this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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Check in on the latest developments and happenings within the Fediverse, a federated communication network that spans many different forms, and communicates over the ActivityPub protocol.

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Thinking about Fediverse Wikis (forum.wedistribute.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

This is just a soft inquiry for now, but I wanted to open up a discussion about public-facing documentation for the Fediverse: whether it's beneficial to have, what form it should take, and to what degree thorough historical and technical information is needed for preservation and reference.

I've been kind of unhappy with where various Fediverse information projects lie currently, such as the Join the Fediverse wiki. To me, there are a few problems with existing efforts:

  • Inherent Bias - Public resources taking a particular biased stance regarding things like competing technologies, what community values should be defined by, or who gets to be counted as part of the Fediverse based on a wide range of assumptions.
  • Lack of Organization / Quality Control - Generally, existing community efforts do not pass muster for technical documentation or cultural reference, and instead suffer from poorly-written explanation of what a given platform "is like".
  • Lack of Resources (People / Information / Etc) - Could probably fall into the previous category, but compounds problems by generally leading to even higher levels of inconsistency / abandonment.

The thing is, I'm of the belief (maybe delusion) that the wider community would benefit from a dedicated wiki detailing project history, cultural developments, technical insights, and functionally unique spaces within the network. It doesn't necessarily have to be a "here's how to do ActivityPub" guide for developers, or a "here's all the platforms and what they are" dictionary for end users, but I think it might be a useful resource for pointing a lot of different people in the right direction.

Two potential paths

The question boils down to this: hosting a wiki is easy. Cultivating and maintaining one is hard. We (We Distribute) might be in a position to do one of two things:

  1. Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
  2. Launch our own initiative under the We Distribute umbrella.

I think either one is an initiative worth taking to, but each option has their various benefits and drawbacks. It would be interesting to get insight from the wider community on whether this kind of thing is even wanted or needed, and if so, whether we should spearhead it, or if we should try to improve something that already exists (even if it's bad).

I would love to hear some thoughts from anybody who's interested on the subject.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ah it sounds like youre a maintainer or contributor on Hubzilla, didnt know that. In fact I am currently working on OAuth-based SSO for Ibis. And making it federate with Hubzilla wikis would definitely be good. For now Ibis doesnt federate with any other Fediverse platforms and has some compatibility problems. In the near future I will make a major rewrite of the federation logic to get that working properly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago

@nutomic I mostly work on themes and addons for Hubzilla via Federated Works, but I am also the President of the Hubzilla Association. Mario, Harold, and others maintain the core code. We have a number of initiatives going on right now, such as rewriting the documentation, refactoring the codebase, upgrading the interface, and adding functionality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

@[email protected]

I do not believe that Open Web Auth complies with the OAuth 2 specification. However, there is an FEP for OWA

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/61cf/fep-61cf.md