Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
Shell Accounts A shell is a command line interface for an operating system. With most shell providers, a command line interface on one flavor of Linux or Unix is all you get. Eskimo North provides access to eight different popular Linux distributions and SunOS Unix. Eskimo North also full remote desktop capabilities using X2Go with sound, and also NX, VNC, and RPD without sound.
Account Types We offer four different levels of shell accounts: Economy, Standard, Power, and Enterprise. Background tasks such as IRC bots, Game Servers, and the like are permitted on all account types except student. IRC servers are not permitted because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks. Standard, Power, Enterprise, and Super-Max shells include a MySQL database allowing you to run a variety of LAMP stack based applications on your website and to use non-web based applications that require a database.
Web Hosting Web hosting under our domain is provided with all shell accounts. You can host your own domains with virtual domains or web hosting packages.
Remote Desktop Remote desktop capability is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers. Because our servers can be accessed anywhere in the world, this allows you to have a work environment you can access from anywhere in the world without risking losing your files to a laptop, tablet, or phone thief. We offer remote desktop capabilities on all of our shell servers except for the SunOS server. We support x2go, nx, vnc, and rdp protocols. X2go is the best choice as it provides extremely efficient compression and X round trip removal as well as sound.
Applications Applications include Office Suites such as Libre Office and Caligra (which can read and write Microsoft Office file formats), Web and Program Development tools such as Bluefish Editor as well as many other editors, compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, debuggers, profilers, and online documentation.
E-mail Our e-mail system offers unprecedented flexibility. You can access your mail via shell mail readers including graphical mailers like Thunderbird, or via Web mail, or via pop-3 and imap mail protocols, complete with TLS encryption. Our mail system includes Bayesian filtering with Spam Assassin which can be individually configured for your needs. Procmail allows you to sort and process mail automatically. Smartlist allows you to maintain mailing lists.
Security[color] Access to all of our servers is available via strong encryption. The shell servers all support ssh access. All of the remote desktop protocols tunnel via ssh. We maintain all of our servers up to date keep with the latest patches. Backups are made weekly.
[color=darkblue]Eskimo North has been providing Unix timeshare services since 1985. We have been providing Linux timeshare, shell access, web hosting, e-mail, and Internet services since 1992. Please take a look at our services as they support our free Federated services including Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, and Yacy Search.
Available Shell Servers
We have a variety of Linux Servers with a variety of Linux Distributions and Desktop Environments. Linux servers in use here are of three basic lines, those derived from RedHat, such as Fedora, Centos, and Scientific Linux, and those derived from Debian such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint. Ubuntu is the most current and feature rich. Then there is Manjaro, derived from Arch Linux. Arch is more often broken because it is a real “do it yourself” Linux, an excellent learning platform, a good development platform, not a good production platform.
All of these servers are available if you have a shell account here. You can use them to learn various versions, decide which to install, and as one place you can develop applications for all versions. We install a wide variety of development tools on all of our publicly available servers.
Our servers listen to port 443 in addition to the standard ssh port of 22 to provide a means to connect from behind a firewall that blocks non-web access. You can also utilize Guacamole on our website (login public, password public).
Alma.Eskimo.Com This server is running Alma 8. Alma Linux replaces Scientific Linux after it’s discontinuation. Presently we are running Alma 8 because Alma 9 does not support NIS out of the box although there are ways of hacking it in. It is unfortunate that Redhat chose to piss on the infrastructure so many organizations depend upon. This is why we tend to favor Debian derived flavors. None the less as Redhat derived software goes Alma is pretty solid. Anduinos.Eskimo.Com Anduinos is a Debian derived distribution that defaults to a Gnome Desktop themed to look like Windows 10. At present though this Desktop is not working over network connections, instead Mate and Gnome are presently available. I am working on some others. Debian.Eskimo.Com Debian Bullseye has a rich assortment of software installed, including hundreds of Games, a huge variety of Office Productivity software, many Educational and Scientific applications, a variety of Integrated Development Environments, and many programming languages. All of the documentation available online these applications is also loaded. Fedora.Eskimo.Com Fedora Rawhide can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate desktop. It has the most applications of any of the Redhat derived servers. I install just about everything I can get to work on this machine so it has a huge variety of applications installed. Kali.Eskimo.Com Kali is a special purpose shell server designed for penetration testing. It is primarily here to test our own