Notices by Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)
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Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Saturday, 02-Sep-2017 15:35:26 UTC 
Thomas Willingham
@bob Yeah, but by the time you know why you need it, it's a decade too late. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Thursday, 22-Jun-2017 02:26:26 UTC
Thomas Willingham
It's been three days now, and not one community leader from the White Van Man Community has come out and condemned the terrorists acting in their name. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2017 22:11:26 UTC
Thomas Willingham
@bob I don't know how that works. I only really used XMPP as a, well, user. But maybe they do already do it. It's not far fetched.
When I send [flibble]Some new flobble[/flibble] all we need to solve 90% of arugment is an extra bit that says "If I send a flibble, post a url to my flobble". That's it. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2017 21:35:42 UTC
Thomas Willingham
Doesn't mean we should try to be compatible with each other.
99% of fights are because everyone is upset their homozygous monoculture isn't the one accepted by everyone else. Everyone wants to be compatible, but they want everyone else to be compatible with them, not the other way round.
A W3C standard that actually solved the problems of federation - which are nothing to do with the protocol in the first place, the protocol is the easy bit - would need to be extensible, not compatible.
But it'd have to be really extensible, not this wishy washy "you can create new activities, and then nobody will understand them!" way we've had for a decade. We need a way to transmit server capabilities, and we need a way to describe what to do with an item if the recipient is not compatible. At a minimum. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Friday, 19-May-2017 18:04:45 UTC
Thomas Willingham
And what do you mean "nobody is interested"?
I'm seeing much more opposition than enthusiasm in my stream.You're just bashing it
Not really. I basically said "I have these problems and so do you, you've got nothing I haven't already got, so why should I bother?". That's hardly bashing. When I'm bashing you, you know about it.the privacy envelope I get, assuming you mean private payloads are not encrypted
Not the payload, the metadata.suppose Hubzilla supported sending and receiving stuff using ActivityPub, and we started to send our assets to other parties, e.g. a Zot app or webpage or a wiki - what are they to do with them? Is there a way to tell what to accept and what to do?
It's extensible, but in the same way activity streams are extensible. These are already activity streams, and they'd perform as they already do (ie, not well). -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Thursday, 18-May-2017 22:20:46 UTC
Thomas Willingham
The problem with activitypub is really quite simple. I don't see why folk are having a hard time seeing why nobody is very interested after the brief initial burst died down.
The two major concerns I have with the protocol I'm using now are that a) my crypto is cryptographically broken, and b) I don't have envelope privacy.
The difference between the protocol I'm using now and ActivityPub is I'm already using the protocol I'm using now.
You're asking me to implement a new protocol that doesn't fix the problem I already have, and guarantee an overall loss - as we'd lose years of testing and bug fixes, while introducing new ones to have the same broken elements.
The rest of the argument doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that there are regressions as well, I don't need to argue that far - you're simply not fixing the problems we already have, so there is no reason to change. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Wednesday, 17-May-2017 20:05:59 UTC
Thomas Willingham
How would the #fediverse feel about having #magnet search available in the directories?
The federated social directory is still in a developer preview state, but it occurred to me that there's no reason we can't plug into Mario's work on shared files in Hubzilla and start magnet indexing things. Right now, this is only possible for Hubzilla (not even RedMatrix), but since Mario has already done it, it's not a hard problem anymore, it's already been solved - other's just need to implement it.
Once they have, providing magnet URIs isn't brain surgery, and we get sync for free.
Last night, I thought this was a great idea, but I woke up this morning and saw an article about ExtraTorrent being closed down, and though oh...yeah.
So what do you think? -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Tuesday, 02-May-2017 09:04:55 UTC
Thomas Willingham
The more gnusocial posts I read, the more I feel like dusting off my Ruby skills and helping Mastodon out.
I swear, if I didn't have four projects already on the go, I'd help them fix privacy and permissions, just as a fuck you to the gnusocial anti-privacy campaign. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Monday, 01-May-2017 23:05:27 UTC
Thomas Willingham
The truth is, I like living in a caravan, but it has reduced the grandiosity of my goals in life.
They say aim for the moon, and if you miss it, you'll hit the stars, but I'm aiming for a bigger water tank, a working pump, and some new lightbulbs. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Sunday, 30-Apr-2017 10:05:09 UTC
Thomas Willingham
It feels good to have actually managed to maintain concentration long enough to actually release something.
The Jargon File is done. The comic is done.
All the $foo-amatics needs bringing back, and this Friendica stuff needs checking in - which I'll do after the cycling...I think I might finally be productive. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Sunday, 30-Apr-2017 09:16:39 UTC
Thomas Willingham
No. RedMatrix forked into two because me and Mike vehemently disagreed about the direction of the project and could not work together. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Sunday, 30-Apr-2017 09:07:24 UTC
Thomas Willingham
Announcing RedMatrix 3.0
RedMatrix 3.0 signals a complete change in direction from RedMatrix over the last few years (it's being maintained by one of the original developers again for starters...)
