I built a #StarterPack with some accounts from #Mastodon, that are bridged via @ap.brid.gy.
To be honest, it was a bit challenging to find some, that are active there, but not here. Suggestions are welcome, let's build more connections between the social networks!
#BridgyFedgo.bsky.app/6ooFNWs
News and Politics are two of the most followed and read topics on Flipboard, and with the U.S. election just a few weeks away, we have a new feature to help you keep up with the day’s leading stories.
Now you can follow people from social networks in the fediverse, like Mastodon and Threads, so you can get your daily dose of news and political commentary from journalists and experts, alongside content from your favorite publishers.
Here’s a look at some of the people you can follow on Flipboard:
Joseph Biden, President of the United States
Ian Bremmer, political scientist and founder of Eurasia Group
George Conway, conservative legal expert and co-founder of The Lincoln Project
David French, legal expert and New York Times columnist
Katie Harbath, public policy expert and CEO of Anchor Change
Steve Herman, Voice of America’s chief national correspondent
Molly Jong-Fast, host of the podcast Fast Politics and journalist at Vanity Fair
Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States
Joy Reid, host of The Reidout on MSNBC
Olivia Troye, American national security expert
Here’s how you can find and follow them on Flipboard:
Explore — Select the Search icon in the bottom navigation and check out the new Fediverse tab for a list of people to follow that post about a wide range of topics, including news and politics. Swipe left to the News tab for more accounts to follow, plus you’ll find editorial features and publishers to follow too.
Search — Select the Search icon and type in the name or handle of the account you’d like to follow. You will see results in the new Fediverse Accounts section in All, Social and Profiles tabs.
Once you’ve followed accounts from Threads, Mastodon or other platforms in the fediverse, you will see their new posts in the Fediverse Activity carousel in your For You feed. If there is a profile that you never want to miss a post from, add their profile to the top of your Home carousel so you can easily keep up on their social sharing. (Note: The Fediverse Activity carousel will only update when there is a new post from a followed account.)
If your Flipboard account is already federated, you’ve got a few more features to enjoy:
For one, in addition to being able to follow accounts from the fediverse, you’ll also be able to comment on and like their posts. Having a federated account fully opens up your Flipboard experience and enables you to seamlessly interact with people across the fediverse.
And while you’ve been able to see your fediverse activity in your Flipboard notifications panel, now you’ll be able to follow and interact with people directly from this experience, making it easier to build connections. For example, if someone follows your profile in the fediverse, you can follow them back from Flipboard — it’s all interconnected.
These features are only available via the latest versions of Flipboard’s iOS and Android apps. And if you’re not federated on Flipboard but all this news is making you wish you were, you can request to federate your account here.
We hope you find new people to follow and inspiring content to explore. Also, be sure to follow The News Desk and The Politics Desk (if you aren’t already) for curated stories from Flipboard’s editors.
Thanks for keeping up with all the Flipboard and fediverse news through our blog. You can download the Flipboard app in the App Store and Google Play Store for free. Personalize it for the stories you’re interested in and curate your favorite articles, videos and podcasts into your own Flipboard Magazines.
✏️ I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The consumer Infinite Scroll Web leaves us feeling empty.
Too few of us participate in the Read Write Web, whether with personal sites or Wikipedia.
A week ago when we wrapped up #IndieWebCamp Portland and I was reading Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks@indieweb.social) live-tooting of the demos¹, I noticed a few errors, typos or miscaptures, and pointed them out in-person.
Kevin was able to quickly edit his toots and update them for anyone reading, thanks to #Mastodon’s post editing feature and its support of #ActivityPub Updates. But this shouldn’t require being in the same room, whether IRL or chat.
We should be able to suggest edits to each other’s posts, as easily as we can reply and add a comment.
13 years ago I wrote²:
“The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web.”
Now I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The ↪ Reply button is fairly ubiquitous in modern post user interfaces (UIs).
Why not also a ✏️ Suggest Edit button, to craft a fix for a typo, grammar, or other minor error, and send the author for their review, and acceptance or rejection? Perhaps viewable only by the suggester and the author, to avoid "performative" suggested edits.
If the author’s posts provide revision histories, when a suggested edit is accepted, a post’s history could show the contributor of the edit.
Instead of asking Kevin in-person, what if I could have posted special "Suggested Edit" responses in reply to his toots, for which he would receive special notifications, and could choose to one-click accept and update (or further edit) his toots?