internal security, and as a result, egress is extremely limited, however upon request, proof of IP space ownership, and permission of the owner and agreement to hold us harmless because it is possible some of these tests may be destructive, we will allow outbound for testing of other sites. Manjaro.Eskimo.Com Manjaro is a good choice for a Linux user who wants to just install and go. There is a pleasant user interface and a good choice of software in the Manjaro repositories. It is a less technical Linux than Ubuntu, you can do most things through graphical interfaces and the default xfce interface is extremely light in terms of memory footprint. Like most modern distros, a variety of Windows systems are available and we have Gnome, Mate, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQT installed. Mint.Eskimo.Com Mint is another recent addition to our shell servers. It is running Mint, although we have the Mate Desktop installed for graphical access. This is necessary because Unity and other compositing Desktops are incompatible with x2go and really work very roughly with VNC. If you like games, this is a good server to use and there are many installed. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu which in turn is derived from Debian and this server thus follows the structure and layout of Debian and Ubuntu. MxLinux.Eskimo.Com MxLinux is an excellent choice for a computer with limited resources. Before the overhead of a Desktop is considered, MxLinux uses 200MB less RAM out of the box than does Ubuntu. If you’re not a fan of Poettering and Systemd, you’ll like this OS as it still uses a System-V init with Systemd shims to allow packages requiring systemd to function. You can also run systemd and in fact I am doing so because it boots faster. The default Desktop is LXDE which is also small and efficient. But if you like eye candy you can install any Desktop you like and as with other servers I will install all that I can get to work on this OS. PopOS.Eskimo.Com popOS is a modern appearing OS based upon Ubuntu, and not just indirectly, it actually utilizes Ubuntu’s repositories in addition to it’s own. The Desktops presently available on it are Gnome and Mate, though Gnome is a special edition known as Sparkle, and it does not operate properly with X2go. Presently X2go and ssh are the only two access methods. I am working on the others. Rocky8.Eskimo.Com Rocky8 is a RedHat derived operating system very similar to Centos before Centos was absorbed, and ruined, by Redhat. While Centos support, with the exception of Centos9 is going away on June 30th, 2024, and CentOS9 is not usable because of the deletion of NIS by RedRat which is necessary to our organization, Rocky8 will be supported for security updates through May of 2029, thus provides us a means of continuing to offer a Redhat based environment for another five years.
Ubuntu.Eskimo.Com Ubuntu can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate Desktop. The native Unity desktop is a compositing desktop which is incompatible with x2go. This machine is equipped with many applications including a huge number of games, a rich assortment of development tools and computer programming languages, a huge assortment of Office productivity software, many scientific, electronic, and educational tools. Zorin.Eskimo.Com Zorin is a Ubuntu derived operating system. It combines the eye candy of some other Ubuntu flavors such as Mint, with the security awareness and up to date nature of Ubuntu providing a really superb server environment. This machine is our best equipped server. It has the full Ubuntu Studio Suite, a very large assortment of development tools, language packs for all supported languages, many games, both Libre and Caligra Office Suites, and much more. X2go is supported on this machine.
Crontab access, batch, and background jobs are allowed on all of our servers. Most have unrestricted outbound access with the exception of kali owing to high abuse potential for tools that exist on it.
Dr Dermot Hudson ,chairman of the British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea ,Chairman of KFA UK and owner of the SONGUN007 channel speaks about the 75th ...
Analysis: Progressive socialist "Zohran Mamdani won the NYC primary race because of his support for Palestine, not in spite of it."
Mamdani wants to establish city-owned groceries, make buses free, freeze rents for subsidised tenants & more.
Supporters say the sky is the limit for true progressives to unite the working class against billionaires & refuse to compromise on issues such as genocide.
When the sorts of #YouTube videos you tend to watch either don't include in-video host-presented promotions, or the promotions are for companies that are often now out of business.
@💡JAHmind🔑 Any chance you could provide some specifics of what this bill provides for in the way of digital currency, and more importantly does it involve removing existing paper currency?
The #Fediverse is so much more than #Mastodon and to deny that by your words and your actions is to shit on every user and developer trying to make the Fediverse a truly better place.
The claim that Emil Bove told DOJ lawyers they might have to say "fuck you" to court orders rightfully shocked people. The full scope of lawyer Erez Reuveni's claims, however, paints an even more damning picture.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche attacked the claims as "falsehoods," but many of the fired longtime DOJ lawyer's allegations are already backed up by public facts.
Doesn't shock me. I'm more shocked that he and others like him haven't gone out in public and said it. They're still afraid of consequences, and I can't see why they would be.