While currently, this is very similar to the project you remember, please be aware that we are heading in a very different direction to the past, and you may be better off with Friendica or Hubzilla, depending on your needs.
New Project Description
RedMatrix aims to be a full stack CMS with global federated directories, decentralised privacy, and federation via Friendica.
If Friendica can (unfairly) be described as "decentralised Facebook", the future of RedMatrix can (unfairly) be described as "decentralised October with Webmin".
In this release:
A few bug fixes.
New style guidelines. Our style guidelines are much better than anyone else's in the history of the world.
Slow progress on making the system channel actually represent the system.
KDE Dav module.
Observer tags are no longer ruined.
Changes the underlying theme structure - it is now in principle possible to create a theme without first having to undo twenty eight million files of randomly overloaded bullshit which can be added to arbitrarily at any time!
Begun removal of members. Only Hubzilla, Facebook, and adult film actors have members.
And one minor feature:
We've only gone and invented platform agnostic federated global directories. RedMatrix directories are capable of syncing with RedMatrix, Friendica, and Hubzilla, with partial support for Diaspora and RSS. oStatus is planned for the next release, and anything with a vcard is coming.
Known issues
The federated global directory has been broken out of RedMatrix. If you are only interested in this project just for the directory, you may prefer to help at our sister project - the The Federated Global Directory https://github.com/beardyunixer/federated-global-directory. This is currently considered a tech preview. A lot of stuff needs adding, and even more stuff needs taking away.
Friendica directories only federated over Friendica, even if you're RedMatrix.
MySQL probably doesn't work. You probably need MariaDB. This is due to the changes in null date. We'll try to have this fixed by 3.1
Postgres probably doesn't work and is considered unsupported unless a maintainer can be found.
Nginx is now considered the recommended server, though as always, this is based on the availability of technical support, not whether or not it actually works. We do, of course, still work with Apache, you'll just find it hard to get support if something goes wrong.
PHP 7 may or may not work. Anyone using PHP 7 does so at their own risk, and should be prepared to work with us to fix any problems they find.
Why? Beacuse I'm just one man, and I've got a $2.19/month VPS. I have neither the hours in the day, nor the resources on the server to test all these things.
Updating from older versions
If you are updating from old versions of RedMatrix, you will need to take the following steps:git remote set-url origin https://github.com/beardyunixer/redmatrix.git
There is also a merge conflict, to avoid having to deal with it:
rm include/notify.php (note this is very naughty, and you're cheating...but you will avoid a merge conflict).
Thengit pull
Development statistics with dramatically improve accuracy over those offered at Github are available, and occasionally even updated at #^https://beardyunixer.com/gitstats -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Friday, 28-Apr-2017 18:55:50 UTC
Thomas Willingham
A Guide To Protocols Used In The Fediverse.
Diaspora: Clunky XML behemoth with some degree of privacy, a fuck tonne of metadata that has to be stored even by complete strangers.
DFRN: Clunky as fuck XML behemouth, but damn well works, with pretty good privacy, but by God, it makes your head spin.
Zot: On paper, the best of the lot, light weight, nomadic, more powerful and simpler than the others...but nobody understands permissions, so it's pointless.
Ostatus: Shouting at people anonymously.
ActivityPub: Privacy, as imagined by somebody with no actual experience of implementing privacy, reimplementing mistakes made by everyone else nearly a decade ago. -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Friday, 28-Apr-2017 18:12:35 UTC
Thomas Willingham
I don't know whether to commend the bravery of somebody trying to make OStatus private (ProTip: You can't catch water in net), or break down in hysterics at the fatuousness of the implementation.
I secretly like Mastodon (don't tell anyone I said that though), but seriously, you can't have privacy and ostatus at the same time. Everything You Need to Know About Mastodon's New Privacy Settings | MastoBlog -
Thomas Willingham (beardyunixer@soc.beardyunixer.com)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2017 17:32:06 UTC
Thomas Willingham
The Fediverse: Know Your Enemy
Given the large influx of new users into the fediverse, you may be unaware of the tradition that we all vehemently hate each other and refuse to work with each other because the other guy is a twat.
If you use Hubzilla, you hate Diaspora, Ostatus, and RedMatrix.
If you use RedMatrix, you hate Hubzilla.
If you use Diaspora, you hate Friendica, Hubzilla, and RedMatrix.
If you use Friendica, you hate Diaspora.
If you use ostatus, you hate everyone else who uses ostatus.
This is the law of the fediverse, please bear this in mind. When picking fights with random strangers, make sure it's always based on nothing other than their software choices.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the fediverse. Thank you, and good day.
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