls
Hubzilla now has support for polls with multiple options. This feature is compatible with activitypub polls and is available directly from the post editor. The vote feature has been deprecated in favor of polls.

Notifications
Notifications have been rewritten to implement server sent events. It is required to install the SSE addon to receive real time notifications. Also some useful new features were added.

Due to the upgrade to the zot6 protocol there are some drawbacks
- Sourced RSS feeds will not federate via zot6 unless the option "Resend posts with this channel as author" is selected. The authors are not valid actors.
- Anonymous comments will not federate via zot6. The authors are not valid actors.
- Community tagging has been disabled. It will be re-enabled when it is agreed upon how to implement it for compatibility with other projects.
- The chess addon has been moved to addons-unsupported until it will be ported to the ActivityStreams2 data format.
- Channel clones at hubs which are at Hubzilla version < 4.7.4 will be disconnected until the clone hubs will be updated.

I'll have to see how the changes in regards to sources RSS feeds will impact the FGD Planets. I guess we will switch to the option mentioned in the changelog and that might even allow the Planets to (finally) federate to Mastodon etc.