Over time, I was concerned about the lack of continuing security patches, so we pulled it down.
While he's off work for the next few months, he's going to try to do more photography , and he's looking to host his work again. I'd like to be able to suggest something that isn't Flickr / 500px or other #corpocentric site.
Federation is not needed, as he's looking mostly for a way to market his work and maybe sell a few prints. I suggested that he look at #PixelFed, but I don't know enough about it to even be sure it could meet his needs. I don't know if his hosting is capable of something like #MediaGobllin (Python based), but that project is still awakening from a long hibernation.
Anyone have knowledge of a self-hostable PHP based photo gallery?
@vegos I agree. To most organizations, their primary concern is reach. So they congregate on big #corpocentric #socnets, even when the central corporation running things is actively hostile to their point of view.
Then they're butthurt when their accounts are shadowbanned.
Years ago, I tried to persuade some local Black churches and ethic-focused organizations to join !GNUsocial and #Diaspora, but was unsuccessful. I think they all joined #Facebook, where their posts are hidden by the algorithms.
Unfortunately, some parts of the #Fediverse (primarily, but not exclusively #Mastodon) have marketed themselves with promises of privacy, control, immunity from recourse, and personal security that none of these networks (nor the protocols they use) were ever designed to provide. The article looked at that as failure, instead of recognizing it for what it was: marketing & advertising puffery.
None for me, thank you. I see the kinds of garbage that gets into the #Google #Play_Store. I’d rather rely on a few motivated #F-Droid maintainers to inspect and package the software on my devices than your auto-scan software.
(BTW, let me emphasize again that #de-google is NOT ENOUGH. #DecentraLife ... I want to remove not just Google from my life, but all #corpocentric gatekeepers.)
This is worth a read. This person has spent some time thinking about these issues. I'm not saying his/her conclusions are "the right" conclusions or that he/she has discovered all the potential issues. But when we discuss these topics, we need to have a (shared) starting point, where everyone understands what particular terms mean.
@tealturtle I knew of some people from West Africa (but none from Southern or Central Africa) years ago, before the #bifurcation. . I think they were #lost to the #corpocentric networks when Identica switched to #Pump.io and many #StatusNet instances closed.
I don't think that having a different kind of discovery from #corpocentric networks means that the #Fediverse's discovery mechanisms are wrong. Having been a #Twitter user for over a decade, they don't have the greatest discovery mechanisms either. They try to fill that in with "who to follow" and trending tags suggestions that are almost always wrong, wrong, wrong.
No universal view is a positive feature, not a negative one. If your group is using the tag #abc123 for something in your local scope (your instance and the instances where your contacts are hosted), it doesn't necessarily collide with another group using #abc123 in their own local scope. This can reduce confusion and conflict. It also means that people can post in whatever languages they desire on instances where said language is the majority and not have posts they can read buried under a multitude of other-language posts.
Many existing Mastodon and Pleroma instances have shared announcement servers (that's not the official name, but I can't recall it right now) that collect public and hashtagged posts and distribute among the other instances using that server. So with judicious choosing of announcement servers, the advantages listed above can be spread over a larger subset of instances and users without as many collision issues as a global view would cause.
No, discovery is not perfect. But let me ask you this: How do you discover e-mail addresses of people you wish to contact? Outside of your organization's address list, you can't just search a directory. You have to ask them or people that already know them. That's probably a better solution than plugging "firstname lastname" or "usual_nick" in a search box anyway.
I also think that if you have more than 10-20 active users, you should probably ask members of the community to contribute if they can ... financially, moderation-wise, admin tasks, customizing the design and function of the site, and so on. We do our users no favor by reinforcing that sites and servers are provided without any cost. That's what the #corpocentric networks do, but then they have ads and data-collection to extract resources anyway.
If we think that peer-to-peer is the eventual goal, then everyone will be responsible for their own bandwidth, backups, and administration (updates, settings). That cannot happen if we keep teaching people that "I can play for free because someone else will do the work without any cost".
Not everyone can or will contribute, of course, but if a few people help in those areas, it can be the difference between keeping the instance going or shutting it down.
@sikkdays Yes, I agree, and that was a question I expressed to my co-worker. How was he going to attract people to use his forum versus the #corpocentric sites they already gravitate to?
In my mind, having to get your information onto $BIG_SITE is a return to the old-media model of yesteryear. People watched the big three TV networks, read one of their local two main newspapers and the TIME weekly newsmagazine, so pretty much everything they knew had to pass through a gatekeeper. Then came the Internet's popularity, and the most interesting information came from outside of the media guardians, from people close to the actual creators.
I really want to find a way to break the hold that these centralized sites have on our friends and family, so they'll be freed from the control of said groups.
From observation, most people in the US do spend the majority of their online time inside their Facebook/Instagram/Gmail/OutlookDotCom cages. I can't speak for UK, NZ, China, etc, because I'm not there.
Watch people on their phones in the markets, on the bus or train, as they walk down the street. They aren't on some-random-guys-site dot com. They are mostly on Facebook and other #corpocentric sites. Maybe a sports-centric or news-centric site during a big event, or a streaming site like YouTube or Netflix or Hulu if they have a lot of time.
There are definitely costs to #DecentraLife, and I don't think we talk about that enough, but from my perspective, even spread over the whole #Fediverse, the cost/benefit ratio is still superior to the corpocentric networks.
@trev The #Diaspora team did something like that on multiple sites. They got lots of requests and suggestions, but as you noted, the real need is developers. Eventually, the requesters feel ignored and leave for #corpocentric platforms. Or they propose hostile forks without enough devs to make their efforts viable.