Self-Hosting: Server: Easy (Leverage email hosting services) → Score: 18/20

Is it really self-hosting if someone else controls the data and software?

I don’t want to be subject to the output of generative AI and yet and I continuously am because AI bros oppose things that would enable my preferences (e.g. requiring AI output to be watermarked or tagged) and shove it in places I visit regularly. So fuck them and their ocean boiling algorithms that will never make art worth seeing, prose worth reading, or music worth hearing.

Yeah, I thought it must be a Reddit repost instance, thanks for pointing to the right one.

i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ => ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just so we’re clear, what this crawler does is go through all servers that use ActivityPub known to it, and congregate that data to a list of known services (Lemmy, Mastodon, Piefed etc.). How is does that is by querying a standardised end point to get the instance info (.well-known/nodeinfo which will then point to a different path to get the actual info).

For instance, here’s what it will collect for feddit.uk:

// curl -s https://feddit.uk/nodeinfo/2.1 | jq
{
  "version": "2.1",
  "software": {
    "name": "lemmy",
    "version": "0.19.10-feddit",
    "repository": "https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy",
    "homepage": "https://join-lemmy.org/"
  },
  "protocols": [
    "activitypub"
  ],
  "usage": {
    "users": {
      "total": 4184,
      "activeHalfyear": 718,
      "activeMonth": 485
    },
    "localPosts": 25750,
    "localComments": 122835
  },
  "openRegistrations": true,
  "services": {
    "inbound": [],
    "outbound": []
  },
  "metadata": {}
}

The important stat here is the localPosts, which is all the posts made by local users in any community, local or remote. It does not include posts by users from remote instances made in local communities. You can also see this data on the instance sidebar in lemmy-ui.

lemmy.zip going down will only reduce aggregated stats for total posts by 47,280, as that’s what they report for their localPosts.

But zip has < 50K posts.

The fix has been merged, but it hasn’t been backported to the 0.19 branch yet. It’s been brought up in another issue and it should be fairly simple to backport (most of the code isn’t even relevant for the 0.19 branch), so I’ll try to do that for Lemmy 0.19.12.

I spent a couple hours trying to create an account on pds.flamingos-cant.xyz that uses a did:web following the instructions here and the account at the end ended up with a did:plc, so IDK how you create a PDS with a did:web but it’s clearly not something they put a lot of effort into supporting.

But what about the DIDs, the things used to actually identify accounts within the ATproto ecosystem:

But Bluesky has developed its own DID method, did:plc. Today, did:plc stands for “Public Ledger of Credentials”, however it originally stood for “Placeholder DIDs”, with the hope of replacing them with something else later. The way that did:plc works is that Bluesky hosts a web service from which one can register, retrieve, and rotate keys (and other associated DID document information). However, this ledger is centrally controlled by Bluesky.

It’s literally not possible to have a functional PDS without registering with a Bluesky server and they maintain indefinite control over the ledger. All your data is tied to this DID, it’s how the entire protocol is designed to identify stuff, how decentralised is your data if it’s dependent on Blusky (the company) assigning you an identity?

I don’t believe there’s any agreed-upon name for such a network on ATProto

They use the term ‘Atmosphere’ which is, admittedly, a really good play on words.

Has world really not enabled parallel sending yet? That feature was made specifically for them.

Single mod who didn’t want to create a meta posts to ask for more mods.

But the sidebar does say to DM them if you’re interested in modding. Not wanting a meta post is weird though.

There’s also three Fediverse comms (here, ml and zip) like do we really need another one?

Does it really matter when you can access the same content from Piefed? It’s one of fedi’s great strengths that different experiences can be tailored on the same platform.

You guys are a lot braver than me lol, I’d never run the Lemmy main branch in prod.

why create this post here instead of [email protected] ?

This community is much bigger? He’s asking a question so probably wants input from the most people possible.

Seems they’re all running the same version, or Piefed doesn’t tag releases:

curl -s https://piefed.social/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq
{
  "openRegistrations": true,
  "protocols": [
    "activitypub"
  ],
  "software": {
    "name": "PieFed",
    "version": "0.1"
  },
  "usage": {
    "localComments": 12382,
    "localPosts": 1169,
    "users": {
      "activeHalfyear": 561,
      "activeMonth": 309,
      "total": 800
    }
  },
  "version": "2.0"
}

curl -s https://feddit.online/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq
{
  "openRegistrations": true,
  "protocols": [
    "activitypub"
  ],
  "software": {
    "name": "PieFed",
    "version": "0.1"
  },
  "usage": {
    "localComments": 503,
    "localPosts": 214,
    "users": {
      "activeHalfyear": 85,
      "activeMonth": 34,
      "total": 85
    }
  },
  "version": "2.0"
}

Fair point. It probably hard to see these things when you’ve been in the thick of Lemmy for as long as most of us here have. It’s easy to dismiss not liking lemmy-ui because alternative frontends exist (written from Photon), but does that matter when the overwhelming majority of instances use it as their landing page.

There’s feddit.online and some personal ones I’ve seen knocking about.

What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user? Remember the majority of users don’t post, comment or otherwise interact with the platform beyond voting.

Spoken like someone without foot pedals.

Quiblr actually is open source now: https://github.com/Technicolor-Dreamcoat/Quiblr