Details of the "Indestructible Brotherhood-2025" and "Barrier-2025" trainings have been discussed in the Republic of Tajikistan en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…
OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
I’ve been noticing this more and more in the modlogs, with it proven via the “creator” option in some instances’ modlogs that the people doing the bans were mods and not admins, and when I first joined Lemmy, one of the things that were held as a universal truth was that this absolutely could not happen.
It might be possible with 3rd party moderation tools. Just using the web interface, you can only do mod actions from a post in your community. Like, I can't ban someone from FoodPorn from a post they made in, say, PoliticalMemes. I don't have any mod options when viewing communities I am not a moderator for on my app (Connect) or the web interface for Lemmy. World or Pawb.Social, but I have seen a few mentions of more robust mod tools in other apps.
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Grove crane parts are trusted for their precision, durability, and ability to perform under pressure. When paired with a crane parts supplier who delivers speed and accuracy, you've got a setup that keeps your job site productive and safe.
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- Iran calls for ‘return to the logic of diplomacy’ - WATCH: More Gaza aid hub killings as GHF called ‘an abomination’ - US didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear programme: Here’s what new intel says - Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission says Iran’s nuclear capabilities pushed back ‘many years’ - Israel killed at least 627 people in Iran during war
Watching the news lately, it's difficult to believe that today's Republicans enjoy lying so much that they'd lie about national security matters wherein easily provable evidence is widely available.
I thought there would be a stopping point somewhere for them, but there isn't.
OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
Instead of being bullied into increasing defense spending to 5% maybe NATO countries could start funding a lot of the stuff that MAGA USA has abandoned in favour of *checks notes* building concentration camps - I’m sorry, I mean deportation facilities.
well maybe what these goons meant by the "anti war president" likely, is killing people in other countries by means other than military involvement, attracting far less domestic opposition to their plans.
Provided to YouTube by EsotericGo Now · The Moody BluesThe Magnificent Moodies℗ 2014 Cherry Red RecordsComposer: Larry BanksComposer: Milton BennettAuto-gene...
#1979 I'm a loner, but I'm never alone Every night I get one step closer to the danger zone Ian McDonald, British rock musician (saxophone, keyboards, guitar) (King Crimson, 1968-69; Foreigner, 1976-80) would be 79 youtu.be/uQoURkhD7b0?si=G6HxFl…
Provided to YouTube by Atlantic RecordsDirty White Boy · ForeignerRecords℗ 1979 Atlantic Recording Corporation for the United States and WEA International In...
We've seen 20 months of genocide in #Gaza, and along those 20 months we have seen the international institutions do shit. The highest court in the world, the #ICJ, hasn't done anything to stop it.
Does #Starmer plan on branding everyone who disagree with him a terrorist?
What is the Palestine Action group, and why is the UK banning it? The UK government is seeking to proscribe the pro-Palestinian direct action group under anti-terrorism laws. aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/25/w…
A lot of churches/temples are membership-based. You can probably still attend sermons and the like in most cases if you're not a member, but they won't let you have a wedding, baptize your baby etc. in their temple.
The CSTO Secretary General Imangali Tasmagambetov took part in the First CSTO International Conference on Cyber Security in Kyrgyzstan en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…
OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
I'm practicing cloning pot plants. I started with a grow box and growing hormone powder and then I tried without the grow box and then I tried without the grow box and the hormone powder and all the plants seem to be fine. From my experience cloning pot is a slam dunk!
I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).
App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.
The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it's Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).
Motivation
I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.
I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine: - being intentional about content we want on our feed - breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub) - promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them. - consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?
Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?
I do, I've been music for a while about an app that had all my fediverse accounts in one place, a long with my email and possibly reddit (but, uh, without ads). I never check my email unless I'm expecting something and I think a big part of why is because it's a separate flow from checking my other text-based social media.
To have an aggregation tool that could seamlessly put together such different environments would awesome, but the scope can be a bit too overarching at first. My suggestion, having seen the progress of another aggregation platform (mainly for video/audio), Grayjay, is to proceed slowly at creating integrations, as effort to maintain them is potentially exponential, and then, when you feel comfortable managing the ones you already made, proceed to the next.
And unrelated, but is RSS truly shrinking? I found out about it some 1~2 years ago, and unless it's due to me using this type of technology for so little time, but it feels far more are made or keep existing than there are feeds being killed. Worse part for finding the feeds is that often they are hidden in the page's source code.
Would love to see a project like this take hold that is floss and community supported. Both Surf and Tapestry are interesting in this area but sadly proprietary.
The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from
This is the exact opposite of what I'm working on. My idea is to embrace "Protocols, not platforms" and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.
So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video... this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.
what would you want to see on this app?
Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.
I am probably missing something here, doesn't Friendica fulfill those requirements in and of itself? On mobile I use Fedilab (android) to get to Friendica.
An admittedly partial–but deeply troubling–case against America's most brazen medical grift, involving Chinese knockoffs, subscription traps, and prescription gas station sex pills.
OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
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.
Thank you! I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.
There's some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.
I agree with Tilley that many of Chambers's complaints seem Mastodon-specific, or at least not applicable to the threadiverse.
The only really big disagreement in philosophy I have is the complaint about direct messages not being private messages. We've all seen the way that private messages have been used to harass users on reddit. That direct messages don't include an expectation of privacy on lemmy is, to me, a strength rather than a weakness; something that advantages the recipient over the sender, which is the balance of power we want.
I did not use Twitter before. So I am not using Mastadon now. Because I don't give a ploop. I liked forums. Lemmy-ish...adjacent spaces are like forums. I like that. I wasn't aware that DMs are not private, so strange. But yes, many people have been harassed. When I was on Reddit, I turned off any means of communication not public. Here, I wouldn't to be honest.
My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.
Basically, it's an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what's assumed to be a Direct Message. It's less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.
I think it can very well be applied to the Threadiverse.
Sin #1: The First-Move Problem - Doesn't really applies for the Threadiverse, because the instances (at least for me) do feel genuinely different, with a different culture, etc., which is one of the most exciting things for me here
Sin #2: Navigation Inconsistency - Basically the same here.
Sin #3: Remote Interaction Hell - Also the same here, right?
Sin #4: Private Mentions Aren't Really DM's - Same here, right?
Sin #5: The Phantom Social Graph - There definitely are synchronization issues on Lemmy, too (see the australian instance, which, I think has a latency of a week of so per post 😁). Otherwise because the Threadiverse is still rather small, it seems to work mostly fine.
Sin #6: The Discovery Problem - Much better on Lemmy. The algorithms are both transparent and make the threadiverse feel alive even though it has much less user.
Sin #7: Basically doesn't apply here, because you don't follow users, but can be applied for communities. And multiple of the same communities on different instances are a big problem of the Threadiverse. Also abandoned communities. PyFed solves this with topics and Lemmy also has an upcoming feature for this in v1.0 I think.
I think the most pressing issue is sin#7 if applied to communities.
In an abstract sense, I see the Threadiverse as inversion of Mastodon: instead of posting messages to a personal account, which tags may be interesting to you to discover other similar content, in the Threadiverse, users post to hashtags and who posted them is only secondary important to you, but may be used to discover more content by the same account.
I used to feel that way, but there's so much crap on that timeline, especially when you're on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.
More like the Sean Tilley’s dream custom frontend wish.
I thought he would talk about text to speech, alternate text, auto describer, voice chat, etc.. Instead I read what Sean wants his interactions with SNS to look like. I want even custom profile music+radios! Here’s how my lemmy profile is supposed to !
Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.
It sounds more like you're talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that's basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!
This article is a follow-up to an older post of mine, Towards a Greater Federated Architecture, and also a response from the wonderfully-thought out piece by Ben Werdmuller, If I Started Fresh. The goal here is to take the lessons learned from a variety of systems to propose the Fediverse platform I have always wanted to build: Postmodern.
No code has been written as of yet, but I am learning to program, from the bottom up, backend to frontend. I have some background in game design, Web development, and API clients, but I'm working on the more elusive foundational stuff. This is the only way I can possibly develop the confidence needed to build this thing.
The Fediverse, Social Web, Peopleverse, whatever you want to call it, has evolved considerably since it originally started back in 2008. During my entire time on the network, I've longed to design a platform of my own. I've learned a lot of lessons from amazing projects along the way: Hubzilla, Bonfire, Emissary, and ActivityPods have all done some really interesting things beyond what Mastodon offers to the network. I also think there's some really valuable ideas in both Nostr and Bluesky that are worth closer examination.
Before I dive into my technical brain-droppings of the past decade, let's establish a few core concepts.
Guiding Principles
1. It needs to be fun
On the surface, this might sound superfluous. What does it mean for a platform to be fun? This boils down to a few key areas that Fediverse platforms struggle with:
Ease of use - Good UX design is hard to execute well. As time goes on, I'm convinced that people want to use something without having to think too hard about conventions or side effects. They shouldn't have to dig under countless menus to find where the decentralization is.
