#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
My experience is that state actors won't even try to decrypt your communications. That's old school - and a horribly inefficient use of resources. They'll come after you with a keylogger or manufactured legal nightmares or torture - to either or both sides of the communication; depending on the perceived value of your secret.
It all comes down to 4 fundamental questions:
- What is the value of your secret to you - What resources do you have available to protect it - What is the perceived value of your secret to your adversary - What resources do they have available to divulge it
My experience is that state actors won't even try to decrypt your communications. That's old school - and a horribly inefficient use of resources. They'll come after you with a keylogger or manufactured legal nightmares or torture - to either or both sides of the communication; depending on the perceived value of your secret.
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
POSSE has merit, being a partial design for disrupting the deprecated monolithic silos, but IMO actually falls short by only seeking to coexist with it, instead of completely obviating them.
As a dedicated FOSS and Privacy Advocate, here's my take on how we can follow a best practices modus operandi, achieving what can eventually relegate today's monolithic silos into the marginalized zone, sending them into the abyss of downtrodden insignificance.
The model can work from any Fediverse platform, but platforms that support a rich feature set with longform authoring capabilities work best, having the greatest impact. For those stuck using masto for the time being, their impact will be less dramatic, but nonetheless still valid.
The model I've been advocating goes like this:
1. ) Create original content on Fediverse enabled properties you own, or cite (link to) content NOT residing in the deprecated silo space (Twitter, Medium, TikTok, InstaSPAM, YouTube, Faceplant, Reddit, Linkedin, Etc.). You can do this from pretty much any Fediverse platform - even masto, with its paltry 500 character limit. A paragraph or so as a rule of thumb, just a teaser/headline to create interest for the reader to follow the link. 2. ) Optional: For added impact and if you have any, from your traditional silo account(s), as well as from less capable clones like masto, offer up a teaser, perhaps a paragraph or so, with a link to the URL of this original content. 3. ) If you're merely pointing to an article or resource created by someone else that exists independently, that's it. Well done! If you created your original content in long form on a more capable Fediverse platform than masto - there are many excellent Fediverse platforms for doing this. A few of those are:
4. ) Endeavor to never publish any actual content (articles, news, photos, videos) on platforms in the deprecated monolithic silo space. Instead, it is preferable to publish your photos, videos on demand, and textual content on a Fediverse Platform well suited to this. i.e., PeerTube for VoDs, Pixelfed for images, and one or more of the platforms mentioned above for textual or multimedia based content such as news articles, HowTo's, tutorials, recipes, Etc. 5. ) Occasionally, you may find it necessary to link to content in the deprecated silo space - a video on YouTube, for example. You may be able to clone videos (depending on licensing) to a PeerTube server, but if not, then make sure you sanitize those videos by using tools such as Invidious that shield the viewer from tracking and other privacy disrespecting constructs built into those silo systems.
The philosophy here is to ensure that anything posted into the deprecated monolithic silo space entreats the reader/viewer to leave that space in order to consume the content.
This practice insures that the consumer of that information does so in a protected, privacy respecting place, presumably built on FOSS, and in the Fediverse. It further serves to familiarize the consumer in an easy and unassuming way, with Fediverse platforms that do not track them or mine their privacy.
For the Fedizen however, it provides a one way transit - anyone seeing a teaser/headline/intro on say, Twitter or Faceplant, is immediately catapulted away from those denizens of commodification that packages and inventories the consumer as the product for sale, depriving those platforms of the necessary revenue that sustains them - death by atrophe. No blissful coexistence, every single post inside the deprecated monolithic silo space is in fact an egress point bringing the consumer into a free and privacy respecting environment.
Obviously, an article on the New York Times website isn't ideal, but it isn't strictly one of the monolithic silo systems listed above either. In this case specifically, it's a walled garden however, so you're directing the consumer to a place where they'll be privacy mined anyway, which offers three other possibilities:
- You can, and should unless you feel you absolutely must, elect not to send someone to that resource - You can, under certain circumstances, copy that data verbatim elsewhere and provide a link to that place where you copied the data. - You can also probably check with the AP, since we're talking about a newspaper outlet, most of which actually pull their news from the Associated Press and other similar networks that provide free access, which you can link to instead.
