Smol fedi – how I think fediverse should work

Not literally, but also, kinda?

Hey, my name is Makary, and I love fediverse. I’ll even say more, I believe that in ideal world all the social media, including presonal blogs, should be federated, because JFC, why not.

But I also kinda think that we are doing it wrong, and in this note will present a few of my, I believe, unpopular opinions.

1. Don’t tell people about Fediverse

I know how it sounds! IT IS AWESOME AND EXCITING! But you cant really explain WHY it is so awesome and exciting in fifteen minutes to someone who is not into it already!

I firmly believe, that if we want to encourage people to move from the Corporation Rim 1 , we need to tell them about cool stuff that’s already here! If you ever hear actual, real, human people giving each other social media/online recommendations, they talk about specific people, causes or communities. I really do think that instead of selling the general concept of THE FEDERATION, we should recommend people the cool stuff that is actually relevant to them.

Like what? — I hear you asking in my brain, so here’s a couple of my favourites 2 :

Did you hear about mastodon.ie? It is a bit like Twitter or Threads, but more wholesome and actually run by Irish people! (And you can follow other people too!)
Oh, yeah, you should probably check out https://rimworld.gallery, it’s a forum, reddit-style, but community run and people post their awesome RimWorld bases there in HD! There’s also advice, tips and tricks and discussion of mods! (And you can also see what’s on the other, similar forums!)
Did you hear about that independent Irish Meetup alternative? It’s at https://events.daoine.eu , and because it doesn’t charge you to run a group, there’s a lot of indie and alternative stuff!
I put that recipe last week on a small fermentation forum I run, https://ferment.site, you should check it out! You can also ask people any questions you have on any kind of food fermenting really, it’s quite nice to have a helpful community. (And you can check out related posts from other forums even!)

2. Nobody wants another app

I know I don’t. Like, I have more apps than I want and probably more than I can reasonably remember to check. If you tell me there is another app I need, I will be deeply unhappy. If you will start excitedly telling me about a new social app, and will seem excited about the app itself, I will probably become at least impatient.

I don’t want another app, I want community.

I absolutely don’t want to hear about Mastodon app or a Fediverse client. I mean, I personally might want to hear about it, but that’s because I’m into obscure IT shit. You know what I do want to know about? A microblog dedicated to hobby radio (coincidentally happens to be Mastodon server) or maybe about this super cool Solarpunk themed forum and link agreggator (which happens to be federated as well).

We already got the people who are into federation and multi-instance networks and open source. They all at least heard about it.

While I have a really deep hatred for all the modern corporate UX lingo, there is one bit in there that’s hard to argue. People don’t care about your app, they just want to get what they need.

And what we desperately all need from social media, is not to be antisocial, to be run by community itself and not board of directors to squeeze as much profit as possible. If you want to convince people to come here, tell them about the communities, not about the fucking apps.

3. We need more, we need less

I’m kinda fed up with the ‘general instances’, for all the safety and tech reasons you probably already know, but also for the above reasons. Like, I’m absolutely not interested in mastodon.social, but! Mastodon.ie is interesting and relevant to me, because it has people and topics relevant to the place where I live. If I could afford it tho, I would absolutely set up one local to my city instead! Because I think it would be better, and it would be easier to convince people to come over, because we tend to care about the stuff that we either have a personal interest about, or that’s local to us. I really don’t think feddit.org, or fedia.io, or lemm.ee are that interesting of a place, at least to me, but I was very happy to register at slrpnk.net and to run ferment.site. And so on! So, if you are a dev/admin person, I strongly encourage you to consider setting up your own, smol thing, than joining a huge one, not only because it’s prestige and you can get a really cool domain name (:P) but also because it will be easier to gather people who care and/or are interested about your thing, if you tell them ‘join my website’ instead of ‘download a lemmy app, register an account on this instance, and then you can join my board’. Or, at least, that’s my opinion.

I will probably come up with some more stuff on this topic, so you can expect updates at some point, and maybe, you know… Let me know what you think?

Footnotes

Yes, it is a Murderbot reference, well found!
These project that I mention and/or link here are mostly projects that I do have something in common with – I either run or help to run them, or I am an user, or I do really appreciate them! None of them have neither paid or asked me to mention them, I just think they are super cool! If you’d like to see more of super cool fedi project, make sure to check out catalogues at fedi.garden or fedi.directory for more cool stuff!

