Have you ever received an HTTP 418 status code while browsing? If so, it may be because you were trying to put a square peg in a round hole, or vice versa.

Indeed, RFC 2324 Lays out the specification, and Oopsies! It turns out that an April Fools joke was canonized, albeit with some utility. Turns out, even if someone's not trying to pull your leg, by telling you "I'm a Teapot", it's likely you're gently being encouraged to look for a resource other than the way in which you're asking.

For example, you ask for a coffeemaker and receive the error, HTTP 418 (I'm a Teapot). It's certainly nicer that a 404 and yet indicates that there is content where the page you've just asked for exists.

This is in some ways a concern that many have dug their heels in over, clinging as intransigent as ever when it comes to #tmpfs discussions beginning twelve years ago on the #Debian Dev list.

Often, in practice, cron is used to clean out unneeded clutter in /tmp or /var/tmp, as well as other methods. An issue I have is with the systemd defaults including /var/tmp in tmpfs on some implementations because temporary files here are intended to be persistent across reboots.

By default, systemd cleans out files in /var/tmp by default after 30 days, and this can be problematic, while the default is 10 days for /tmp. /var/run and /var/lock are also Incorporated - But I digress.

After well over a decade, about half of the major Linux distros have migrated to tmpfs: Arch, Fedora, and some versions of SuSE number among the most familiar. Others have not: Redhat, SLES, and other "Enterprise" focused distros, along with Debian, ... Until just recently, when much to my surprise during routine updates I noticed the switch to tmpfs has now occurred.

w00t 🤘🤠🤘

With respect to Slackware, does it use the traditional disk based method or the RAM based tmpfs? The answer to that of course, is "Yes, of course, it absolutely does!"

"Which one did you say?" I actually didn't, lolz. As is usually the case with Slackware (and Arch and Gentoo), it's really however you want it!

In Slackware, the implementation is much more elegant however. You simply mount /tmp on a ramdisk (again, leave /var/tmp alone - these files are intended to be persistent across reboots, and for possibly much, much longer than a mere 30 days).

Okay so back to Debian. If you're one of those fraidy cats that doesn't believe, or rather, isn't competent or confident enough to run Enterprise production machines on rolling distros, I've got good news for you! You won't be needing to concern yourself with this until Debian 13 is officially released or you're forced to upgrade to it in the next few years. Lucky you!

For the rest of us however, already running #Trixie, it has indeed arrived. Welcome! Here's the problems...

You may, depending on what daemons you run in production, want to tweak your defaults. i.e., 10 days may be less than appropriate for your company's needs. Remember, #cron is your friend. It's also why Slackware's approach was referred to as elegant, because you have to take into account what it is you want or need before you implement it.

For example, since you already know that you don't want temp files to survive reboots in /tmp, there's really nothing faster than disk space residing in RAM anyway.

On the other hand, Poettering doesn't make up the rules for the developers of this world or sysadmins. If you're not careful you can wind up right back on a spinning disk platter again, since the default for #systemd is to allocate 50‰ of your RAM for tmpfs, if you don't have ample memory, you go to SWAP.

Oh, the irony :p

When you're in an HA environment where your UNIX boxes have uptimes exceeding 800+ days, and the only reason to reboot is to install a new kernel, Poettering's 30 day default storage for tempfiles in /var/tmp, or for that matter, a default for files in /var/lock or /var/run, ... is absolutely absurd - this is why we have cron and shell scripts (and Perl/Python).

tl;dr: This is why I started of with that amusing simile about HTTP 418, because if you just trust systemd to hold your hand, you just may find that one of your mission critical Enterprise services informs you that it's been told it's a #Teapot 🫖

That's not a good thing when 5, 500, or 50,000 people expect their shit to just work without ever having to know your name as the person who makes that happen for them.

Disk based storage is the safe bet; that's why #Redhat still does it that way. But it's certainly not the most performant, and requires the steady fingers of a competent systems administrator for the care and feeding of the tmp file systems - otherwise, like so many n00bs have discovered (in the days when hard drives didn't exceed a Gigabyte in capacity), you may wake up one day to find that you've hammered your filesystem, everything is running, but nothing is doing anything it's supposed to be doing - now, rm and du have become your best friends until the moment you discover that rotating your log files and keeping /tmp clean is actually part of your job...

Even as a casual workstation user on your personal laptop. It's your job.

