I just discovered why some of my followers from larger #Mastodon instances (like mastodon.social) would mysteriously unfollow me after a while!

A pull request was just merged in Mastodon that fixes a critical bug in their follower synchronization mechanism.

Turns out Mastodon implements the FEP-8fcf specification (Followers collection synchronization across servers), but it expected all followers to be in a single page collection. When followers were split across multiple pages, it would only see the first page and incorrectly remove all followers from subsequent pages!

This explains so much about the strange behavior I've been seeing with #Hollo and other #Fedify-based servers over the past few months. Some people would follow me from large instances, then mysteriously unfollow later without any action on their part.

Thankfully this fix has been marked for backporting, so it should appear in an upcoming patch release rather than waiting for the next major version. Great news for all of us building on #ActivityPub!

This is why I love open source—we can identify, understand, and fix these kinds of interoperability issues together. 😊

#fediverse #fedidev

Hey Fediverse!

I'm micr0, creator of @altbot, the open-source bot that helps generate alt-text for images on the Fediverse to make content more accessible.

What's New in 2.1?

After successfully moving image processing to local hardware with version 2.0, I've now brought video processing capability back - but with a major privacy upgrade! Altbot can now generate descriptions for videos completely locally and privately without sending content to Google or any other third-party services.

Important note: Currently, video processing is visual-only and doesn't include audio transcription. The audio processing Google was doing was some serious black magic fuckery that isn't possible to replicate locally with current technologies. But the visual descriptions are excellent and totally private!

With this update:

• All processing happens locally with zero data retention
• Complete privacy for all content
• No data used for training models
• Videos processed with the same privacy standards as images

I've also maintained Altbot's focus on energy efficiency - while video processing naturally requires more resources than images, I've implemented it to be as efficient as possible, keeping power consumption to a minimum while still delivering great results.

Thank You for Your Support!

I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped me reach my donation goal on Ko-fi with the 2.0 launch! Your generosity made it possible to set up the local processing infrastructure that powers this privacy-focused service.

The response from the community has been incredible, and it means so much to know that privacy and accessibility are values we share.

What's Next for Altbot?

I'm already working on exciting future developments:

• An Altbot API that will allow developers to integrate alt-text generation into their applications
• Direct integration with Fediverse software platforms - I'm collaborating with instance developers to make accessibility a built-in feature!

Remember that Altbot has always been and remains fully open-source, with self-hosting being a core feature from day one for anyone who wants to run their own instance.

Supporting Ongoing Development & Infrastructure

Altbot currently runs on hardware in my home, which means I'm covering all the electricity costs for powering the GPU server that processes your media. While I've designed the system to be energy-efficient, running a dedicated AI server still impacts my monthly power bill.

Monthly donations would be especially helpful in sustainably supporting:

• Ongoing electricity costs
• Time spent on development and maintenance
• Future infrastructure improvements

Even small recurring contributions can make a huge difference in keeping this service running reliably and allowing me to dedicate more time to improvements!

Ways to Support:

• Ko-fi (one-time or monthly): ko-fi.com/micr0byte
• Ethereum: 0xC992E57236eb9F30E79d0469446a6CF08Be05939

I've added the ETH option for those who prefer crypto or don't want to use PayPal!

Version 2.1 also includes various internal improvements and bug fixes that make everything run more smoothly behind the scenes.

Thanks again for your support in making the web more accessible without compromising on privacy!

Feel free to boost or reach out with questions! For press inquiries: inquiries@micr0.dev

#Accessibility #Privacy #Fediverse #AltText #Altbot

!Friendica Developers !Friendica Support As of right now I am not sure if my #Friendica instance is working across the #fediverse as I am not seeing much engagement at all, and more than half of who I am following, I am not receiving their #feeds at all, and at this point I am clueless as to what is going on or how to deal with, because I dont know what is wrong, or if anything is wrong.