To enable such UIs and interactions across servers and implementations, we may need a new type of response³, perhaps with a special property (or more) to convey the edits being suggested.
There is documentation of this and similar use-cases, prior art / UIs, as well as some brainstorming on the #IndieWeb wiki:
https://indieweb.org/edit
Our interaction after IndieWebCamp has inspired me to take another look at how can we design and prototype solutions to this problem.
For now, if you host your blog and posts as static files on GitHub (or equivalent), you could add a button like this to your posts alongside Like, Reply, Repost buttons:
✏️ Suggest Edit
and link it to an edit URL for the static file for the post.
I don’t use GitHub static files myself for posts, but here’s an example of such an edit link for one of my projects:
This will start the process of creating a “pull request”, GitHub’s jargon⁴ for a “suggested edit”.
After completing GitHub’s ceremony of entering multiple text fields (summary & description), and multiple clicks to create said “pull request”, it’ll be sent to the author to review. Presuming the author likes the suggested edit, they can perform the other half of GitHub’s jargon-filled ceremonies to “Merge” or “Squash & Merge”, “Delete fork”, etc. to accept the edit.
It’s an awkward interaction⁵, however useful for at least prototyping a ✏️ Suggest Edit button on sites that store their posts as files in GitHub. Certainly worthy of experimenting with and gathering experience to design and build even better interactions.
We can start with the shortest path to getting something working, then learn, iterate, improve, repeat.
¹ /@kevinmarks%40indieweb.social/113025295600067213
² https://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb11
³ https://indieweb.org/responses
⁴ The phrase “pull request” was derived from the git command: “git request-pull” according to https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/nvahcp/comment/h12hzj7/
⁵ “edits” in GitHub require taking far more steps, and navigating far more jargon, then say, Wikipedia pages, which come down to “Edit” and “Save”. We should aspire to Wikipedia’s simplicity, not GitHub’s ceremonies.
✏️ I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The consumer Infinite Scroll Web leaves us feeling empty.
Too few of us participate in the Read Write Web, whether with personal sites or Wikipedia.
A week ago when we wrapped up #IndieWebCamp Portland and I was reading Kevin Marks ( @kevinmarks@indieweb.social) live-tooting of the demos¹, I noticed a few errors, typos or miscaptures, and pointed them out in-person.
Kevin was able to quickly edit his toots and update them for anyone reading, thanks to #Mastodon’s post editing feature and its support of #ActivityPub Updates. But this shouldn’t require being in the same room, whether IRL or chat.
We should be able to suggest edits to each other’s posts, as easily as we can reply and add a comment.
“The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web.”
Now I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The ↪ Reply button is fairly ubiquitous in modern post user interfaces (UIs).
Why not also a ✏️ Suggest Edit button, to craft a fix for a typo, grammar, or other minor error, and send the author for their review, and acceptance or rejection? Perhaps viewable only by the suggester and the author, to avoid "performative" suggested edits.
If the author’s posts provide revision histories, when a suggested edit is accepted, a post’s history could show the contributor of the edit.
Instead of asking Kevin in-person, what if I could have posted special "Suggested Edit" responses in reply to his toots, for which he would receive special notifications, and could choose to one-click accept and update (or further edit) his toots?
To enable such UIs and interactions across servers and implementations, we may need a new type of response³, perhaps with a special property (or more) to convey the edits being suggested.
There is documentation of this and similar use-cases, prior art / UIs, as well as some brainstorming on the #IndieWeb wiki: * https://indieweb.org/edit
Our interaction after IndieWebCamp has inspired me to take another look at how can we design and prototype solutions to this problem.
For now, if you host your blog and posts as static files on GitHub (or equivalent), you could add a button like this to your posts alongside Like, Reply, Repost buttons:
✏️ Suggest Edit
and link it to an edit URL for the static file for the post.
I don’t use GitHub static files myself for posts, but here’s an example of such an edit link for one of my projects:
This will start the process of creating a “pull request”, GitHub’s jargon⁴ for a “suggested edit”.
After completing GitHub’s ceremony of entering multiple text fields (summary & description), and multiple clicks to create said “pull request”, it’ll be sent to the author to review. Presuming the author likes the suggested edit, they can perform the other half of GitHub’s jargon-filled ceremonies to “Merge” or “Squash & Merge”, “Delete fork”, etc. to accept the edit.
It’s an awkward interaction⁵, however useful for at least prototyping a ✏️ Suggest Edit button on sites that store their posts as files in GitHub. Certainly worthy of experimenting with and gathering experience to design and build even better interactions.
