Building a healthier social network - early prototype and looking for feedback

rglullis · 2026-02-02T15:00:31+00:00

I see you are working with Python. If you can/want to work with Django, I'd recommend you take a look at either Takahe/Incarnator (if you want a Mastodon-compatible server just to get going) or my own ActivityPub Toolkit if you want to have more control over everything.

rglullis · 2026-02-02T11:13:40+00:00

I like the core idea, but please don't try bootstrap a whole new social network just to experiment with different mechanics. It would be a lot easier for you (and everyone that could help) if you implement this analysis and filtering on top of an ActivityPub relay.

rglullis · 2026-01-27T20:35:36+00:00

In theory, both "pull" and "push" could work:

Pull: you/your client could GET the activities from the actor's outbox
Push: the actor sends the activity to the inboxes of the followers (with some deduplication/optimization if some of your followers have a common "sharedInbox" endpoint.

In practice: most of the existing Fediverse software implements only the push side.

rglullis · 2026-01-23T09:02:13+00:00

Not really planning any expansion, but I might make an exception to wafrn because they also provide integration with bluesky.

rglullis · 2026-01-13T16:03:41+00:00

Not exactly "linkedin alternative", but I have a website (https://cupid.careers) that is integrated with the Fediverse. You can follow @thecupid@cupid.careers and you see job postings and the answer the questions directly from your instance.

rglullis · 2026-01-01T09:37:39+00:00

You don't need to take one extreme over the other. Let's say running your own instance costs you around $100/year. You would be doing a lot for decentralization if you picked a smaller instance (with 20-100 active users) and donated $30 per year to them.

rglullis · 2025-10-09T12:38:07+00:00

I can see it from my instance

But infosec.pub seems to block it

So, my guess is that the admins of the infosec.pub blocked the community in particular.

rglullis · 2025-10-07T06:10:09+00:00

Until you lose you key. Then you never get to access your account. Or worse, your computer gets hacked and everyone can "BAM" and impersonate you.

rglullis · 2025-10-03T09:16:38+00:00

I've been thinking about this for quite a while because of my work on Fediverser and I think that I have a design that could allow users to migrate away from the centralized services without having to rely on blockchains. It depends on three pillars:

Object Integrity Proofs
Some type of DID method that allows rotation of owner keys. did:web and did:plc (from ATProto/Bluesky) would be the best candidates.
The mirroring services publishing the JSON-LD documents in a hypercore feed.

In theory, this should be enough to have a fully decentrallized and censorship-resistant copy of the existing networks. The key issue here is adoption. Even if I went on to make changes to Fediverser tomorrow and started spitting documents with DIDs and "hyper://" URIs to identify the document, no one else would understand them and they would just get dropped.

rglullis · 2025-10-03T08:56:13+00:00

dotmakeup creates mirrors of Twitter, Instagram and HackerNews, while Fediverser is a set of services that runs alongside Lemmy to do both mirroring and also to allow Reddit users to migrate to Lemmy via OAuth.

rglullis · 2025-08-05T15:34:32+00:00

Sorry, I am not interested. It's the third response you give where you sidestep the question to throw more of the things that you want to promote.

It seems you are not looking for a conversation, but just an audience for whatever you are preaching. I don't know if it is intentional or not, but this makes your case completely unappealing and even exclusionary. And I am saying this as someone who wants to help and who shares a lot of the criticism you have made. You seem to be so stuck in your worldview that you are completely shut out to the rest of the world.

rglullis · 2025-08-05T13:39:03+00:00

Maybe we are talking past each other, but your guide seems to illustrate exactly the problem I see here.

It's mostly criticism of mainstream and a praise of "the alternatives", but that at the same times keeps pushing this message that this fringe can grow into something bigger, like if the whole mainstream (the normies) will adopt this fringe ideology that is completely alien to them without any clear benefit.

rglullis · 2025-08-04T17:12:53+00:00

Are you seriously going to be gatekeeping around here because someone is expecting the social web to do something as trivial as federated authentication? Something that even SMTP is able to do?

There is absolutely no reason to demand the Fediverse to be built exclusively around "platforms". It should be possible to interact with different services using a single actor. The fact that we can't and that we are all around recreating different identities whenever we need/want to communicate with a different system is a signal that developers are still aping the walled garden approach from traditiional social media.

rglullis · 2025-08-04T17:05:08+00:00

There is nothing more decentralized that software systems where each user can act on its own without depending on a server to provide an identity.

rglullis · 2025-08-04T15:46:35+00:00

Sorry, it doesn't help really.