For those interested, here's an example of the systemd defaults for tmps should you wisely consider the beneficial consequences of responsible planning for managing the size of your growing tempfile directories, from the Arch Wiki:

/etc/tmpfiles.d/tmp.conf
# see tmpfiles.d(5)
# always enable /tmp directory cleaning
D! /tmp 1777 root root 0

# remove files in /var/tmp older than 10 days
D /var/tmp 1777 root root 10d

# namespace mountpoints (PrivateTmp=yes) are excluded from removal
x /tmp/systemd-private-*
x /var/tmp/systemd-private-*
X /tmp/systemd-private-*/tmp
X /var/tmp/systemd-private-*/tmp

Umm... 10 days, /var/tmp? IMNSHO, that's maybe just a tad (way more than a tad) aggressive.

Although I've so far only alluded to it, I actually do recommend that you consider removing /var/tmp from any cleanup schedule too, instead using cron and shell scripts, along with a little proactive monitoring to keep that part of your tempfile systems clean.

And remember: "You may be short, and you may be stout, but unless it's April 1st, don't let anyone call you a Teapot." 🫖

For further reading you can checkout the [LWN article here] (https://lwn.net/Articles/975565/?ref=news.itsfoss.com).

As always, feel free to boost and share this with others (sharing is love), and I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

I hope that helps. All the best!

#tallship #FOSS #Linux #Slackware #Arch #Gentoo #SuSE #Fedora

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As a longtime provider of services in one form or another since the late 80's and early 90's, I felt the pain of having to write out the following blog post/update.

Drew is an opinionated perfectionist with an attention to detail and his perspective that chafes some, endears others, and deservedly, receives the respect earned when someone strives toward par excellence for those for whom they provide services for.

I have some differing set of conclusions from my understanding of what he laments as the ordeal he's been through in the past year, like, "why would anyone consider a carrier besides DHL for international overseas shipments?" Also, I fail to see the logic in moving his entire infra from the U.S. (where there are many affordable top-tier carrier hotels - aka datacenters) to Amsterdam, which also has fine facilities and maybe it is because of privacy concerns which depending on what those are, may indeed be quite valid from my perspective.

But not having IPv6 fully deployed (as a result of datacenter choice?) is puzzling, although almost inconsequential operationally, in production, ... Almost.

Considering I've always looked directly at the carriers themselves, used my own delegated IP infrastructure for core operations, I tend to look at a datacenter as three things:

- Electricity
- Fail-over electricity (Generators)
- Air conditioning

Most folks rent a rack that comes with transit, I ask how much the XC is - I can find, mix, and pick my transit providers. I just wanna know that my shit is secure in a suite or cage behind locked cabinets that I personally have 24/7 access to at anytime (even though I'll rarely do so) and have 24/7 remote hands to swap drives, hot-pluggable power supplies and plug cables into the designated ports I specify, etc. Those things typically come w/zero cost.

For DDoS'ing, I do like to outsource this as part of a package, and I'm open to any offers of included transit/XC and want to know how much each additional 20A of electricity cost me each month in addition to the rack fees. Putting the onerous of protecting my customers from a good DDoS'ing on someone else like my upstream takes a lot of worry away.

Shipping machinery though, that's a bit distinct too, I've been burned a few times domestically, although always recovered my *tangible costs - time? well, I've lost a couple of customers because their infra was lost or damaged in transit, but insurance is important - Drew had that. What I'm really wondering though, is who besides DHL would you even trust to ship servers over the Atlantic Ocean?

That's a cost I would not consider skimping on - A girl I almost married worked for DHL for over 20 years and they'll cut a check at the drop of a hat, which might have worked out well for Drew considering these were old boxes ready for retirement anyway and the replacement cost (new stuffs) is what you insure for.

Anyway, I've really admired much of what Drew has done over the years, was cheerleading for him as he migrated from full time paycheck person to finally being able to announce that he "thinks" he can make enough money for a living by devoting himself full time to FOSS with his fledgling SourceHut.

Yah, sometimes his head swelled up pretty big, making it hard to fit through doorways, and I've butted heads with him here and there on technical matters only, but have always respected him, and in truth, he was never not correct even if his way was the wrong way, or there was simply a better way - usually those were matters of opinion coz there's more than six ways to Sunday to skin a cat.

Anyway, he's been kicked in the balls really hard, which if you know much of him, must have been really hard to lay all of that out in some manner of detail (He's almost always brutally transparent). For that, and moreover for getting right back up after being knocked down (maybe by da man?), I applaud his candidness. His devotion to those of you reading this that may have free repos at SourceHut, and I'm also encouraging everyone to kick in at least a few bucks - fuck that dumb app that you don't need, let alone pay $2.95 for the exclusive right to be tracked - I urge you with all FOSSiness in mind... Give it a read, and send him whatev, ... I guarantee it will come back to you tenfold.