We can start with the shortest path to getting something working, then learn, iterate, improve, repeat.
Twenty years ago this past February, Kevin Marks and I introduced #microformats in a conference presentation.
Full post: https://tantek.com/2024/044/t1/twenty-years-microformats
Aside: This is an even shorter summary of that post from ~200 days ago, which #Mastodon readers never got due to a Mastodon #federation bug (details in https://tantek.com/t5Yo1).
Since early 2023, here are the top three updates & interesting developments in microformats:
Growing rel=me adoption for distributed verification (✅ in Mastodon etc.)
Wikipedia, Threads, omg.lol
Proposal to merge #microformats2 h-review into h-entry, since in practice (e.g. on #indieweb) reviews are just entries with a bit more.
Aside: This is an even shorter summary of that post from ~200 days ago, which #Mastodon readers never got due to a Mastodon #federation bug (details in https://tantek.com/t5Yo1).
Since early 2023, here are the top three updates & interesting developments in microformats:
1. Growing rel=me adoption for distributed verification (✅ in Mastodon etc.) * Wikipedia, Threads, omg.lol 2. Proposal to merge #microformats2 h-review into h-entry, since in practice (e.g. on #indieweb) reviews are just entries with a bit more. 3. #metaformats adoptions, implementations, iteration
Das Fediverse tut sich schwer, das volle Potential der verschiedenen Activity-Objects auszunutzen, hauptsächlich aus Angst, sie falsch oder schlecht darzustellen und deshalb teilen die meisten großen Netzwerke leider nur Notes.<p>Dabei könnte es so einfach sein!</p><p><a href="https://social.wedistribute.org/users/deadsuperhero">@<span>deadsuperhero</span></a> schreibt auf seinem Blog, dass er eigentlich gerne Articles veröffentlichen will, aber (hauptsächlich) durch Mastodon zu Note gezwungen wird, wenn er sicher gehen will, dass der Text […]</p>
Das Fediverse tut sich schwer, das volle Potential der verschiedenen Activity-Objects auszunutzen, hauptsächlich aus Angst, sie falsch oder schlecht darzustellen und deshalb teilen die meisten großen Netzwerke leider nur Notes.
Dabei könnte es so einfach sein!
@deadsuperhero schreibt auf seinem Blog, dass er eigentlich gerne Articles veröffentlichen will, aber (hauptsächlich) durch Mastodon zu Note gezwungen wird, wenn er sicher gehen will, dass der Text vollständig dargestellt wird.
Here’s the problem, though: the biggest player in the space, Mastodon, does a poor job of supporting Article. Instead, every post Mastodon uses is instead a Note. From a semantic point of view, it might not seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two: both are effectively texts posts that can contain some formatting markup, both can hold an arbitrary amount of characters, and both can effectively be used to represent a full article.
Ironischerweise zeigt Mastodon eine föderierte Note vollständig an, auch wenn der Text weit über die eigentlich erlaubten 500 Zeichen hinaus geht, bei einem Article wird statt dessen aber nur die kurze summary benutzt.
Seine Idee: Ein Content-Fallback Mechanismus!
Das heißt jede Aktivität, egal von welchem Typ, liefert zusätzlich zu dem spezifischen Objekt, eine standardisierte Note (content-fallback):
Ich verstehe das Problem und finde die Idee generell nicht schlecht, aber eigentlich bietet ActivityPub alles Nötige schon von Haus aus! ActivityPub oder besser ActivityStreams ist so aufgebaut, dass alle Objekte von einem Art Base-Object abgeleitet werden. Das heißt Article, Note, Event oder Place, haben ein gleiches Minimal-Set an Attributen:
Und auch wenn beispielsweise Place oder Event einige spezifische Eigenschaften haben, die nicht jede Plattform „kennt“ und „versteht“, sollte es immer möglich sein, die Beschreibung (content oder summary) und den Titel (name) anzuzeigen.
Das Prinzip ist ähnlich wie, wenn nicht sogar inspiriert durch, schema.org/Thing. Auch hier basieren alle Objekte letztendlich auf einem Thing und trotz der wesentlich größeren Anzahl1 an Objekten und Attributen, können Suchmaschinen sich immer sicher sein, dass es zumindest einen name, eine description und eine url zum Anzeigen gibt.
Bevor wir über also über ein `content-fallback` nachdenken, sollten wir (meiner Meinung nach) erst einmal dafür sorgen, dass die vorhanden Möglichkeiten richtig genutzt werden.
