Linux communities beware of #PewDiePie fans

Regardless of PewDiePie’s personal #politics (which clearly, at the very least are problematic), it is fairly well known by anyone who has been following him for any number of years that the vast majority of his fan base are enthusiastic fascists.

Now #PewDiePie , who’s content centers around PC gaming and Windows, has decided to switch to #Linux and published a video encouraging his followers to do the same. This means a very large number of his #fascist fan base is going to be switching to Linux.

Now many Linux communities are going to be forced to more explicitly choose their politics. Like the parable of the Nazi bar, if the community remains politically neutral, it will become fascist in short order.

A few things to be wary of:

• People asking you not to be “too political” or to “focus on the technology, not the politics” is a classic and highly effective fascist ruse to get moderators to lighten up on fascist elements posting in their community.
• People complaining about free speech rights. The #Internet and the #Fediverse is already a domain where people can speak freely about their politics by running their own server and building their own community with few to no government constraints. You don’t need to compromise on whether fascists have the right to free speech in your community.
• Arguments over your code of conduct (CC) and “safe spaces.” Keep them up-to-date. Research other people’s CCs, learn about the history of why these CCs came to be, learn about what the function of each clause of the code is included and phrased the way it is. These were usually designed to make explicit the fact that a community wants to be a safe space where underprivileged people can feel comfortable expressing themselves, and it is very easy to make people afraid to express themselves. Fascists understand these CCs and the concept of “safe spaces” were explicitly designed to exclude them, and often attack these ideas.

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."