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Switzerland remove ist mastodon server

Switzerland remove ist mastodon server

The Swiss confederation closes its Mastodon instance a fediverse server for its official communication. social.admin.ch.  Reason not enough followers.

The Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration since September 2023. The pilot project, which was limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.

As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether previously unused platforms are eligible.

In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.

Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.

Too few active users

On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.

On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.

The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

 

Source

How to add your Hubzilla channel to Fediverse.info

How to add your Hubzilla channel to Fediverse.info

If you want to add your Hubzilla channel to the project-independent Fediverse People Directory at Fediverse.info, but you’re struggling to get it submitted, here is a how-to which worked at least for me.

Step 0: Obviously, you have to have PubCrawl activated. Being on Fediverse.info is kind of senseless without PubCrawl because it’s mostly for a Mastodon audience. If you don’t want to have PubCrawl on, stop right here and rely on Hubzilla’s own directories instead.

Step 1: Prepare your profile. If you’ve got multiple profiles, prepare your default profile. Edit it. Open the « Miscellaneous » tab.

There you have to edit the « About me » field. It’s the equivalent of the self-description on Mastodon, so it’ll be your Fediverse.info profile text. Describe yourself there.

At the bottom, add hashtags. Fediverse.info reads hashtags, but since it’s built against Mastodon, it can’t read Hubzilla’s keyword field. It can only read hashtags from the « About me » field.

Most importantly: Add the hashtag #fedi22. Fediverse.info won’t add your channel without it.

Step 2: Let the changes settle. Don’t advance to the next step until at least 15 minutes later. Maybe do something else in the meantime. But don’t forget what you were doing here.

Step 3: Go to the Fediverse.info directory page (see the link at the top).. Click on « Add Account ». Go on and confirm that you’ve added #fedi22 to your profile. If you haven’t, go back to step 1 and 2 and come back to step 3 later.

Step 4: Add your full channel URL. Only this works. Your Webfinger ID (kris@hub.libranet.de) does not, neither does your profile URL.

Step 5: Click Proceed.

You should get a message that includes the hashtags discovered in the « About me » field except for #fedi22. This means your channel has been added.

This method might also work with (streams), only that Fediverse.info doesn’t know (streams), and most (streams) instances don’t identify as « Streams » anyway.

metric time
Metric time or decimal time

Metric time or decimal time

Metric Time

With metric time the day is broken into 10 hours.

A metric hour is broken into 100 minutes.

A metric minute is broken into 100 seconds.

What makes metric time so cool is that would make all the mental math we have to do when adding and subtracting time so much easier—especially when it comes to different timezones. Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24.

In fact metric time could be decimal time

There is no AM or PM with metric time. Just 10 hours in the day. To get a good night sleep (8 standard hours) you’d sleep for 3.33 metric hours. If you go to bed at 9:50 metric time (about 10:45pm in standard time), wanting to get a good night sleep, you’d wake up at 2:75 metric time (roughly 6:45am standard time). Remember, a half hour in metric time is 50 minutes, and a full hour is 100 minutes. One metric minute before « midnight » (10:00 on the metric clock) would be 9:99 in metric time.

Time is Money

The logic you use to tell time with metric time is very similar to how you think about money (assuming US Dollars). One metric hour is like a 100-dollar bill. One metric minute is a 1 dollar bill. And each metric second is a penny. Each day (10 metric hours), has 1,000 minutes, and 100,000 seconds. It’s an interesting way to think about the time we get to spend each day.

Nomadic identity

Nomadic identity

Hubzilla introduced the nomatic identity. That means that your identity is not linked with the address of the server. You can move from server to server or have clone. You can use a server or an other one easily.

Streams has the nomadic identity but I tryed to import my hubzilla channel and it does not work. It is like Streams and Hubzilla is not compatible concerning nomadic identity. Of course hubzilla account can talk with streams account.

we distribute
we distribute a blog about Fediverse

we distribute a blog about Fediverse

 

 

We distribute is a blog about Fediverse.

Sean Tilley has been a part of the federated social web for over 15+ years, starting with his experiences with Identi.ca back in 2008. Sean was involved with the Diaspora project as a Community Manager from 2011 to 2013, and helped the project move to a self-governed model. Since then, Sean has continued to study, discuss, and document the evolution of the space and the new platforms that have risen within it.

 

If you have a fediverse account just add  @news

Encrypted Messaging Apps Compared

Encrypted Messaging Apps Compared

We have so many chat tools today. Maybe too many and they are not opent to each other. This video compare the most of them in angle of privacy and technical aspect. This video does not talk from the perspective of use. How easy it is to register and or to use and or how popular it is. But I recommend to see because we it is easy to understand and we can learn many things. If you use the best tool but your contact doesn’t have it it is  useless.

I even know Wickr and session chat messager.

 

Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russia

Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russia

Censoship is not neutral. What is good what is bad  is subjective but Meta change radicaly its rules because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

« As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians, » a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

Such information is not believable  but it comes from the serious reuter agency.

Read Reuter message

It is really time to stop using facebook and close account there. It is time to start using alternative for neutral plateform like Fediverse alternative. We can disagree the russian invasion we can support Ukraine but pushing people for violence against specific people and civilians is not acceptable.

Many russian people do not agree with the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine.

 

 

Hubzilla
Hubzilla 7 is released

Hubzilla 7 is released

Hubzilla is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.

The version number 7 is out with new features and many bugs fixed

Hubzilla 7.0 is addressing one of the most important features of Hubzilla – permissions. By refactoring the way we set permissions we managed to simplify the workflow to do so and at the same time provide more flexibility while making it easier to organize.