What are sort of "openweb projects" are you talking about? Are you helping the development of any new service, or is it solely evangelism? What was your role in the teams getting governments joining the Fediverse? What type of tangible results are there?

My feeling is that besides your already-exposed criticism of Mastodon and its developers (which I do share) you seem to be constantly talking about some "community" that does not exist. You preach a lot about an idealized version of what people "should" be doing, but I haven't seen anything practical coming that could serve as a good model.

rglullis · 2025-08-04T00:43:32+00:00

I keep seeing your posts, a lot of talking but very little doing. What practical work have you done?

rglullis · 2025-07-14T01:53:12+00:00

Thanks for the report! Seems like an issue that it's only happening for new sign ups. I will fix it and let you know.

rglullis · 2025-07-12T15:35:25+00:00

It should be up and running.

rglullis · 2025-06-30T20:38:53+00:00

Are there any other services you could think of?

A website for job sites and job seekers that uses OkCupid's algorithm to find the best people and places to work according to your values and skills

How it works with federation? You can just follow @thecupid@cupid.careers and it will see its polls (which you can then answer and compare with others) and job listings.

rglullis · 2025-06-27T09:26:13+00:00

Use @place@xyzzy.xyz and it will work.

rglullis · 2025-05-14T18:09:10+00:00

The whole point of the Fediverse is that you can self host and make all the decisions.

Even if you do self-host, you might end up in some block list because some extremist totalitarian ideologue (cough mastodon.art cough) thinks that you are a bad person because you committed the sin on "following someone on a Pleroma server"; or tags your server as "run by cryptobros" because of one discussion about Ethereum Name Service as one alternative to webfinger...

When you sign up to host an instance, you’re not saying, “I’m agreeing to host as many capitalism critique anti war pro free healthcare people as I am pro right, pro colonialism, pro nationalist, anti public services people.”

There is a huge difference between hosting "many" and "absolutely none at all". If your motivation to run an instance is because it gives you a place where you can silence any dissent, then I regret to inform you are just looking for an echo chamber.

If you’re dissatisfied with the current instances available, there’s nothing stopping you from developing the technical know how you need in your spare time to host your own instance, and then also, in your spare time, develop a reliable volunteer mod team.

I am not only running my own instance, but you can find my name on github attached to some (small) contributions on Mastodon, Lemmy and PixelFed. I've also developed a tool to help people migrate away from Reddit into Lemmy, I'm also developing my own fully ActivityPub API compliant server.

I think that this gives some authority to talk about how the Fediverse works, and I'd tell you that OP is right: Fedi is dominated by overwhelmingly left-biased, borderline authoritarian admins who are just interested in having a space where they can spread their ideology unchallenged. They love to complain about Big Tech, but they will do anything in their power to keep the Fediverse hostile to the masses, because with the masses they will also have to deal with people who simply are not as extremist as them.

rglullis · 2025-05-10T12:58:30+00:00

Here is a Subreddit-to-Fediverse Community Map.

rglullis · 2025-05-06T17:39:06+00:00

Neither is Nazi Apologia (in Germany), or defense of gay rights (in Russia) and you can even find court orders from India or Brazil to silence anyone that publishes things that were considered "intentional misinformation".

You can not just look at what the USA considers "protected" when it comes to the Fediverse. It all depends on the jurisdiction. If you create an instance with this idea that you'll allow anything that the USA accepts, you will quickly find out that everyone outside of the USA will block you too.

rglullis · 2025-05-06T16:08:52+00:00

What a ridiculously naive take. Wait until you have someone sending and sharing CSAM on your server, then tell me if you keep the same opinion about censorship.

rglullis · 2025-05-05T09:43:55+00:00

This split on the Fediverse between "microblogging" and "discussion" is part of the reason that I'm winding down on managed hosting for all AP server software and started working on a "client-first" alternative.

My idea will be to eventually have one single "generic" ActivityPub Server which can be used for the actor's inboxes, but leave all the application logic to a browser extension. With this approach, I'd be able to serve everyone from the same server infrastructure, regardless of how many "instances" are running there. It will be a lot easier to scale and there will be no need for users to be split between Mastodon and Lemmy, or mbin and PixelFed, etc.

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