
Pleroma 2.0: a free, federated social networking server built on open protocols - zimpenfish
https://pleroma.social/blog/2020/03/08/releasing-pleroma-2-0-0/
======
Yolta
It saddens me that every time I see a fediverse-related post on HN, it gets
inundated by people who don't "get it" and that is to be expected: fediverse
is not Twitter and everybody gets Twitter. That change in mentality is not
easy.

Fun story: massive influx of users from India recently and the timelines got
flooded by posts indirectly asking: "what is the way to fame here? How do I
get followers?". Fediverse doesn't work like that. You just… talk with others.
There's no "you and your followers". There's "us".

Analogy: you are not in a metropole. You are in a village that is extremely
well connected to all other villages. You do not need to shout to be heard.

I'm on a FOSS-focused instance. We talk all kinds of stuff and FOSS is one of
them. I have my Home timeline where I follow all the people I want to hear
from (both my instance and all others). I have my Instance timeline where I'm
basically guaranteed to read interesting stuff I can reply to and meet new
people who also considered this instance to be their haven. And the Known
Fediverse timeline… Well, it's fun to browse but come on, imagine a timeline
of all tweets on Twitter: mostly useless.

Choosing the right instance also involves choosing the right moderators for
you. Mods can block other instances. If you don't like what the mods do,
change instance or start your own community. After all, it's not Twitter, the
people decide how content is moderated, not a for-profit company.

That's the fediverse for ya. Hope to see you there!

~~~
sneak
> _Mods can block other instances. If you don 't like what the mods do, change
> instance or start your own community._

Doing so costs you all of your followers. This is one of the main issues with
the culture of heavyhanded instance operator censorship: you can’t simply
switch like you would an email host with your own domain, because few/no AP
implementations support bring-your-own-domain virtual hosting.

This is like saying “well, if you don’t like that the mail admin simply
doesn’t let you email certain domains, just change your email address!”

~~~
klntsky
> Doing so costs you all of your followers

This is not true anymore. You can "transfer" your account to another instance,
and all the followers will not need to refollow.

~~~
lainsoykaf
This is sadly not quite correct. You can send out a 'Move' activity from your
old account, notifying other servers that you have moved. There's no guarantee
that they understand that activity, or, if they understand it, that they
actually follow the new account automatically.

~~~
vertex-four
In practice, nearly all your followers will be using fediverse software that
understands and supports Move{Actor} in a similar way to Mastodon. There's not
a massive amount of fediverse software - it's not like IndieWeb where everyone
does their own thing - and the microblogging-focused software largely
implements the same feature set.

~~~
kick
Most Mastodon instances currently running today don't support it.

~~~
cptskippy
It seems like virtual hosts would be reluctant to support it because it allows
clients to move away from them. Vendor lock-in and such...

~~~
kixiQu
Most people aren't getting paid for running their instances, and are doing it
for the kind of goodwill that is only amplified by enabling features.

------
kick
Pleroma is significantly more lightweight than Mastodon, is compatible with
both Twitter and Mastodon clients, and is one of the bigger (maybe the biggest
that isn't working on Elixir itself?) free software Elixir projects. Worth
giving a look if any of that interests you!

~~~
seemslegit
It still requires the user to install and admin a postgres instance which
already makes it a non-starter for 99% of the target audience, this design
choice is tragically stupid - the chance that an instance of pleroma will
reach a usage volume that can't be handled by sqlite and basic caching is not
on the horizon, if they ever reach this problem they could then develop a
version that works against an actual rdbms.

~~~
lainsoykaf
We do provide a step-by-step guide, which also involves installing postgres.
In general, I think installing Elixir and Erlang is the much scarier part for
most people, because few people have ever used them.

Sadly, we can't just use SQLite because we use Postgres-only features like
jsonb extensively.

~~~
seemslegit
Not suggesting that sqlite could be dropped-in as replacement but
[https://sqlite.org/json1.html](https://sqlite.org/json1.html)

------
seemslegit
Me hearing about the fediverse for the first time:

"Man this thing looks really promising, just think of the potential of a
social network unhindered by the dark machinations of the googtwitface !"

