[Flounder] Fwd: Federation

[Russell Coker]

LUV had a meeting tonight about Federation, in response I wrote the following 
message to the LUV list.  Some of it is relevant to this list.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Federation
Date: Tuesday, 5 April 2022, 22:23:44 AEST
From: Russell Coker <russell at coker.com.au>
To: luv-main at luv.asn.au

https://nzoss.nz/online-services

The New Zealand Open Source society runs some online services for Open Source 
type people, they specify New Zealanders but they gave me a Mastodon account 
and I think all LUV members would be welcome.  I won't rule out the 
possibility of running a LUV Mastodon server and Mastodon is specifically 
designed for account migration so we could change to some future time.  But 
NZOSS are doing a good job and I don't think I need to make more work for 
myself at this time.


Mastodon is the federated replacement for Twitter.  It supports ~500 character 
"Toots" by default and that can be increased by the site admin.  So a lot of 
what is done on Facebook can be done on Mastodon.  I know one man who was 
looking for an alternative to Facebook, I pointed him to Mastodon as part of 
the solution to his problem.  He decided that while Mastodon wasn't designed 
to do what Facebook does it can be made to do the things he really wanted to 
do so he didn't need anything else.  YMMV.

Here's my Mastodon address: @etbe at mastodon.nzoss.nz
Here's the web page for my Mastodon feed so you can read it without a Mastodon 
account: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@etbe

I currently use the Tusky Android client from the f-droid repository and the 
web interface on the desktop.  I have to find a suitable client for Librem5.
I haven't done much with Mastodon yet.  Toot me something worth replying to.  
;)


Matrix is the federated chat system that also does video chats, it's a 
replacement for Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, etc.

My Matrix address is: @etbe:luv.asn.au
The LUV room on Matrix is: #luv_chat:luv.asn.au
The Linux Australia IRC channel is bridged to Matrix: #linuxaus:matrix.org
This Matrix room is for representatives of different  LUGs:
#linuxaus-lugs:matrix.org
The Flounder room is: #flounder:luv.asn.au you can get answers to Linux 
questions there at most times of the day and night.

Anyone who wants a Matrix account can email me off-list with the preferred 
account name.  The LUV server is pretty much idle at the moment so we can do 
lots of other things.  I use the SchildiChat program on Android from the f-
droid repository for most of my Matrix stuff.  I haven't yet selected Debian 
Matrix clients for desktop and Librem5.

Matrix currently uses Jitsi for audio and video chat.  The LUV server uses the 
Perthchat Jitsi server.  This URL has our side of the configuration for Jitsi:
https://luv.asn.au/.well-known/matrix/client

The URL isn't normally for human reading, but it's plain text and it's meaning 
is obvious.


Most of the federated systems discussed tonight are things I don't have a 
personal interest in using.  My past experiements have indicated to me that 
unless I really push something it won't get much traction in LUV.  We had 
experiments with Diaspora and Mobilizon (which I didn't use) and they didn't 
take off.  The LUV Matrix server didn't get much use for the first 1.5 years 
(I set it up in 2020).  I think this is because there are several categories 
of potential users.  There are people who want to run their own server, people 
who want to use a large public server, and people who are interested in using 
a smaller server tailored to people they know.  A LUV server will get the 
third category of users and most of them aren't too unhappy with using 
Facebook etc if it basically works.


https://join-lemmy.org/

I think that the concept of Lemmy is good (I haven't tried using it).  It's 
designed as a Reddit or Slashdot replacement which means that it does part of 
what Facebook does.  Lemmy, Mastodon, and Matrix combined cover most of the 
scope of Facebook.  Facebook does lots of things NOT because those things are 
best done together (although there are some benefits to having the same system 
for multiple things) but to prevent competition.  Using separate services for 
the things you might use Facebook for is viable.  I'm thinking of setting up 
Lemmy as a LUV service to see how it goes.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/

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-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/