VersionFriendica 'Interrupted Fern' 2025.02-dev - 1576
Server Settings
PHP
version 8.1.31
php.ini /opt/alt/php81/etc/php.ini
upload_max_filesize 256M
post_max_size 256M
memory_limit 512M
MySQL / MariaDB
max_allowed_packet 268435456

I am not seeing much engagement, more so I am not seeing posts of those I follow across the fediveres, and I know several post a few times a day, but I am not seeing much activity at all, any ideas on what may be going on would be great, and please any directions please make very simple to understand, brain issues, sometimes I struggle grasping things that should be easy. If it matters, I am in cPanel on shared hosting, so not root access to anything.

social.2ndshot.photos/profile/… pasjrwoctx@social.2ndshot.photos

Friendica Installation

Ich versuche gerade die #Fediverse Anwendung #Friendica auf meinem #Raspberry Pi 5 in einem #Podman #Container zu installieren. Aber bei der Datenbank ist Schluss. da bleibt es hängen. Weiß jemand Rat? @Friendica Support zum Beispiel?

version: "3.7"

services:

  mariadb:
    image: docker.io/library/mariadb:latest
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - mydb:/var/lib/mysql
    ports:
      - "6033:3306"
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: *****
      MYSQL_DATABASE: friendica
      MYSQL_USER: friendica
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: *****

  phpmyadmin:
    container_name: phpmyadmin_9092
    image: docker.io/library/phpmyadmin:latest
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "9092:80"
    environment:
      - PMA_ARBITRARY=1
      - PMA_HOST=mariadb
    depends_on:
      - mariadb

  app:
    image: docker.io/library/friendica
    container_name: friendica_9093
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - friendica:/var/www/html    
    ports:
      - "9093:80"
    environment:
      - MYSQL_HOST=mydb
      - MYSQL_USER=friendica
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=*****
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=friendica
      - FRIENDICA_ADMIN_MAIL=*****
    depends_on:
      - mariadb

volumes:
  mydb:
  friendica:

networks:
  proxy-tier:

Thx for your link and efforts @Seirdy !

All this said, being part of a decentralized web, as pointed out in this toot, our publicly visible interaction lands on other instances and servers of the #fediVerse and can be scrapped there. I wonder if this situation actually might lead, or should lead, to a federation of servers that share the same robots.txt "ideals".

As @Matthias pointed out in his short investigation of the AI matter, this has (in my eyes) already unimagined levels of criminal and without any doubt unethical behavior, not to mention the range of options rouge actors have at hand.

It's evident why for example the elongated immediately closed down access to X's public tweets and I guess other companies did the same for the same reasons. Obviously the very first reason was to protect their advantage about the hoarded data sets to train their AI in the first place. Yet, considering the latest behavior of the new owner of #twitter, nothing less than at least the creation of #AI driven lists of "political" enemies, and not only from all the collected data on his platform, is to be expected. A international political nightmare of epical proportions. Enough material for dystopian books and articles for people like @Cory Doctorow, @Mike Masnick ✅, @Eva Wolfangel, @Taylor Lorenz, @Jeff Jarvis, @Elena Matera, @Gustavo Antúnez 🇺🇾🇦🇷, to mention a few of the #journalim community, more than one #podcast episode by @Tim Pritlove and @linuzifer, or some lifetime legal cases for @Max Schrems are at hand.

What we are facing now is the fact that we need to protect our and our users data and privacy because of the advanced capabilities of #LLM. We basically are forced to consider to change to private/restricted posts and close down our servers as not only the legal jurisdictions are way to scattered over the different countries and ICANN details, but legislation and comprehension by the legislators is simply none existent, as @Anke Domscheit-Berg could probably agree to.

Like to say, it looks like we need to go dark, a fact that will drive us even more into disappearing as people will have less chance to see what we are all about, advancing further the advantages off the already established players in the social web space.
Just like Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse stated in his take about on YT The network is challenging us min 2:42 more than 14 years ago:
"With semantic understanding we'll have the real big brother. Someone is getting the best out of it and the rest will suffer."

What would happen if Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cooperated with each other? What would it be like if we lived in a world where where you could use your account on one platform to like, comment and share posts from any other?

I’m not talking about merely sharing a link from one platform to another, either, where interactions were siloed off from each other.

No, what if you could leave a comment on a Facebook post for this video and that comment would automatically appear in the comments section of this video.

Well, that already kinda exists. The Fediverse, you might have heard of it. From Mastodon to Peertube and more—it’s is a collection of different services that are all working together to form an interconnected universe of applications. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s here today.

It wrests control of the web out of the hands of corporate oligarchs and digital tycoons and returns that power to where it belongs: us.

I’ve spent the entirety of 2024 working on the Fediverse and I’ve learned a lot. See, I started mirroring these videos over on my Peertube instance: subscribeto.me/ and it’s sucked me. I’ve gone down this rabbit hole of discovery. I’ve passed through the looking glass. I’ve seen the promised land. And now, I want to share this with you.

