deadsuperhero

joined 2 years ago
 

Look, I think Ghost is a really great publishing platform. But after dogfooding their Fediverse integration for six months, I'm realizing there's still a lot missing. With their blog dormant, I'm left to wonder: is development still happening?

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Silverpill might not like me making this comparison, but its form and function are shockingly similar to OnlyFans.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

OpenCollective is a pretty solid open source contender in my experience. It's not perfect, but it's definitely workable.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

PeerTube's support button is, at best, a lightbox that holds a text string. It's fine for highlighting links, but you still kind of have to dance around with having an account in another system to make the payment.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, the YouTube algorithm itself is a huge problem. I think about the fact that there are entire slop studios out there trying to ride algorithm trends, churning out crap to push onto YouTube Kids so that they'll do numbers and make a lot of money from it.

Like, I have nothing against the concept of a recommendation algorithm itself, but the relationship I just described is nightmare fuel.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.

 

For those seeking out a federated and open alternative to Tumblr, Wafrn is looking extremely promising. It can speak both ActivityPub and AT Protocol, offers a ton of interesting features and customization, and focuses on making an incredibly fun experience.

 

This was a really great interview we had with the team from A New Social. We talked about bridging, being able to migrate data across different protocols, some of the team's latest ongoing efforts, and a long rant about where the network is, and where we hope it will go.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly, it's a tough choice. Hubzilla can theoretically do everything you want, but there's a steep learning curve.

One thing that might help is to narrow down what kind of features you want. What I'm seeing so far from your description is:

  • Blog / HTML hosting site
  • space for webgames and assets
  • code?
  • Something like Facebook?

Friendica and Hubzilla] (and everything derived from them) are theoretically right up your alley, but each interface is kind of janky and introduces a learning curve of some kind. Misskey is extremely good, and often feels like the most polished option for long-form stuff. You're kind of limited on clients, though, as most mobile apps use the Mastodon API. Some Misskey forks add support for it, though.

I know you said you didn't like WordPress, and I get it. However, the actual ActivityPub integration is really really good, and continues to improve. If you self-host WordPress, there's hypothetically enough extensibility there to build everything you want. However, WordPress as a platform can be extremely janky. We tried doing it for We Distribute, and there's a bunch of stuff under the hood that doesn't quite work right with Fediverse integration. Then again, we've been doing a lot of experimental stuff over the years, so it might be different with a fresh install.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I was a long-term Hubzilla user some years back. There's some really cool stuff that it can do, but it seems to get slower and more bloated the longer you run it.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's not great. Unfortunately, there's not a great way to describe this stuff without either leaning into abstract terms, or using oversimplifications.

The short of it is: only half of the ActivityPub protocol really got adopted by most of the Fediverse: the stuff that lets servers talk to each other. The other half would allow for a lot of cool things to be built, with not everything being its own Fediverse server.

 

The Social Web Foundation has been experimenting with the lesser-known other half of the ActivityPub protocol. Here's what they're up to.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Honestly, it would be kind of cool if you just had a simple app to log in with your Fediverse identity, and it rendered your existing profile on the page and allowed you to put additional links.

I don't think it necessarily needs to federate.

 

We Distribute recently launched a dedicated weekly newsletter that aims at rounding up a lot of things happening around the Fediverse and wider Social Web, and adds other publications and community voices to amplify them. This is our very first issue!

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 20 points 3 months ago

Actually, there's a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there's literally no reason not to.

Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 40 points 3 months ago

Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.

 

This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people's fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Probably not, but the tradeoff is that you're limiting audience reach. Occasionally, this can also break context in public conversations, where someone might follow someone else who responds to you, but can't see your original post.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

OwnCast is wonderful. It's dead simple to set up and use, and works great with OBS.

I tend to prefer streaming through PeerTube, simply because the platform has more features. But for simplicity, OwnCast can't be beat!

 

Building on some initial reports coming from the FediPact account and Dropsite news, we dive into potential measures admins can take for their instances.

 

There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for the open source federated alternative to Tiktok and Vine, including a Web UI and a boatload of new features. Let's dive in, and see what's coming in the next release.

 

Although some people debate whether or not Nostr is part of the Fediverse, the reality is that we have a lot in common, and the networks do overlap in places.

This is a really cool interview. Rabble is someone who started using the Internet in the late 90s to organize protests and bolster independent media. He would go on to become a founding member of Twitter, before focusing his attention on next-generation communication systems such as Secure Scuttlebutt and Nostr.

Dude has a massive depth of knowledge, and is a super cool guy. You can listen to this on my site, or wherever you get your podcasts!

 

The latest release of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin introduces new functionality for performing remote follows directly from WordPress. Here's why that's important for the future of WordPress on the Fediverse.

 

This article is a response to Tim Chambers' recent writeup, titled The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix). It's a pretty great read, and I'm writing this not as a rebuttal, but to analyze and expand on the points made.

This is a musing on 7 problems that have been pointed out, with some ideas on what progress has been made to fix them.

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