“Federated social media’s contribution to digital autonomy runs wider than another place to post. Public money funded a supply of parts and put it where anyone could reach it. Researchers used it to start rebuilding scientific publishing, a magazine’s readers used it to turn an audience into a membership, and a town can use it to let a river tell everyone what the water is doing. None of those had a commercial version to copy, and all of them exist.”
Explore local activities
Linux Magazine talked to us about how and why we build Bonfire.
What we want next is "not a bigger Bonfire, but a network of cooperatives covering the whole supply chain of a community's digital space", who "do it together" rather than leave you to "do it yourself".
Because "federation, we don't see it as just a technical thing. We see it as a social, economic, and political tool as well."
Link: Supporting the Social Web: How the Fediverse Found Parts for Its Platforms
Also happy to spread the love for @coopcloud@social.coop, @coquest@social.coop, @SocialCoop@social.coop and more, check out the links at the end of the article! Thanks to @horncologne@fosstodon.org for a lovely conversation, and @linuxmagazine@fosstodon.org for publishing it, in a piece that also features the great @cwebber@social.coop and @tsyesika@mastodon.nu from @spritely@social.coop.
#fediverse #ActivityPub #opensource #freesoftware #OpenCooperativeEcosystem #OpenScienceNetwork
It was such a great experience to join the open source conference in luxembourg!
Huge thanks to the amazing @_elena@mastodon.social and @Gina@fosstodon.org for organising and curating the Decentralised Technologies for Digital Sovereignty track, It brought together lots of the people and conversations we need right now.
And thanks to @samvie@chaos.social to keep pushing the fediverse forwards ✊️
Coming to the Open Source Conference in Luxembourg today? @oscl@mastodon.opencloud.lu 🇱🇺
Come say hi! At 15:30 we'll talk about digital sovereignty, why it's more than a server, what is the ecosystem we're building towards and keep asking ourselves: where's Franca? 🔥
pretalx.com/open-source-conf... #DigitalSovereignty #Fediverse #OpenSource #Bonfire
Belgian journalism cooperative Apache is going to be testing Bonfire as a space for its readers, inspired by #Jacobin work in Germany.
Independent media building community spaces where readers and journalists can meet, participate, and connect across the fediverse. This is the kind of social web we want to support.
Their ongoing diary of leaving big tech is worth a read (in Dutch): apache.be/vaarwel-big-tech
quanto è importante e contemporaneo lo spettacolo sul vajont di Paolini...
youtube.com/watch?v=q7CarpRf...
@lebout2canap@mastodon.tedomum.net fixed, thanks! @gardian@social.manade.org
It would be pretty cool to have a fediverse version of ResearchGate. Someone should look into that. Someone with a lot more free time than me.
@benlockwood@ecoevo.social openscience.network goes beyond that 👋
Originally published on Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy blog, this article by @s0hw@hci.social and @andresmh@hci.social reflects on a semester of collaboration with Bonfire. Together, we explored how Governance Cards could help communities describe how they organise and govern their shared spaces.
Community rules will ship alongside federated groups in the upcoming Bonfire release 🎉
What comes to your mind when you think of an old woman? What about a sage, magician or witch? Carl Jung thought we humans had a sort of primordial and universal knowledge. Archetypes are tools for telling stories:
https://laurahilliger.com/models/a4-choosing-your-own-archetypes/
@epilepticrabbit@social.coop after reading Ursula K. Le Guin “Space Crone” essay, everytime i think of an old woman i see an earth' space ambassador 😊
TIL OpenAI spent $22M plagiarizing someone else's math paper and brute-forcing a proof and istg I cannot stop laughing right now
Like honestly, if they win a Millennium Prize, $22.5M expended for a $1M payout is just all of the AI ecosystem in one story
@mattmay@mstdn.social big companies spend $300-500M yearly on marketing, OpenAI is not different, they throw $22M, plagiarized mathematicians, and brute-forced the solution to install in people mind that chatGPT has surpassed the smartest human in Math, one of the foundational disciplines to understand the universe. It was a really good marketing move, work of the devil, as most marketing is...
Indeed. Over the years I've seen so many developers become discouraged to continue their #ActivityPub projects after becoming initially highly excited upon first reading the #W3C specs. They bump into a world of undocumented complexity, harsh wire realities, inconsistencies and tech debt. Only the true "stayers" grit their teeth and keep at it. Developers love to be able to focus on a solution, and not get mired into all kinds of low-level plumbing that is not related to that.
This makes tech that's social-culturally worse (ATProto w/ centralization, VC capital) still have better uptake potential.
I gave special mention to both @fedify and @Bonfire in my article. For #Fedify for how they focus on providing a framework and SDK that hands people software so that they can focus on "solution development" immediately. And #Bonfire because they constitute a framework, but also engage directly with clients and partners in solution development, closest to making the paradigm shift.
@smallcircles@social.coop you say "Over the years I've seen so many developers become discouraged to continue their #ActivityPub projects after becoming initially highly excited upon first reading the #W3C specs. They bump into a world of undocumented complexity, harsh wire realities, inconsistencies and tech debt"
IMO while this is true, because many developers approach building on the fediverse as hobbyists, out of personal curiousity and to meet their own needs first, despite there being libraries and frameworks to take care of those boring/complex parts that would enable them to focus on "solution development" like you say, almost nobody picks these up and instead "reinvent the wheel" so to speak in terms of implementing all the protocol parts...
