@steve I guess if you want to avoid that kind of failure mode altogether, you need a fully or mostly P2P model like SSB or Nostr. But every system has its downsides… My original post was simply a light-hearted parody of Paul Frazee's post, intended to highlight that the Fediverse isn't susceptible to outages as a whole in the way that Bluesky is. Of course individual nodes can go down, but the rest of the network isn't affected, it will never all go offline at once.

@briankrebs I mean isn't ICANN as a whole a "giant fraud, spam and scam turd" anyhow?

@julian thanks! And unfortunately that's the answer I expected about Mastodon, though I briefly got my hopes up that I might be able to use my own domain without self-hosting

@steve If I'm reading you correctly you're saying that the Fediverse has single points of failure because the internet does?
Whilst I can't argue with that, it doesn't really point to a flaw in the federation model of the Fediverse. As compared to the centralised model of Bluesky (both the canonical identity authority and the relay system are totally centralised), the federation model of the Fediverse is much more resilient to outages affecting the whole network.

@julian @canary thanks for this great document and tool!

I have two questions.

1. In a few places you link to a SocialCG document (https://www.w3.org/community/reports/socialcg/CG-FINAL-apwf-20240608/) but it's 404 now. Do you have an up to date link?

2. You mention several times that Mastodon allows users to use a different webfinger domain from the host domain. I can't find any documentation. As a user, how would I configure this?

Here's a few things you can expect when there's a #Fediverse outage:

- oh wait, there's no such thing, the Fediverse is actually federated
- there are over 30k totally independent servers
- if one of them goes down the rest of the Fediverse works just fine

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ragtjsm2j2vknwkz3zp4oxrd/post/3lawdqryaws2q

#Bluesky #BlueskyOutage #ATProto #ActivityPub #federation

@petergleick also, strangely, the article doesn't mention any alternatives to replace X. Why don't they have Mastodon and Bluesky accounts?

@petergleick ...I'm not.
More to the point, what took them so long, and why do other people and organisations who don't consider themselves fascists continue to post to an explicitly fascist platform? Is it just cognitive dissonance, or is there more to it?

@GottaLaff I'm curious, what makes you think you will have more elections? Given that Trump controls the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court, who do you expect to stop him from abolishing elections as he (more or less explicitly) said he would?

@sidereal And yet both those examples are countries that lost heavily in a conventional war, and then were forced to become "friendly" in order to survive.

@nickaubert @zinnia respectfully, that's bollocks. The people who believe Trump's "alternative reality" are mostly people who choose to because they identify with his politics, they're the ones who when you try to reason with them or provide honest information put their fingers in their ears and go "lalalalalala I can't hear you". (It's not uniquely a US problem, but it's worse in the US than in most Western countries and it has a bigger detrimental impact on the rest of the planet.)

As a European: sincerely, fuck the American basket of deplorables.

Sorry to the good people in the US, I know you exist, but you're a minority and today is proof that you don't represent your country. The majority have just proven themselves once again to be fucking arseholes.

@mcc @onyxraven @whitequark The directory of dead URLs is an interesting idea, but my preferred solution would be a proper migration mechanism where the new server can authoritatively declare that all posts posted from the old server should have their URLs updated to point to the new one.

@mcc @onyxraven @whitequark I totally agree, they shouldn't. It's a difficult challenge to solve in a decentralised system, so I can understand why it is the way it is, but it's one of the big drawbacks of the Fediverse at the moment and it's why I hate the "just pick a random server, you can always move later" advice that gets thrown at new users (and also why I haven't moved to hosting my own server).

@onyxraven @mcc @whitequark it would certainly be interesting but it only solves part of the problem. URIs are an intrinsic part of posts and breaking URI resolution is for most intents and purposes the same as deleting the post. Yes archiving the content would be great, but conversation structure and discoverability would still be gone (unless you can browse the whole Fediverse via the archive like with archive.org).

I suspect most of the federation problems mentioned in the last few posts are the "fault" of Discourse – BrowserPub fails to find anything at https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/4 – but in the end the user doesn't care whose fault it is when something doesn't work, they just think federation is confusing and broken.

@eeeee The lack of complete federation is another very good (and very hard to solve) point that makes federation less-than-intuitive. From my Mastodon instance the situation is worse, none of @bumblefudge 's posts nor any others from SocialHub appear in the thread. (See https://indieweb.social/@julian@community.nodebb.org/112972609579702339)

@julian I'm curious what it means that my post was "boosted" by @activitypub. I guess it's because this post is in the ActivityPub category, but what are the actual mechanics of that which show up on the Mastodon side as a boost?

@julian This is exciting! Is it compatible with Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin? And what about any other forum software, such as Discourse with the ActivityPub plugin?

I'd like to see some info in the docs about how to use it from a user point of view. For example how do I find a thread on another forum (or Mastodon etc) and reply to it from NodeBB?