Channel roles have been simplified. There are now 4 possible selections: public, personal, community forum and custom. Personal is the default.

Individual contact permissions have been deprecated in favor of contact roles which are now a requirement for every contact.

Contact roles have one default preset which is defined by the channel role. Custom contact roles can be created as desired. Any contact role can be set to be the default for new connections in the contact roles app.

Privacy settings have been moved to a separate settings sub module. Settings for the online status visibility and entries in the directory and suggestions pages have been moved to the profile.

Advanced configurations are available in the privacy settings if the custom channel role is selected. They have received an initial warning and some entries which are likely to be misunderstood have got advising help texts.

Privacy groups can be managed from the Privacy group app if installed. The settings for the default privacy group for new content and the default privacy group for new contacts have been moved there.

Guest access has been refactored to allow new guests to be added to privacy groups. Quick access links to private resources have been added to the lock icon dropdown for convenience.

Other notable changes
– Improved UI for changing the profile photo
– Improved rendering of polls
– Fixed polls for forum channels
– Improved performance when deleting a contact
– Remove deprecated legacy mail addon
– Scope support and improvements for the socialauth addon
– Various bug fixes

Breaking changes
– The legacy mail addon has been removed. This means that the data will not be accessible anymore from the UI. The data will be removed from the database in the next release (7.2). At this point the legacy mail data will be lost.
– Forum channels must be assigned the « community forum » channel role in the channel settings. Otherwise the channel will not act as a forum anymore. If you require the custom channel role, this setting can be found in the advanced configuration of the privacy settings.
– Profile vcard was dysfunctional and has been removed from the UI. It might be revived at a later point.

A big THANK YOU! to all contributors and everybody who is supporting Hubzilla. Special thanks to @NGI Zero open source funding for supporting this work.

How to Upgrade

1. create a backup
2. execute util/udall from the terminal
3. select a new channel role for your channel (optional*)
4. review your privacy settings (optional*)
5. assign your contacts a contact role (optional*)

* Optional because your old privacy settings will be still in tact until you decide to change them.

Get the Code

Source code: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/
Install instructions: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/-/blob/master/install/INSTALL.txt

Hubzilla is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.

https://hubzilla.org

 

Nomad-ActivityPub
ActivityPub will include nomadic identity

ActivityPub will include nomadic identity

I was reading a comment from Mike Macgirvin…

Zot is gone and Zot6 along with it. Their successor, the Nomad protocol (which was derived originally from Zot10), is considered experimental and transient (hence the name) and is not intended to be implemented by other projects. Most of the functionality once provided by Zot has moved or is moving to ActivityPub. Nomad will remain until this migration is complete and ActivityPub has evolved to a point that Nomad is made redundant. Then it will wander off in the desert and die.

How do you understand this?

First of all I must explain what is nomadic identity. Mike Macgirvin the creator of the protocol ZOT had a vision long long time ago. He realised that all our identity was catched by a domaine name. On the Fediverse your identity is similar than email. It looks like user@domain. It is a weakness.

  • The server can be down
  • Your account can be censored or deleted
  • The administrator can stop maintaining the instance.

Nomadic identity let you move your account to an other instance or clone it. Your identity is not your user@domain but is hidden in a unique key. Then if you move user@domain2 would be ok and all your contacts would be still yours.

He apply this idea on Hubzilla then on zap, Mistpark and other clones.

But today if you have an account on Mastodon for example. You loose all your contacts. You can follow them but they have to accept you again,

As far as I understand this remark, he is planing to include the nomadic concept in ActivityPub. That means that all plateformes of ActivityPub could be nomadic.

Just imagine you create an account on Mastodon then you clone it on Pleroma and you can use both the same way you use mail from your phone or your desktop or webmail.

This concept is not easy to understand untill we try it. Today you can try it on Hubzilla or Zap.

Friendica
How to install Friendica with Yunohost

How to install Friendica with Yunohost

Friendica is a wonderfull and powerfull social network you can install easily yourself with just few lines of commands.

This is not a detail way how to do it. But just a missing part of the official documentation.

You have a server with yunohost. If you don’t know how to install yunohost go the official documentation of yunohost. But I can give you how to do it in 2 lines

  1. Install Debian
  2. Connect with ssh to your debian server and type
curl https://install.yunohost.org | bash

Prepare a domain or subdomain for your friendica

Admin > Domain > Add follow the instruction …

Then Admin > Application > Add

Just let yunohost working…. Have a tea…

The documentation explain « For admin rights: When installation is complete, you will need to visit your new hub’s page and login with the admin account username which was entered at the time of installation process. You should then be able to create your first channel and have the admin rights for the hub. »

Now I will translate this misterious sentense.

You must know the email of yunohost admin and have acces on it. I did a redirection because I don’t need yunohost email.

Then create and account with this email (admin of yunohost). You will receive by mail a password. Then you can access to you friendica and have administration.

Sometimes it is important to close registration.

More information about Friendica

Using Yunohost save you time. It configure for you all the server and the domain. You can use Friendica for you family, your group or for yourself. You will be able to communicate with the whole Fediverse, with Twitter and many other plateforme.

If this tutorial helps you just tell it on the comment. By the way you can add this blog in your contact if you already have a fediverse account (Pleroma, Mastodon, Hubzilla etc…) Just add kris@kris.aga.ovh and you will be allowed to comment directly from your fediverse account.

Have fun

2021-10-23

Important additional information : Friendica does not work with this kind of installation. I didn’t investigate more why and how to fix it. I already installed Friendica with the classic installation and it works well. But with Yunohost It simply does not work. I create 2 account and impossible to add an account from the same instance.

If you installed Friendica with Yunohost do you have the same problem?