Discovery - For the time being, the act of finding new, cool things to interact with or peruse is pretty bad. There's some promising work happening with Fediverse Discovery Providers. Regardless, discovery needs to also extend beyond simply finding stuff, and include a laser focus on finding people. Onboarding still kind of sucks, and there's a number of issues with trying to find your friends and connect with them.
Resiliency - One of the shakiest aspects of the Fediverse involves just how fragile instances can be. If an instance permanently goes down, and you didn't already have some alias set up to migrate your followers, you're dead in the water. Having to rebuild your social graph from scratch is the opposite of fun.
Control - This can mean a lot of different things: control over your timeline, control over how your space on the web looks, control over your connections, control over your data. A big missed opportunity in the space is that we'll say things like "you own your own data", but it's not exactly true. Your data mostly exists as a series of tables in a database, which can be serialized into a JSON export that you mostly can't use with anything.
It might seem like this is a catch-all, where you can throw any old thing into the guiding principle. Maybe it is. What I know is this: if the experience is bad for users, if they're getting harassed and seeing drama every day, if they don't really have much control over the platform, if they can't find their friends or cool things that interest them, then your platform is the opposite of fun.
2. Users should have maximum agency
Building on top of Principle #1, individual users should have total agency of how their experience is shaped online. This can be categorized in four ways:
Visual / Conventional - the user decides what interfaces, themes, apps, and clients they will leverage to access the network. Custom designs and behaviors empower users to make their online space truly their own.
Data Sovereignty - the user has strict controls over their data: what apps and services can use it, the extent to which different pieces are exposed to the Web, and the ability to seamlessly port the sum of that data from one place to another.
Filtering and Connectivity - users should always be given the opportunity to decide what they see on their feeds, and what other people can see from them. This could take the form of filtering out keywords, blocking users and domains, leveraging a third-party labeling service, or being able to connect to individual accounts that may otherwise be banned instance-wide for everyone else.
Of course, this isn't to say that admins and moderators don't have a suitable place in community-building and curation. It's just that solely relying on them tends to result in communities where users have minimal input on policy, and admins have absolute authority. To me, this is a major barrier towards world-wide adoption of the Social Web, which is a goal for some of us in this massive, sprawling movement.
3. The platform must move the Fediverse forward
There's some absolutely amazing developments happening in the space. Most notably, the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals project has helped many different platforms standardize on undocumented behavior. It's the closest thing we have right now for improving ActivityPub implementations, in lieu of a formal update to the protocol spec.
FEPs are the reason why groups mostly just work across a variety of systems now, and related efforts such as the Threadiverse Working Group allows NodeBB, Discourse, Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin to federate together with minimal issues. It's not perfect, but the project is bearing a lot of fruit.
The problem is that some of the biggest projects in the space, such as Mastodon, have historically been pretty indifferent to these efforts. Often, they choose to forgo established agreed-upon FEPs to do their own thing, forcing everyone else to bend over backwards and support their unique way of doing things. At the end of the day, FEPs still aren't advancements in the ActivityPub protocol itself.
We need more Fediverse platforms to champion these collaborative efforts, both to help influence further development of the protocol as well as putting pressure on larger projects to work with the community.
4.) The experience must be unique
This might come across as wildly conceited, but I don't want to build yet another clone of a service that already exists. I mean no disrespect towards the people doing that, but I think we've barely managed to scratch the surface of what can be built. There's a certain appeal in imitating existing familiar designs and paradigms, and iterating on them to be better.
What I want to do is develop new concepts that aren't quite like anything else. Sure, there may be a passing resemblance to half a dozen different things, but I want to develop something bold. I'm tired of describing the Fediverse as "the alternative" and want so badly to instead describe it as "the future", but we have to take much bigger risks to get there.
Implementation Details
Here are some of the pipe-dream ideas I've been refining over the years. There are probably a lot of aspects that still need key considerations, some of which is still above my ability to program! I'm currently going to school for Computer Science, and practicing to make my coding skills more capable of tackling these big ideas.
Composable Interfaces
This is probably the biggest idea behind Postmodern, the platform I hope to one day abuild. What are Composable Interfaces? To keep it simple: composable interfaces are a way to construct a custom frontend with whatever data is available.
Composable interfaces are not necessarily new; prior art exists in the following Fediverse projects:
Hubzilla - You can write pages, a custom theme, and widgets using an elaborate template system. You have to write it yourself by hand, there's not really a way to preview these changes, and some of the more high-level customization has to be done by making calls to pieces of code that aren't super well-documented.
Bonfire - Customization is largely accomplished through modules, which can be bundled together into a sort of unique software distribution. So, you can choose to add a group forum module, a wiki module, and a video module, and Bonfire will snap those pieces together for you. Super interesting, kind of complicated, still yet to be battle-tested for communities.