There's simply no way to completely ensure being so mindful of your consumers without precluding yourself from linking to some forms of interesting content - but the point here is that almost without exception, you're not sending anyone into the deprecated monolithic silo space - you're sending them into the Fediverse, where they'll begin to become comfortable with, eventually creating their own accounts here.
I recently had some discussions with a few folks who completely turned their back on things like Twitter, which is good because it is one of those social networking systems that engages in tracking and privacy mining. Those individuals have made it easy for themselves by simply putting the existence of those privacy disrespecting resources completely outside the real of consideration - it's not like anyone is going to suffer because they didn't visit Faceplant. They may suffer a bit of withdrawals, but bear the following in mind:
There are liquor stores on virtually every corner in the real world. They sell booze at liquor stores. An alcoholic must come to terms with this and learn to live with this fact, making a conscious choice to buy, or not to buy booze in those stores, or even go outside where the temptation is even greater.
That's not the greatest metaphor I know, or maybe I just didn't deliver it well. Either way, I hope that in understanding this death by atrittion model, that people can make better informed decisions about privacy for themselves and others.
I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, and any tools that help assist folks in addressing privacy concerns. Please feel free to share this by boosting to raise awareness within the Fediverse (and beyond) of all the excellent platforms available to everyone in the Fediverse. I realize I left out large sectors of the Fediverse that can be factored into this formula - the link aggregators and forums like #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Kbin, #Mbin, #Discourse, and more. I didn't even directly address the purpose built single user instance platforms. Maybe we can give them some coverage in a later edition :)
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.
No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?
Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.
No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.
The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.
Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.
True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.
With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.
Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.
In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when they're on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.
The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".
That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.
masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.
Jupiter: > That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.
Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.
There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.
I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.
Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!
Danie: > thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?
In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.
My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.
The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.
I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.
And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him [paraphrased, of course]: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.
Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.
I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.
They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)
Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.
Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.
Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?
Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?
Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.
Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?
Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?
This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.
What "I" did here...
- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location. - Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing on that particular server), or you can remotely add yourself (like I did). Since the remote features don't quite seamlessly work with Mitra, I tried this from a masto server - no joy. I tried it from another masto server (a masto fork) - no problem this time, even on an older version of masto. That was humorous to me, as I've a bit of disdain for mastopub servers and found it amusing that even some of the instances running the very latest version of masto won't work, while older one's based on forks do; but I've got a twisted sense of humor. - So next, you can engage with the seller directly from your local instance on most Fediverse platforms (support is added for various additional Fediverse platforms all the time). In this case, (visible because I chose the "All" tab), the particular item was from yet another #Fohmarkt server elsewhere - this is a very nice feature, like #DeSoc #eBay!!! - From there, once you boost the item in the listing, others can see it in their streams, boost it further, make arrangements directly with the seller, etc. Kinda Kewl.
This is different from how most other attempts to deliver a marketplace into the #Fediverse. Usually, what I've seen is someone trying to integrate the functionality local to a platform, which networks (via ActivityPub federation) only with other like platforms. That's not a Fediverse solution - that's a platform solution and leaves everyone else on the fediverse not running that particular platform disenfranchised.
For example, using the Epicyon server platform as an example, it is first to be understood that this particular server platform is designed for very small numbers of user accounts per each instance. You also have to manually contact the admin of remote Epicyon servers yourself (or be contacted by them), then mutually agree to federate each other's marketplaces separately and distinct from any wider federation configurations your server has. Considering the inconveniences with locating other Epicyon instances that may or may not have enabled and made use of their marketplaces and establishing a mutual publishing agreement, coupled with the likelihood that each of your instances between 1 and 10 users, posting an item in the marketplace has a pretty high probability of being more effort than its worth - especially since it dosn't federate with any other Fediverse platforms.
Others follow a similar design, but also generally operate like normal #ActivityPub federation using a blacklist method, as well as being able to accommodate potentially hundreds, or even thousands of users per each instance (yeah, I know, semi-monolithic); so even if those marketplaces didn't already automatically federate across the Fediverse with all instances of other like server platforms, it's still a huge improvement over the previously discussed smolweb platform's model.
But they're still not Fediverse wide...
This is where Flohmarkt really starts to shine - it's fully Federating (Still a WIP wrt some platforms - see the wiki for particulars) across the entire #ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.
You can check for the latest particulars on Flohmarkt's current Federation status if you're interested in your particular Fediverse platform and level of interoperation with Flohmarkt instances.