If you got that far, thank you for reading, I will write more on that (and unveil a related thing!) in the upcoming days, so come back! You can also give this blog a follow at https://readme.makary.online, on your RSS reader at https://readme.makary.online/feed, or on your favourite Mastodon/Fediverse account at @makary@readme.makary.online Be warned tho, that it was created with more technical posts in mind!

Authentik setup, day... 10?

So, I think I'm almost ready for some open beta of the registration on my project. Yay me? Summary is as follows: 1. I want to run a federated discussion forum using #Mbin 2. Because I will want to put another services as a part of the same project/domain, including but not limited to #mobilizon, and maybe even multi-user #writefreely, I need something to handle authentication and user access to all of them 3. Initially I wanted to go with #Zitadel, but I realised that it has baked in First and Last name required fields, and to be honest, I am absolutely not interested in this data, and even explicitly don't want to have to keep and process it; so I don't really want to make my users have to fill this out 4. I stumbled upon #authentik, and while I appreciate possibility of setting up complex auth flows and such without the need to touch raw code, it seemed a little bit daunting. 5. I found a set of really awesome tutorials by Cooptonian on YouTube, and I managed to solve not only setup, connecting the client apps, emails and password recovery, but also I got a way better grip on the inner workings of Authentik, and feel confident that if I need to do some minor tweaks to it, I will be able to. 6. I hope I will deploy the pemultimate flow today, that is the signup/invitation flow, and I will be ready to invite selected amount of people for some tests of the project, so hang on tight!

Nihil de nobis, sine nobis – nothing about us without us

If as queer people we want to have nice things, the only way to achieve this is to self-fund and self-organise.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of marriage equality in the Republic of Ireland. 1
It is, also, the year when the second term of Donald Trump's presidency starts to agressively try to steamroll all the advancements that the equal rights movements have made in the recent few decades, not only in the US, but globally 2. Why do I mention this side by side? Because the consequences of the latter are getting more and more visible. Not only political pressure groups inspired and often financed from the US and the UK are getting more and more loud and active, sowing divide and distress in Ireland, and trying to come for us, starting with the most vulnerable parts membersof out community; namely trans people and people of color/migrants. But also due to the pressure from Washington demanding end of “Woke” or “DEI” policies not only within the administration but also in private companies and even (sic!) foreign governments and even cities in Europe, lots of companies previously supporting, also financially, the equality themed events and actions, drop the funding and other support. Probably the most notable case in the last few weeks was Indeed dropping the sponsorship of Dublin Pride, alongside other international corporations.3 This financial hit, while bad, is not entirely unexpected – those among us who have more anti-capitallist beliefs, were warning for quite some time:

Corporations don't care about queer lives, they only care about queer dollars.

This, in my personal opinion at least, shows very well, why we should not take this, or any other kind of corporate support for granted, because while they are happy to march alongside use when Pride is a party, they don't want to have anything to do with us when we have to yet again fight for our rights against powers that be.

What is the answer to that?

We have to get back to our root values and tactics. We need to learn again how to build networks and organise, and fundraise, we need to have institutions, organisations, mutual help groups that are run for queer people by queer people. While I'm not saying (tho I need people who would argue for it) that any form of organisational or financial support received from a business or governmental sponsor should be outright rejected, I think we should consider one thing: If the thing we're making is important for the community, do we have a plan in case we have to run it within our own means and our own community? Because if the answer to that is no, then we have a problem. Governments change over time, and corporations, despite what they claim on their websites, don't have values, they only have interests. It is really easy to get used to a good thing, but as recent examples of the US or recently UK show4, what have been given, can be easily taken away.

Footnotes

Many people will say that there is no real marriage equality as long as it is not affordable to everyone, or there are legal barriers for disabled people to freely get married. While I generally agree with that opinion, it is outside the scope of what I'm trying to say today, but I believe it is very much worth signalling.
https://www.newsweek.com/european-city-reacts-trumps-dei-ultimatum-2068974
https://gcn.ie/indeed-drops-dublin-pride-sponsorship/