Emissary- Really wild template system built on HTMX and HyperScript. Emissary is really different from other projects because it allows developers to dictate data schemas and actions from within the view template. A lot of contemporary developers might balk at this, because it kind of violates the MVC design pattern. However, Emissary is crazy flexible, and makes it possible for a developer to add support for custom Activity types and actions with a single template.
Dokieli - a full-blown decentralized client-side editing tool. It implements ActivityPub, Linked Data, and a swath of other technologies related to Solid. It's extremely powerful, but the interface looks like it has a significant learning curve. It's hard even for me, a Fediverse nerd with 15 years of experience, to fully grok.
Looking at these concepts, I think Emissary and Dokieli come the closest to what I want to build. The ability to build a custom UI with unique capabilities just by dictating what the template is doing is awfully compelling.
My personal head-cannon differs in one specific way: take Dokieli, and marry its capabilities with that of Emissary. Focus on the page-building, widget-building, stream-building elements, and give people the power to delve into a vast pool of social data that they can edit client-side without having to touch any template code themselves. Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out. Instead of taking inspiration from page-building tools like Gutenberg, Elementor, or Wix, my thoughts are to instead take inspiration from layer-based image editors. Each layer in the builder/inspector thing is a component, which can be altered, rearranged, and adjusted in a number of different ways. You can mix and match existing components, or compose your own from scratch by reaching into the pool of data that your account is aware of. It's not unlike the WordPress approach to Blocks in 2025...but, hopefully this approach can be more intuitive. Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement. For this to be viable, a lot of work would need to be done to overcome any potential learning curve. The tools need to be accessible, with the page layout exactly matching what the user sees on the screen.The experience could really suck if it's not implemented carefully. After all, we have to follow the first guiding principle: it has to be fun. Fighting with an editing tool is not that. I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this. To accomplish this, the most straightforward approach would be to create a core set of widgets with data types and settings, bundled together for different experiences. I'm calling these bundles-of-things complications, which can be thought of as the snapping together of atomic units to make something greater. An experience that has a lot of complications put together would pretty much work as its own frontend made of stylized, curated pieces. If this sounds way, way complicated: yeah, I know. For a social client frontend, this idea pushes a lot of boundaries. I have some ideas about how to get there (maybe use GraphQL for the builder?), but a lot of it is going to probably diverge from the standard Web application stack. I have a lot of homework to do.
Next-Gen Permissions System
I've written about this a bit before in my last article about moving the Fediverse forward, but we need to get our act together about permissions systems. Mastodon's offering is woefully lacking when it comes to granularity. Sigh. ActivityPub has these nifty things called Collections, which is really just a representation of a collection of objects. You can pretty much put any object in there, so in a roundabout way, you can create a scoped list of people you're connected with. Theoretically, you could use collections of people as privacy scopes, dictating who can see certain things, or certain versions of things.
Projects such as Bonfire have taken the logical next step, where it's possible to establish boundaries and barriers for different collections of people, under a variety of conditions. This can apply to everything from individual posts to group communities to whatever else you can come up with.
I think it's absolutely important that we build a system that not only accounts for message delivery and access, but capabilities as well. You the user should be the one that dictates whether people can see a post, boost it, reply to it, whatever. In a decentralized system, this is kind of hard to figure out, but not impossible.
Some people will disagree with me here, but I think a document database architecture might be the way to go for this whole thing. A traditional relational database might be too limiting for this kind of insane flexibility, especially when you consider how different platforms try to account for the complex data structures necessary for ActivityPub.
Pleroma, for example, historically used the jsonb data type in PostgreSQL to hold reams and reams of nested JSON data. At a small scale, it's not so bad, but ActivityPub data can grow exponentially when you're interacting with lots of people and content.
For some time now, I've been thinking a lot about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project. When first approaching Solid, it seems super abstract and complicated. You get all these people talking about RDF, TripleStores, Quads, WebID, and a lot of other stuff. As someone that has a pretty firm grasp on Fediverse systems, Solid initially caused a vein to bulge in my temple. I went on to explain the semantics here. A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod TL;DR: Solid is kind of a specification for data, data storage, and access. It allows users to store their data in pods, and that data is represented as different kinds of documents and metadata. There is no relational database. Instead, the data in your Solid pod is used as a database itself. If you wanted to migrate all of the posts you've ever made, Solid makes it super easy to pick all that stuff up and move it somewhere else. An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data. ActivityPods manages to marry the two concepts, and does the heavy lifting to translate these documents and data into something ActivityPub implementations can understand, and vice versa. The real magic here is that ActivityPods makes the act of building ActivityPub apps relatively seamless and straightforward. Developers don't have to think about both ActivityPub and Solid. They just need to write an ActivityPub app. Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid. I still have some outstanding questions about whether ActivityPods can effectively scale up. The Solid community in general is pretty small, and ActivityPods is an even smaller subset of either Solid or ActivityPub communities. A large-scale community instance with over 100,000 users (who all individually have their own pods) doesn't feel that feasible to me.