I do have some criticisms of the particular functionality in federating that the developers have chosen to incorporate, however. Basically, The server admin still needs to manually federate item listings between the local instance and other remote Flohmarkt servers. It doesn't need to be this way however, but one must concede that after going over the documentation and seeing that the concern's of the dev team are over unchecked spam, phishing, poor quality ads, etc., I find it to be a very reasonable concern, although I'm still not comfortable with how the Dev team has hard-coded this conditional into the server's capability, when a slightly different approach might afford self-hosters much greater flexibility and incintive for adoption; namely:
- Make the current model the default - Enable other configurations for federating between other Flohmarkt servers (and eventually, other platform marketplaces) via either simple configuration files, runtime arguments, or via a GUI in an admin control panel, including that of an uninhibited fully blacklist model of sharing listings between Flohmarkt servers.
I generally tend to think that hard-wired, opinionated configuration choices are a less than ideal (usually bad idea) than acknowledging issues surrounding such decisions and then choosing a default while affording server admins (or users themselves) of being able to manage the options for themselves. This is one of those cases where I feel it could make a huge difference in the viabilty and adoption potential for this, "Strictly Federating Marketplace" Fediverse platform.
The other (very minor) criticism I have for Flohmarkt is the pin & string radius solution as it is currently implemented:
- It's determined by the server admin, instance wide - It's determined by the server location, or some other arbitrarily decided locale
The radius is a great idea, but I think the following would go a long way towards improving the utility of this feature set:
- The server admin decides whether to enable user-level radius configs or server level, as is the case at this time. - Local users determine, and have control over whether an established is applied to either their entire user profile's repertoire of items listed, or on a per item basis. - If he user chooses a per item radius, each listing could have a different radius established. - The local users have location radius specifications that can be based on different criteria, such as pinning a location on a map of their choice, by country (the free IP2Location databases can accommodate this behavior). - The user's particular radius settings for each listing must be preserved and observed by all federating remote Flohmarkt server instances (but not by individual remote user shares/boosts, which should remain unrestricted).
This Radius feature is extremely powerful and I think that every effort of the development team to exploit the potential of this feature set should be a major consideration. Eventually, Flohmarkt servers will federate with other server platform types, exchanging listings between say, Flohmarkt servers and Friendica servers, etc.. but the awesome power unleashed through following and boosting capabilities that are already fully available to remote users to share with others holds the potential at this very time to make Flohmarkt item listings ubiquitous across the entire Fediverse, ... And that is really kewl :)
Well, I'd rather tease your interest and see you go checkout more for yourself rather than feed you everything you wanna know about a really kewl #social_commerce communications tool - you really should experience how kewl it is for yourself.
I couldn't locate a #Matrix support room for Flohmarkt like most contemporary software products maintain in the FOSS world, but the more traditional irc chan #flohmarkt at #LiberaChat is readily available, and of course, there's the issue tracker at the Codeberg repo I previously linked to above.
What are your thoughts and impressions on this novel approach to embedding the marketplace commerce structure into potentially everyone's social streams in the form of both a dedicated platform and as passive feeds via the intervention of other #Fedizens who share and boost individual items and listings in Flohmarkt?
This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.
What "I" did here...
- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location. - Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing...
A few items, but for the tl;dr please scroll down towards the end. The first few appear to be precisely what you asked for, the third is my rather enthusiastic recommendation.
I believe this first one is the plugin I mentioned, and was found to be quite lacking, further, frustrating to most - This showcases the glaring problem associated with conflating mastodon with that of the #Fediverse - most things break, early and often, over and over again.
- A simple share button that breaks about a fourth of share attempts:
Here's Terrence Eden's article on the Share on Mastodon plugin. I thought a link to this article best, as it leaves you lots of breadcrumbs to pick up along the way to the plugins page at WordPress. Including Jan's blog article. I believe this was the one with the least utility, that caused the most problems with people, which is quite a bit more than frustrating for a lot of people, angering many. masto isn't even the big man on campus anymore - those days have passed, and are in the past; it's just one of many increasingly popular platforms that people use in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.
