yeah i get what you mean, its been something ive been thinking about. the title itself is already deliberate, because the legal problem already exists: while it is uncertain what the Russmedia ruling does for federation and social platforms regarding GDPR, that uncertainty itself already does pose a major problem.

in the article itself i have an entire section on the uncertainty, and what might limit Russmedia’s reach. A lot actually hinges on what the outcome of the Kunast case will be.

thats why i published it now, and with this title. Because right now federation does have a legal problem, with the problem being the uncertainty itself. After Kunast there might either be a much bigger problem (Russmedia confirmed to generalise to social platforms) or a much smaller problem

yes this. The current problem right now is that it is very unclear what the status of federation for GDPR compliance is, this ruling strongly suggests that it is not compliant. But this is a single ruling, that technically only right now affects a single Romanian marketplace. So a lot depends on how other courts will respond to this ruling, which parts they pick up on, and if this type of argument will become more broadly used beyond this single Romanian site. But that the german courts specifically paused a major cause about Meta to wait for this ruling, and that they have said that they will read it broadly, and that a prominent German legal scholar predicts that they this ruling will apply straightforwardly to Meta, are not encouraging signs. But yeah, thats future predictions, and that is still highly uncertain.

thanks! all the cover photos are made by my dad, and i usually pick the ones i like, often nature or buildings. I had this one lying around for a long while that i never used, because as you say, it does look disgusting and creepy, and that described my feelings pretty well with the topic of the article

i thought you made a fair point, and you were right to be confused, so figured id just address it directly

i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.

activitypub scaling is a very real issue

open social web is used here as a descriptive term, to mean the collection of networks that includes activitypub, atproto, nostr (and potentially more like matrix and farcaster, depending on your inclination).

whether open social web is the correct term or not does not really matter, because if it was not than i would simply have to replace it with another term that describes the exact same thing

yeah, there are two aspects to this: what do you think is beneficial for the ecosystem, and what do people do in practice. And those are largely different things, turns out.

I think you can make a pretty good case why it would be beneficial for ecosystem development to have protocols more standardised. But that also kinda doesnt matter much, because in an open network you dont have control over what other people are doing.

Bluesky has a much more structured protocol, and much more control over their protocol and anyone in the fediverse has over activitypub. Still, the first thing that people do is tweak the protocol. The three most successful other products on atproto (tangled, streamplace and roomy) all significantly modify the protocol to fit their own needs, theoretical arguments be damned

ohh indeed some interesting recommendation system in there, thanks!

ah great, thats exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

very curious what server you are on? im on a server with 1k active users, so not big by any measure, and manually counted the federated timeline just now, and it shows at least 50 new posts per minute. like how do you even use that? do you just watch it until an interesting account pops up on there? im very confused by this idea of using federated timeline to find people

i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.

because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/

There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I’ve seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month

https://bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/post/3lfdtegyzs22i

hello from piefed!

PieFed represent! Highly recommended, the ‘Topics’ feature that aggregates multiple community is super valuable to me

So confused that skybridge is now getting all the media attention lol. Its been around for over a year and hasnt been updated for 3 months. It works fine, its just that nobody actually bothered to use it. Not really clear how 800 dollars is going to make a difference here.

They couldve just checked the repo lol.

https://github.com/videah/SkyBridge

Piefed has this, and it’s great!

It is worth noting that what they posted in their business plan in July 23 (1) differs quite a bit from what Jay Graber mentioned as their business plan in an interview with The Verge in Feb 24 (2), which again differs on quite a few points from what Jay Graber mentioned in a podcast with The Verge in March 24 (3).

(1): https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan (2): https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24062837/bluesky-drops-invite-system-begins-federation-at-protocol (3): https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview

piefed has quickly become my main threadiverse driver. its really nice

Threads has implemented both ActivityPub implementations of quote posting: it uses the Misskey quote posting system, and also implemented fep-e232 (which is a better version of quote posting, but not implemented by any major platform), so that they are already immediately compatible with platforms that use the FEP version.

Mastodon ignores the current implementations of quote posting, and wants to do their own new implementation so that they can add granular control.