Still, I respect everything these guys are doing, and I think about building on top of ActivityPods pretty often.
Relay-Based Supportive Infra
Fediverse instances suffer somewhat from a fragile network. In fact, I would go as far as stating that tethering user accounts to Fediverse instances is an antipattern. We've mistakenly followed this trend for a long time, and put the sum of a user's entire social graph into one server. If that server goes down for good, you're toast. A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays. Nostr doesn't have this problem, because it doesn't have instances. Instead, user accounts are free-floating, peer-to-peer identities that dispatch posts to individual relays. Instead of individual instances where everybody logs on to post, everything is done through clients. Your identity is basically a public key, tied to a profile and some posts.
What I'm advocating for isn't necessarily the prioritization of one method over the other, but a hybrid approach that includes the best of both. What if Fediverse identities could be free-floating, separate things from instances, that persist even when an instance goes down?
Suppose that the Move activity in ActivityPub was just a method for detaching the identity from one instance, and attaching to another? Or, taking the approach that Hubzilla takes, suppose that you could mirror your identity to multiple instances by attaching your identity to multiple servers? You post in one place, it shows up somewhere else, too.
Another way that relays could be useful is in attacking the notorious Discovery Problem so prevalent in the Fediverse. As Nostr has continued to evolve, different relays have emerged that specialize in specific things:
Caching
Hosting Media
Search
Premium Long-Term Storage
Theoretically, it could also be possible for relays to take on the role of Fediverse Discovery Providers. These things could not only act as an index of content and people, but conduits that pull in news, book reviews, events, and maybe even a contact directory. Maybe your instance could just subscribe to relays, rather than trying to broker message dispatching and pulling in new content itself.
A Single-Identity Ecosystem
Finally, we get to what I consider to be the Achilles heel of today's Fediverse. As highlighted in previous sections, I think we do a terrible job of handling identity. In fact, we don't really do any job at all. Sigh Part of the problem here is that every Fediverse server in the network is a full-blown platform, rather than a client. The decision of the Mastodon project was to forgo the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a bespoke API of its own. Mastodon's API grew so popular that many other Fediverse platforms adopted it, just to have access to a vast amount of compatible apps.
The primary side effect of every Fediverse server being a platform instead of a client is that every platform needs its own account to be used. This quickly leads to a nightmare scenario where it's possible to have 15 different accounts floating around that don't actually connect to each other in any meaningful way. Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile. Granted, the Client-To-Server API has its fair share of complaints. It's under-documented, clients are expected to handle all logic on the client side, and seemingly nobody uses it anyway. However...it still exists, can be improved upon, and could be used in conjunction with ActivityPods.
I'm greatly interested in the prospect of building ActivityPods apps that work with Postmodern, where you're really just viewing different crafted experiences in specific clients.
In Conclusion
Congratulations on getting to the end of my big, weird rant about how I'd do things. Some of these ideas remain unproven, and may not actually be the solutions I end up going with. Still, much of this exists as the byproduct of lessons learned from observing different Fediverse platforms evolve over time. I hope to start by building small prototypes to test out various ideas.
Some of this (all of it?) might be super convoluted and complicated. The biggest thing I want to focus on, however, is the experience of building composable interfaces. I think this idea really has legs, and could potentially be a radically different approach to building for the Social Web.
If you have any insights, ideas, suggestions, or critiques, please feel free to reach out! This article was, believe it or not, something of a shortlist. There's a lot of things I didn't discuss (Bluesky-styled labelers, custom feeds, etc) that still belong in this vision somewhere. For now, these are simply the topics most resonant to me, that I wanted to pay special attention to.
US President Donald Trump has accused The New York Times and CNN of trying to spread misleading information regarding the results of US strikes on Iranian facilities.
Pretending to be a ghetto girl isn’t working as well as Jasmine Crockett thought it would. Lacking total self-awareness, she put in her bid to become the Ranking member of House Oversight Committee and came in last. Crockett is actually a privileged private school graduate.