The vocabulary currently consists of 806 Types, 1474 Properties 14 Datatypes, 90 Enumerations and 480 Enumeration members. – https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html↩︎
Island Networks aka. "Archipelagos": consentual, cooperative, opt-in social networks; an alternative, or a companion to the fediverse
Note: The Island One Network or "ION" is simply the first of what will be many island networks ("archipelagos"), the intent of the "One" network is to provide a proof of concept and "anchor network" that can provide a sort of index of other available islands, and will eventually spin off into launching other networks.
Quick breakdown: What is an Island network?
An island network model is an opt-in (allowlist or "limited federation") network; contrasted to the current fediverse, which is overwhelmingly an opt-out (denylist) model.
In an island network model, no one controls "the network" because an island network (or "archipelago") is simply a conceptual term for a collaborative block of servers who mutually allowlist each other, rather than relying on blocklists, and agree to abide by at least a core set of common standards.
You can learn more about island networks here which explains things in more detail: That page also links to how to create an island and/or a network. It also explains how you can host your own island for ~$8 or less per month (depending on your hosting provider).
What's an Island?
Islands are fedi servers with a smaller population (recommended 50 or less per island), democratized by being cheap to host ($8/mo or less, depending on hosting provider, easily covered by donations), and configured in allowlist mode (or "limited federation"), with open signups disabled (reviewed signups are fine, or invite-only links), creating a much less porous network. By contrast, mastodon.social is a Continent, and uses denylists, not allowlists, like most fedi servers.
Continents makes it very hard to enforce norms or expectations of behavior due to their style of federation. I don't have to really explain this very much, as this is the water you're swimming in now. It's how you're reading this post.
Island networks themselves have rules, and the rules are "whatever that island network says they are" and by asking to join the network, you agree to follow those rules and help enforce them, along with allowlisting the islands in the network, as they will be allowlisting you back in return.
The best part of all of this is that we don't have to write new code for this. We don't have to wait for any particular dev timetable, this is available now.
This uses all the same existing fediverse software. Your apps will still work (and most support the ability to toggle between multiple accounts.) There can be Mastodon islands, GoToSocial islands (my preference), Akkoma, Catodon, Pixelfed islands, all strung together into a larger archipelago! The only requirements for an island is that the server software has to support allowlist mode, rather than denylist (this is also known by Mastodon as "Limited Federation").
Are there any existing island networks or archipelagos?
Yes, the Island One Network or ION.
Currently, there are now three GoToSocial servers forming the basis of the new ION closed federation network, although the allowlist will only grow over time:
Note about "closed federation": A closed federation island network is unreachable via the wider fediverse, and only federates with other islands on its allowlist. (Open federation networks that allowlist continents can exist, but someone else will have to build that one.)
Signups are open for all three above servers, though space is limited. I'm looking for a couple admins, too, to basically "take over" Isla Dos and Isla Tres as admins and help govern the network. Note that every admin and every moderator have a governing role (and a vote) in a network.
I'm on the 'Uno' server (@oliphant@uno.1sland.social) as an admin as a means of testing the network via ION.
I would like to prioritize slots for BIPOC willing to join, and invite friends, including those who might have been run off of Mastodon in the past. This is a closed network, meaning it only federates with other islands and does not connect to the rest of the fediverse.
There is no account migration, you create a new account to join an island network. Your island user, as part of your associated island server, may encompass multiple networks.
I encourage you to create your own island, your own networks, and/or join mine.
Edit: If you would like to join this public group for discussion of news and pro-Harris organizing info:
1. Click on the @kamalaharrisforpresidentnews link. 2. Follow the group. 3. Wait to be approved. (May take some time. You will get a follow back notification and it will change to Mutual) 4. Then any post you @ mention the @kamalaharrisforpresidentnews will post to the group.
Hey #Mastodon folks -- While @heidilifeldman's #MastodonForHarris fundraising campaign continues to do amazing numbers, consider also donating some money to the team that builds Mastodon. Every bit helps go towards building a social web for everyone.
There must be some tech reporters out there who would be eager to write a story about @heidilifeldman's #MastodonForHarris campaign. Over $150K has now been raised. It's still going strong. On its way to raising $200K.
![[REDACTED]™, Donor Hater](https://media.beige.party/accounts/avatars/110/073/272/009/505/518/original/e6a994af2d1382b9.gif "[REDACTED]™, Donor Hater")