Me after ten minutes on the public feed of mastodon.social:

"So do the furries post for the sex workers or is it the other way around or
what ?"

~~~
stevenicr
I've been thinking about these kinds of things for some time and starting to
talk about it.

I think we need an open source set of 'bouncers / blockers' \- that people can
use, perhaps best as a chrome / ffx extension? That blocks content from
various portals or individual posts or posters that you may not want to see.

Different people want to censor different things, and some want to censor the
same things less and some more.. so by have an open source set of blocker bots
people can discussion the blocking lists.. people can pick and choose what
they see / not see..

That's on a basic beginning - I could see them also getting into 'unsubsbrcibe
to stuff from server A and mastadon B' can take it further..

Since cloudflare came out as censor friendly - I've given up hope the big
players will be all 'open info utopia' ever again. I think the best we can
hope for is to get individual blocking bots and open up the web more.
Otherwise we will have more censoring across the board and will succumb to
whichever lowest common denominator of whoever gets to be in charge and make
new rules.

This way some people can choose to filter sex workers and not furries and some
can choose to censor furries but not sex.. Of course I am sure many people
will choose some broad auto-block and stick with that, making their internet
more like fbook's daycare.. but having transparent options will certainly have
many people turning off the 'safesearch' and explore the whole world, or
larger parts of it.

You are right in that we may need more tools for individual users to take
control in this expanded universe.. but things like 'peter's ad block list'
kind of things can be more beneficial than depending on MostPopular Mastadon
Server being pushed to choose what to block for the masses and what to let
through and the whack-o-mole that tends to create.

If they are open and clone-able / editable - some might want peter-and-pauls-
block-more lists.. and some may like furfriendlyButnotPron lists.. and I hope
many more options for choose your own censor.. rather than having them chosen
for us as most have succumbed to.

My current random thoughts on the subject - hope others chime in to make it
better and more of a possibility instead of just napkin notes.

~~~
nirui
I was having my 2 cents thought on the topic as well, my conclusion is: A
shared blocking list (Or a _blockchain_ system, hehe) can only be used as the
last resort.

Systems like such already been developed, for example there is one for Twitter
made by third-party called "Twitter Block Chain"
([https://github.com/satsukitv/twitter-block-
chain](https://github.com/satsukitv/twitter-block-chain)).

Yes, it can block "unwanted" posters and bots when a correct list is given,
but it could also sometime block innocent accounts when somebody is been
mistakenly added to the list (Or that somebody just simply changed their
behavior for the better).

For such system to work, the maintainer of the list must be trustworthy, which
is the hardest part and almost always falls apart.

Add to the injury, it can also be very hard for others to detect mistakes
sneaked into the list, as the list may contains more than 10,000 items, makes
it impossible to be completely verified manually.

And what to do if a mistake is indeed discovered? Maintain an unblock list to
automatically request the user to unblock? Now user has to maintain their own
"Yes I manually blocked this guy" list to counter act the automatic one.

My suggestion is: Yes, you can use a shared block list if there is no other
way (The Twitter case). But since Mastadon is open sourced, maybe let's try
something else first while still can?

Please give this a little thought: Can a system be designed in such way that
makes it really hard for their user to _accidentally_ come across some
unwanted posts (without having to block the poster)?

~~~
endgame
Don't forget that blocklist admins can be jerks, too. If I run a blocklist
that gets popular, I could make people I don't like disappear without anyone
really noticing.

~~~
stevenicr
Good point! This is one reason why I a want a few portals with the bots and
showing discussions about them, easy option to fork / clone / change.

Would be nice to have something check for updated bots and discussions about
them and put a flag in the browser bar maybe every two weeks -

Some bots will get better over time - but some people who liked the old one
may not appreciate the changes and want to re-hatch the old one with a merged
list minus X and Y but leave Z.

------
kixiQu
Pleroma is mostly great except that you click follow and.... it doesn't work.
The devs are mysteriously dismissive of this issue despite it being reported
very, very consistently. I switched to running a ~single user Mastodon
instance despite Pleroma being otherwise perfect for my needs (IT'S SO MUCH
MORE RESOURCE-EFFICIENT). I was really hoping to see something about this
issue in the release notes.

~~~
nenolod
It does work, but AP follows are asynchronous so it may take a minute for the
relationship to update.