Pretending to be a ghetto girl isn't working as well as Jasmine Crockett thought it would. Lacking total self-awareness, she put in her bid to become the Ranking member of House Oversight Committee and came in last.
Caitlin Johnstone- After pumping out deception and fake diplomacy in order to assist Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran and launch an unprovoked attack, Trump celebrated his facilitation of a ceasefire.
German has the cool feature of just cramming a bunch of words together to make a new word. That's about the only thing I know about it as someone who's just interested in language as a concept.
For people interested in language who speak English, I will recommend this book, which kinda blew my mind explaining why my native tongue is so stupid for good reasons:
Well, English prefers genitive constructions, and rarely compounds more than two words, so native English speakers have trouble to parse words like Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden, Speciallægepraksisplanlægningsstabiliseringsperiode or Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, despite compounding being a core feature of Germanic languages, not only German. English just cought a severe case of French back in 1066..-
I hope you're aware that words like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz aren't exactly easy to understand for Germans, either. If there's one thing English is usually really good at, it's dumbing things down to a level that's easy to understand for the reader; some scientific texts are genuinely easier to understand in the English translation than in the German original, even if you're a native German speaker with a relevant university degree.
Technically Schyzerdütsch is High German (you could even say it's the Highest German, considering elevation), while what most Germans call 'Hochdeutsch' is actually standard german (which, to be fair, is mostly derived from High and Middle German dialects, as opposed to Low German (and Middle German is much more similar to High German than to Low German)).
Did you know EFF's Privacy Badger has been eating tracking cookies to keep you safe online for over ten years? Your privacy matters, and we're here to protect it. Support our work today! eff.org/35years
Podcast: Reacting to Zohran Mamdani's primary victory, Peter Feld says, "It's proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics and that the emperor has no clothes."
Reacting to Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory, Peter Feld says, “It’s proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics and that the emperor has no clothes.”
The anarchist ideals are far from being in contradiction, as the "scientific socialists" claim, to the laws of evolution as proved by science; they are a conception which fits these laws perfectly; they are the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization. -- Errico Malatesta
Brian Johnson, better known as “Liver King,” was arrested Tuesday evening at a downtown Austin hotel after allegedly traveling to the city to confront—and potentially threaten—podcaster and UFC commentator Joe Rogan.
Modern socialism is simply a dead and unserious ideology because it complains about there being 42 different deodorant scents, but doesn't dare breathe a word against gay couples renting women's wombs and buying designer babies.
She said " we will continue to take any possibility of foreign interference extremely seriously" This IS foreign interference "What we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, the president of Argentina and so on, we penetrate the cabinets… I know that least half Trudeau’s cabinet or even more than half of his cabinet are actually from our young global leaders of the World Economic Forum" Klaus Schwab youtu.be/bvCE3fAqUNQ?si=u9Za1C…
Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand spoke with reporters ahead of the start of the 2025 NATO meeting in the Netherlands, and was not impressed by th...
I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.
I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.
After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.
I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.
The problem is probably unrelated to the firmware, and caused by some other upgrade.
After experiencing the issue, you should be able to switch to a different tty with ctrl-alt-f6 (or any other f key), log in, and check journalctl -b for an error message. Edit: Use the End key or shift-G to scroll to the end of the journal.
Successfully made it to a different tty with ctrl-alt-F5 and was able to run journalctl -b
I'm not entirely sure what error I'm looking for here in particular so I'm taking a guess that "Activation request for 'org.freedesktop.XYZ' failed: The systemd unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.XYZ.service' could not be found." is the one I'm looking for (XYZ because there are a few of these such errors with just the XYZ changing between them).
I was hoping you had f-6 which was causing all sorts of problems for amd and intel users but you have f-9 which purports to fix them all. The next question is are you using Plasma with X11? If you are, the have a look at archlinux.org/news/plasma-640-…
I am indeed using X11. I tried using Wayland ~a few months ago (on one or both of my setups, wish I could remember) and it did not work very nicely for me so I just stuck with X11, which so far has worked perfectly for what I do.
Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out.
Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement.
I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this.
Sigh.
A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod
An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data.
Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid.
A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays.
Sigh
Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile.
over_clox
in reply to BonesOfTheMoon • • •genevieve
in reply to BonesOfTheMoon • • •Machinist
in reply to genevieve • • •gravitas_deficiency
in reply to Machinist • • •over_clox
in reply to gravitas_deficiency • • •I know right?! You could fit your entire wallet in there, and they'd never guess the password!
Don't ask how I know this, I don't have any trucknuts..