So in this video, I want to take a moment to explore 5 of the most important lessons I’ve learned and why I’m now betting the future of my company on this amazing technology that we call “The Fediverse.”

00:00 What if we lived in a cooperative online world?
01:33 What is an "instance?"
02:11 #5 - Netiquette was not a fluke
04:49 #4 - Kindness is King
06:44 #3 - It's not a Social Network
08:06 #2 - The Fediverse is boring (complement)
11:04 #1 - Viral Memes as Bioweapons
12:59 Social Media is the enemy of humanity
13:36 What the Fediverse truly is

We’re re-opening completely free accounts on Write.as, so more people can start a blog on our clean, distraction-free writing platform.

In late 2021, we announced that we were closing free registrations for new users. This was mostly an experiment to help us focus on the paying customers that keep our small business running, and provide a better experience all around.

Since then, we’ve been able to launch our social platform Remark.as, continue evolving WriteFreely, and add a ton of features around collaboration.

In this time, we’ve also realized that free accounts are one of the best ways for people to get started on our platform. While some people know what they’re looking for, and happily upgrade to our full Pro tier within the 2-week trial period, others just need a place to casually write when they feel like it. This takes a longer time, and doesn’t fit our time-based trial model, so we want to support these writers too.

Another goal of closing free accounts was to limit the number of spam accounts on Write.as. As a long-running platform with plenty of positive search engine authority on our domain, we’re a prime target for Search Engine Optimizers and spammers of every kind. Closing free accounts reduced the number of abusive actors we saw, but never stopped them completely.

Now that free accounts are open again, we plan to develop new anti-spam measures that can eventually be used by all WriteFreely instances to reduce the amount of abuse they receive.

New and existing users

Now, anyone can grab a Free Write.as account, and get a permanent space to write online — you can get started here. Our Free tier includes all the basics, including Markdown support, our Fediverse integration, and even support for monetization through services like sub.club. See our Pricing page for the full comparison with our other tiers.

Along with this, if you signed up for a trial between January 1, 2022 and today but never upgraded to Pro, your account is now completely free! This is our way of saying thanks for sticking around — and if you haven’t revisited Write.as in a while, now is a great time to check it out again.

Thanks for writing with us, and we can’t wait to see what you create!

#free #Writeas #accounts #fediverse

We are extremely proud to announce our Content Classification Service is up and running, with our first classifier active. We are starting with detecting child sexual abuse media for our opt-in connected servers, and our plan is to introduce additional classifiers over time, including non-consensual intimate imagery, terroristic and violent extremist content, malicious URLs, spam, and more.

For the time being we are operating in a closed test with a very small number of servers, and we have a slate of additional server admins ready to participate in our beta. You can learn more – and sign up to participate – on the CCS Web page.

In other news, we are kicking off an exciting collaborative with the Bonfire Networks developer team.

Bonfire is a governance-first community platform using ActivityPub, and the developer team are interested in reviewing proposals from the moderator community for rapid iteration of evidence-based, prosocial tooling and workflow in a co-design effort with the moderator community.

The Bonfire team have already rapidly adopted several proposals including:

• greyscaling and blurring media in reported content – this reduces trauma for moderators reviewing harmful content
• muting audio in media files – no sudden noises, loud volume or traumatic audio for the moderation workflow
• removing clickable links from reported content and suggesting URL investigation tools – this reduces the chance of moderators clicking through to phishing, malware, and other harmful web sites

Our IFTAS Connect community is working to provide additional feedback, and anyone is free to suggest additional feedback on the Bonfire GitHub.

This is a fantastic opportunity for the Fediverse’s trust and safety community to interactively guide the development of modular tooling that we hope will not only benefit Bonfire communities but can benefit the ecosystem at large, through modular adoption of the tooling, Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, or other platforms incorporating the same evidence-based prosocial approaches to empowering community managers and moderators.

We urge all IFTAS Connect moderator members to join us in the Moderator Tooling Workgroup and tell us all the tools, features and functions you want to see added to keep you and your community safe!

Lastly, a huge thank you to everyone who has responded to our community support drive, we’ve raised over $2,000 this year in direct community support and our IFTAS First 50 page is filling up! As we head into giving season, a quick reminder IFTAS is a 501c3, all donations are tax-deductible for US supporters, and we accept a wide range of support. If you can, donate today to keep supporting our mission!

about.iftas.org/2024/10/03/ift…

#ActivityPub #BetterSocialMedia #Bonfire #Fediverse