Drew is a consummate FOSS warrior, do it for yourself, please - Five bucks, fifty bucks, heck, whatever isn't going to cut into your budget for porterhouse steak this weekend would be nice.

And it will make you feel good too.

Full disclosure: I'm not getting shit from this article. Drew and I only converse occasionally and usually it is to disagree - some folks are just good coz of what's in their heart, their commitment to the community, and whether you're a fan or not doing this for him really is doing this for yourself and everyone else in the FOSS world.

Here's the link to the article/update.

#tallship #FOSS #OpenSource #SourceHut #Git #repo

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@tallship Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.

On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.

For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).

And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.

If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do? Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.

It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.

This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"

On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.

They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.

If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.

At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.

Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.

The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.

However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.

There's a Lemmy community named "Fediverse". "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right? People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about?

Hahahaha... no.

Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.

If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.

If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.

At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.


So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts?

Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.

And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #A11y #Accessibility

@simon

A couple of things there Simon. How do you know this? Are you still using the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos to which you refer, or are you just taking this on the word of good, 3rd party information sources?

If it's the former, why?

If it's the latter, then yippie kai yay! The demise of these platforms is underway and in full swing - just as Steve Ballmer once called Linux "Cancer", the fact that these silos aren't simply ignoring links to particular resources, especially those in the #Fediverse, and have taken up with the practice of actively blocking them, is a good thing; and you, as a #Fedizen, should be proud.

Yet again, if it is the former, and you really insist on validating and monetizing those privacy mining silos via your subjugation as inventoried chattel there, consider pinning something akin to the following to the top of your profile (make sure to read the alt-text for the image):

October 28th, 2019 - Highway 36, Humboldt, California.

With the season coming to a close, them trimmigrants can't be choosey about where they're gonna hibernate for the winter ❄️

Seen along the way to the #Mad_River Bar - a town, if you will, with 3 buildings in it; a bar, a post office the size of a closet, and a butcher shop. There's also the "Mad River Burger Bar", a locally famous trailer on jack stands that sells takeout burgers 🍔 & fries 🍟

#tallship #harvest #Humboldt #autumn 🍂

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Roast Fish Cornbread installation in Torrance (Los Angeles). An international event by Kyle William Harper.

This old lockout music studio received a facelift of free paint by street scene artists from around the world. This one by *Soup* and others by him especially impressed me.

5 bands performed at the event (not that there was any shortage). More of Kyle's work is available at his website.

#tallship #Roast_Fish_Cornbread #Kyle_William_Harper #art #street_scene

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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

#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 is EVER completely, 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!"

https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem

#tallship #encryption #PGP #secure_communication #Privacy #FOSS

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August 11th, 2020 - My final month on the mountain before the fires of the August Complex came and dashed everything away.

As you can see, my bountiful garden was thriving, with more than I could consume myself - it was wonderful.

#tallship #Humboldt #Homesteading #Off_Grid #Jeremiah_Johnson #wilderness #solitude

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26 March 2018 - Approaching sunset while overlooking valleys and mountain ranges in Humboldt California.

That's six years ago.

#tallship #Humboldt #sunset #view

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@Sandra

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:

- Streams
- Mitra
- Misskey, Iceshrimp, Cherrypick, Firefish, and Others
- Pleroma, SoapBox, and Akkoma
- Friendica
- Hubzilla
- WriteFreely
- WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin)
- Ghost (reportedly coming soon)
- GoToSocial
- Socialhome

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 :)

All the best!

#tallship

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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?

#FOSS #DOS, get it? I was rather amused. Anyway, Here it is.

#tallship #Microsoft h/t to: @csolisr@azkware.net You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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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?

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Marketplace #eBay #I_can_haz_Cheezburgerz? 🍔
@grindhold @me @flohmarkt_support #flohmarkt_support

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RE: https://fedi.markets/users/Yonggan/items/f7f7f8d1-6279-4249-890a-bdd97340d218

@Yonggan

@coffeegeek

Hi Mark,

I've got a follow up here 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.

- 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 with Quote 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.

I do like the colorful buttons too in the demo here. I also like the non-traditional "Lorem ipsum" example prose too. I find it refreshing :)

- 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:

- Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family

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.

All the best!

#tallship #FOSS, #Automattic @pfefferle

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Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p

https://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Migrating_from_Monolithic_to_Client+Core - just ain't gonna cut it right now.

I still love HexChat.

Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?

#tallship #FOSS #IRC #DCC #GUI #Quassel #Konversation #Halloy #HexChat #WeeChat

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