I believe Jan is incorrect on the number of images that masto can accommodate - yes it used to be four, but lately, when authoring articles in the Fediverse with platforms that accommodate inline media in the posts, I've noticed that masto actually will include 5 images, the rest it summarily discards, making for an even more confusing event for those on masto (NGI Zero funding has just been secured BTW, to at least bring masto into the 21st century withQuote Posts- like pretty much everyone else has had for a long time,some for a decade now).
Perhaps in time this will improve, or you can get into it with the aid of some of the others below, or just move past all that and install the plugin at the end of it all which performs famously ;)
- Conflating mastopub with the Fediverse is a Bad thing:
I've heard a few good testimonies of how well the Fediverse share button performs. Note that no where in the description or documentation is the word mastodon used; no one is mislead to believe that there is such a thing as a mastodon network - because there isn't.
- People should be offered the opportunity to share interesting content into (and throughout) the Fediverse, not some small slice of the available platform choices existing there:
This next option was heavily inspired by the old AddToAny plugin back when a kazillion different silos were popular and extant. I remember using that plugin to support sharing across upwards of 30 or so various social networking, bookmarking, link aggregation, and other types of obscure sites in far flung places of the world. I've also heard some good things about this solution too - please take note of all the certified platforms that it supports, and yes, mastopub is one of those ;)
If you do choose this method, do please join us in the Fediverse-City Matrix room to offer a review / evaluation as to how well Fediverse Share works for you. Several project leads there are always interested in viable solutions that are inclusive and accommodate the wider community at large without any marginalization through misleading brand recognition.
- Either through simple naivety or conscious exclusionary arrogance, here's some other masto branded share options, at least one, IIRC, was much less than satisfactory, but I typically don't traffic mastodon branded things anymore when the insinuation is that the product represents the Fediverse. You may find, however, that one of these is just what you need, and that with a little bit of tweaking will fit nicely into your website's business processes. A little branding can go a long way, but sometimes a solution depends on, for example, a "share API endpoint", not strictly compliant with the W3C's published specifications, that serves to marginalize all other platforms by excluding them (that's commonly regarded as EEE). I'll just post the links w/o commentary: - mastodon share button - Share on mastodon button - MastodonShare - Toot Proxy - Yet another mastodon share button *Share to mastodon
There's another utility by Nikita Karamov (creator of the Toot Proxy above) that doesn't embrace the predatory branding of a diluted trademark:
- Share₂Fedi - Share₂Fedi isn't a button, exactly, but the functionality is there and it is inclusive of the larger diaspora of the ActivityPub powered portions of the Fediverse, avoiding any sort of marginalization as a result of marketing through leveraging overt, and predatory branding campaigns.
Alright, I know you're interested in getting to the good part. Yes, I'm guilty of that same sort of mindset that makes you scroll down to the bottom of the ToS before you can click on the submit button. But before we get to the tl;dr:, we have one more which in spirit at the very least, is promising, I encourage you to read it:
- Honorable mention goes to shareOnFediverse, which works even with GNU Social, Diaspora, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Lemmy, Friendica, Kbin, Misskey, Pleroma, Etc.
# tl;dr:
That bit of markdown above (the H1) may not show up on your platform, depending. Regardless, you've arrived. Here's the solution that I personally recommend, a very fine solution that not only allows one to share their content into the Fediverse by providing links back to their website, but providing the gateway for people in the Fediverse, #Fedizens, if you will, to engage the authors of news and blog and lifestyle and cookbook style tutorial and HowTo sites, directly, with two way commenting and sharing of dialog in true open and participatory fashion:
First, (and it has indeed come a long way since the post of this article), a page on how exceedingly simple it is to install and configure this, the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin:
Bear in mind that the plugin was in beta at the time, so never mind the sourpusses in the comments who wanted it, and yet couldn't have it because they weren't self-hosting #WordPress. I must reiterate that development has come a long way, the plugin is in general production release and available for any WordPress site, managed, self-hosted, or otherwise, and it's got a powerful feature set.
Posting links back to clear-net websites on the open Internet is fine, it's not like clicking a share to Faceplant or InstaSPAM button when you share an article that you like into the Fediverse, After all, it's every blogger's mission to drive traffic to their own site (not Faceplant or InstaSPAM), but then your visitors are limited to offering comment replies in the manner of a form submission on the site that really only allows you to subscribe your email for subsequent comment notifications for the article or thread that your commenters spawned.