~~~
kixiQu
Nope, never started working. I asked kaniini; she suggested extending a
particular timeout config value. No values for this worked. I heard this a lot
from other people, though I'll acknowledge I shut down my instance a while ago
so maybe it's been fixed?

------
skrowl
I tried the federated social thing with Mastodon after Twitter started really
ramping up their censorship of conservative views.

A social justice warrior complained to the admin of my instance that I was
conservative and they banned me.

That was my first and last foray into the federated socials. You trade a big
corporate censor for a mom and pop censor, but none of them appear to actually
be "free" (as in speech)

~~~
cjslep
I'm sorry someone promised you the Fediverse as if it is "free speech heaven".
It isn't. Which is fine by me.

To be honest, I think your view of what "free speech" is, is a ridiculous
extreme. Go use FreeNet. If I don't seem compelling, I've put together an
essay to address this in more detail [0]

[0] [https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-
tool](https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool)

~~~
nenolod
As you are somebody who is responsible for stewarding the ActivityPub
specification, I am seriously disappointed by this dismissive attitude.

~~~
cjslep
> As you are somebody who is responsible for stewarding the ActivityPub
> specification

I am not associated with the W3C in any way, and had absolutely no hand in
creating ActivityPub. Chris Webber and many others deserve that credit. I
don't attend the SocialCG meetings either (which are open to all).

The most I can say is I've implemented a library implementation in Go (there
are other Go projects), and I voice my opinion in the community.

> I am seriously disappointed by this dismissive attitude.

Dismissive? My apologies, that's not what I am going for. I'm precisely
showing how certain folks' expectations in the free speech community were
unrealistic and showing a mature technology that precisely delivers what they
want.

Consider what ActivityPub is not: it is _not_ a way to physically get your
free-speech in byte form forcefully delivered to others on the network. That's
what multiple free-speech folks have repeatedly drawn the line at when I poked
and prodded what their disappointment stems from. Instead, to get this
technological capability, one needs to switch to blockchain or FreeNet
protocols as this is what they do. The former actually requires consensus
whereas the latter doesn't! ActivityPub as a technology does not guarantee any
of this.

I think free speech is important (I wrote a whole damn blog post about it, and
here I am writing more), and I think there are important conversations to be
had around it. But complaining about ActivityPub not being a censorship-proof
technology ("I got banned from _one_ instance for being too conservative") is
not a productive discussion to be had. There's better ones out there.

~~~
nenolod
As someone who is writing an implementation, you are responsible by default
for stewarding it.

~~~
cjslep
OK. Sorry for disappointing you.

------
TheJoYo
> Breaking: Removed 1.0+ deprecated configurations Pleroma.Upload, :strip_exif
> and :instance, :dedupe_media

What did these configuration flags become?

------
d3ntb3ev1l
Too bad we can’t name things simply with less Grandiosity and cleverness.

Just call it leaf, cheese, or poppy.

Cheese 2.0 that’s some killer tech

------
FalconSensei
It's interesting that I didn't find a single link on the post or main page to
join/try it. There's only a link to the Pleroma IRC channel.

A link to the "main" instance, or a list of instances to join would help.
Without that, I don't see the average person using it

------
grizzles
A screenshot / feature matrix would be a nice addition.

~~~
self
A screenshot isn't as useful as you'd think. You can very easily point a
third-party web frontend to it, like the ones at
[https://wedistribute.org/2019/04/your-guide-to-
alternative-f...](https://wedistribute.org/2019/04/your-guide-to-alternative-
frontends-for-mastodon-and-pleroma/)

~~~
hombre_fatal
Imo a screenshot is more useful than people think.

Developers think "well, you see, any number of arbitrary clients can load the
data and even impl their own UI features so a screenshot doesn't really make
sense because...".

But people mainly want to know what that even looks like at all. Especially
with how open-ended "social network" can be. That the screenshots just look
like Twitter answers some preliminary questions.