Noticing is the discipline these times most lack and the one #AutisticiInventati has practiced against techno fascist over the past twenty-five years:
"Noticing is my way of opposing a particular modernist practice of looking towards an imagined future. Certain things get coded as possible futures and then we develop blinders so that all we can see is our trajectory towards one kind of imagined future, which isn’t actually the future but is a stereotyped dream future. And so, we stopped seeing. Noticing is trying to take those blinders off to look at the world around us..."
We’re delighted to share that our talk: “Sovereignty Is More Than a Server: Public Digital Commons with Bonfire” has been accepted for the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 🎉 !
We’re looking forward to discussing why digital sovereignty requires more than self-hosting and how public digital commons and projects like Bonfire Networks can help build more open, democratic, and resilient digital ecosystems.
If you’re attending, we’d love to meet you, exchange ideas, and learn about what you’re working on.<span class="invisible"> #digitalsovereignty #commons #bonfire
Earlier this week I unsubscribed from #1Password and moved to #Bitwarden... due to their donation of 300k to DHH's #Omarchy.
I made sure to let them know about the reason, so that hopefully the company would notice those kind of decisions have an impact.
Day one I got messages from their AI system.
But today I got a response by a real human at 1Password (or so it appears).
If you are curious about the company's official response to the backlash, check out the screenshot (and/or #AltText)
We're running out of words for how shitty things are getting:
- "enshittification": quality degrades over time
- mask-off?: turns out they were fascists (or sympathisers) all along, and they've stopped pretending
- enclosure?: thought you were safe with an open-source alternative? Many are on the same late-stage-capitalism hamster wheel. Bitwarden is now private-equity owned and has scrubbed "always free" from its site. At least it can still be forked... fastcompany.com/91542655/bit...
Shared infrastructure is how the #Fediverse can grow without recreating enshittified platform silos.
We’re excited to share that Bonfire is working with Mastodon on two critical areas of Fediverse infrastructure: remote media storage and automated content detection.
Built around open Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) specifications, this work will help platforms connect to shared services instead of each having to build and operate the same capabilities alone.
Our aim is to make these capabilities open, interoperable, and available for any federated server to adopt.
A big thank you to @Mastodon@mastodon.social team for involving us in this work. We’re looking forward to building together and sharing what we learn along the way.
Read the full post: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bu...
#ActivityPub #FASP
…I remember @aral talking about this over a decade ago, and to my eye at least, we don’t appear to have gotten very far.
I know Aral is trying with Small Web, and I know many others here are doing something similar in spirit too.
But something keeps going missing. I’m not clever enough to pinpoint it.
Below is my attempt to narrate the pattern that I regularly encounter
@urlyman@mastodon.social Completely agree with your larger point though! We've got a long way to go. As you can see from our hosting page we'd love to see more of an ecosystem around hosting of FOSS, both with better UI and simpler onboarding (i.e. a step by step form that gets you from domain name to deployed app, as simple as signing up to SaaS but with autonomous infrastructure) and more cooperative economic models.
…Tbf to @coopcloud their docs clearly state:
“In the spirit of transparency and to avoid confusion, we would like to begin with the explanation that this documentation is aimed at a *technical audience*.”
Qualified as “collectives and individuals who have familiarity with system administration”.
But here’s the mismatch:
- Bonfire imply a friendly entry point
- That links to an unfocused page
- The Bonfire-focused step, when found, points to the docs, which are for…
sysadmins 😐
@urlyman@mastodon.social Please see my other reply. We'll try to make our website clearer, but in the meantime the friendly entry points are the co-ops who can do it for you if you're not technical, and while they have websites it's really about getting in touch with them rather than reading any documentation:
3 more link(s)
…1. I visit https://bonfirenetworks.org and see the below menu options.
Ok, I know I’m not equipped for DIY and probably never will be, and I’m just exploring so I’m not ready for the Mosaic discussion, but Hosted sounds good, so let’s take a look.
2. At https://bonfirenetworks.org/hosting/ there’s a nice big ‘Find a hosting partner’ link, which offers me an attractive tile for @coopcloud. Last time I looked I could make no sense of that, but I’ll see what’s changed…
It's probably just bad design on our part, on the hosting page underneath CoopCloud there's a "Co-ops offering managed hosting" link, which lists a few organisations who can host an instance for you, and another link for @coquest@social.coop who do the same.
We understand it is confusing but @coopcloud@social.coop is a federation of co-ops (+ a commons of FOSS app recipes + tools to make hosting them easier) rather than a hosting service itself. CoopCloud is currently working on a new website to make it clearer on that side as well.
In solidarity with #AutisticiInventati.
Please join us in signing the open letter and send it to your representatives: inventati.org/campaign/open_...
A/I's mission has always been clear, and for more than twenty years it has inspired generations of hackers and activists in Italy and around the world: "Socializzare saperi senza fondare poteri." Sharing knowledge without establishing power.
That is what the US is attacking, and that is what is at stake today.
The premise of these sanctions, that whoever provides communications infrastructure answers for whatever anyone does with it, would criminalise and shut down most Big Tech platforms tomorrow if applied equally.
Instead it is aimed at grassroots services who refuse to surveil their users.
We condemn these sanctions, and we stand firmly with solidarity tech like A/I. Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism.