What the #ActivityPub plugin enables for those who engage with you, is to provide an instant audience of several million MAU (monthly active users) throughout the Fediverse who will be able to directly participate and engage in the conversation from their own native Fediverse platforms, receiving replies as well.
I've called this, A Game Changer, before. A few times, actually. @matthias@pfefferle.org @pfefferle and his small team of developers created and curated this plugin that enables this hitherto (mostly) inaccessible feature set for the masses. Literally anyone in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse can now comment and reply to the comments of others on WordPress sites, which is pretty much like 40% of the entire word wide web nowadays, and you can check this out for yourself right now by visiting his blog at https://notiz.blog/ in the comment section of any one of his articles.
There were some issues, which could be attributed to the predatory marketing practices by Mastodon gGmbH, whereby a lot of what is actually ActivityPub or Fediverse centric was being referred to, and worse, attributed to mastodon in one sense or another, further diluting their trademark which places it in jeopardy of losing its registration (the first item in mastodon's general guidelines states, "Only use the Mastodon marks to accurately identify those goods or services that are built using the Mastodon software." - but the defense of trademarks themselves is another matter entirely, although the discussion has come up many times with the responsible parties, often, in very heated, public, forums.
Anyway, Mattias and his team have become incrementally more mindful of placing emphasis upon #Fediverse, the brand, instead of masto, the brand, and that's a good thing because it goes a long way toward correcting the existing confusion that exists due to the abuse certain marketing personalities have, and continue to pursue. Indeed, the plugin itself is named ActivityPub, which is appropriate - and it certainly is not an exclusive tool for mastopub.
You can download the latest and greatest version of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin HERE, which was released just 3 days ago, and I know because I was on the periphery of an issue that was resolved, making this an even more relevant and quickly becoming (IMO) essential tool for #DeSoC and Fediverse aware bloggers, journalists, chefs, and anyone else that knows they can benefit from deploying their own WordPress site for business or personal use in communicating with the world beyond the walls of the deprecated, proprietary, privacy mining monolithic silos.
In wrapping things up here, it goes without saying that one of the very most powerful aspects of the #WordPress_ActivityPub_Plugin isn't actually that people can respond to your published articles from the comfort of myriad clients such as #FediLab, #Husky, #Phanpy, or the native web or desktop interface for their Fediverse instance, but the reality that they can simply follow you, on your blog, and receive your blog or news or HowTo articles in their streams whenever you publish a new item. From there, they can boost (more exposure for your published works), reply (of course), and even offer a bit of narrative introducing your work with a #Quote_Post. It's like a butterfly affect, or concentric circles emanating from one little plop of a pebble into a pond.
Oh, one more thing, there's nothing preventing you from including one of the pretty little Fediverse Share buttons either, in conjunction with the ActivityPub plugin. After all, some folks like to comment and let you know their thoughts, while others prefer to simply share it with others who will also tell two friends or themselves offer comments to your articles - it's a win win for everyone on both sides of the line that divides the Fediverse from those so-called Big Tech institutions comprising the walled gardens of subjugation by the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome.
I hope you've found this helpful, I didn't want to send you on an errand of discovery without making sure that there's been some decent coverage of several different alternatives currently available for you.
A few items, but for the tl;dr please scroll down towards the end. The first few appear to be precisely what you asked for, the third is my rather enthusiastic recommendation.
I believe this first one is the plugin I mentioned, and was found to be quite lacking, further, frustrating to most - This showcases the glaring problem associated with conflating mastodon with that of the #Fediverse - most things break, early and often, over and over again.
Part of #FOSS and #Fediverse advocacy involves bringing awareness to those who have already adopted an #open_source and #DeSoc mindset to the rich flora and fauna available to everyone.
Did you know that #FunkWhale is a streaming music and audio Fediverse server platform that you can join an instance of, or self-host like any other?
Part of #FOSS and #Fediverse advocacy involves bringing awareness to those who have already adopted an #open_source and #DeSoc mindset to the rich flora and fauna available to everyone.
Did you know that #FunkWhale is a streaming music and audio Fediverse server platform that you can join an instance of, or self-host like any other?
Gregory's Server
It all comes down to 4 fundamental questions:
- What is the value of your secret to you
- What resources do you have available to protect it
- What is the perceived value of your secret to your adversary
- What resources do they have available to divulge it