Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!
Hey, thanks for sharing this! The site seems to be down right now, and needs to migrate over to new servers anyway. I’ll be investing time into that process - for now, I’m writing weekly articles over at the fledgling FediNews publication.
This is such a sad situation. On the one hand, the tech is legitimately outdated, and the company was struggling to make enough money to keep advancing its development. On the other hand, it improves the quality of life for a lot of people. Not being able to get any support with failing hardware is the worst possible outcome.
It would be amazing if, at the very least, the designs for these devices could be released to the world for free, so that people could find ways to hack on them and offer improvements. I know that there are other companies out there now, which are offering better, more modern solutions…but, being able to modify this tech easily would go a long way towards improving quality of life for patients with implants.
You know, every time I’ve tried to take a look at Solid’s protocol, I find myself struggling to understand what they’re actually trying to do, or how any of it is supposed to work.
I’ve tried to read the protocol spec several times, and my brain just kind of melts. From their About page for the Solid project, I kind of get what they’re talking about, but so much of the under-the-hood stuff feels really vague.
I’m not against making a fediverse platform support Solid, if only to support the core concepts its promoting, but I feel like they have a lot of work to do to make their own project more accessible to people.
Over the years, I’ve been studying a handful of different fediverse platforms that bring a lot of interesting concepts to the table. …
Yeah, running multiple instances can be quite the investment of time and energy (sometimes also money). It can initially seem easy to run an instance, especially if you’re self-hosting one, and maybe have one or two more as a side-project. But, the demands that come from running multiple instances can steadily increase over time.
This is partially why I had to open up VidCommons as a joint project. Even though I still do most of the server maintenance, trying to run it all by myself was an absolute nightmare.
In 2018, a platform was launched to build an open, decentralized web for videos. In 2021, the network is still struggling to grow. I take a look into some of the problems with content discovery, along with some small suggestions for instance admins…
An overview of a new federated GoodReads alternative, powered by ActivityPub. It’s awesome, and I’m really excited about it!..
TL;DR - A month or two back, I launched an instance with a specific goal in mind: provide a home for creators that want to put videos out into the fediverse, without having to deal with storage space limitations or the hassle of maintaining their own instances. This motivation gave birth to Spectra…
So…there’s a couple of communities worth checking out!
If you want to do something purely FLOSS-related, https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/ has a pretty dedicated built-in community for that.
If you want to produce tutorials for edutainment purposes, there’s TILvids: https://tilvids.com
I’m not exactly surprised to see Roy Schestowitz taking this position. However, I think he’s making the classic mistake of assuming that centrally-issued censorship by an institution is the exact same thing as a bunch of people swinging ban hammers because they don’t like what somebody has to say.
An important component of Freedom of Speech (by extension, Freedom of Association) is the freedom of the individual to decide whether they have to listen (or in fact, associate with a person at all). I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes various parts of the fediverse can get a bit ban-happy…sometimes that sets up a toxic dynamic where the people making those kinds of announcements are at best loosely informed on what they’re spreading around. But, that’s also nothing new when it comes to online communities.
If you’re going to act like a repulsive human being, I reserve the right to cut you out of my feeds so that I don’t have to deal with you. In a sense, that puts power directly into the hands of the user.
I think PeerTube has really come along as a project, but I think it’s caught in a situation where the technical aspects are advancing far faster than the communal ones. In order for PeerTube to actually succeed in practice, I believe that creators ought to reach out to one another to create a type o…
That’s actually a great tip, thank you!