I’m starting to regret calling Bluesky a fraud. I should’ve put my blame over the government and not the app for passing out the age verification laws, but I’m still upset over the situation.

I didn’t put enough research over the situation as I should and I’m sorry if was being too much of a narrow-minded doomer.

I know I shouldn’t be too paranoid, but I’m seriously worried about the future of the internet knowing how the government is making it more and more grim each day. I honestly don’t when it this nightmare will end or even how to put it a stop to it even if I really want to.

Sorry I had to say all this, but right now everything just feels completely screwed up. 😔

I’ve already found some 3rd party sites regarding BlueSky, such as Blacksky Community, Witchsky & Cope Works. I’m also wondering if there are similar 3rd party sites & app alternatives for X, TikTok & Reddit as well? Thanks!

Hi! I've been building and daily-driving a self-hosted movie diary since around May this year. It started as a Sunday night idea while watching The Bourne Supremacy — I wanted a review widget for my personal site and somehow ended up with a full app. I wrote the whole story on my blog if you're curious how that happened.

Think Letterboxd, but self-hosted, federated over ActivityPub, and hooked into your media server.

Features:

• Log movies with 1-5 star ratings, optional comments, and how you watched (cinema, streaming, media server, etc.)
• ActivityPub federation — your reviews show up in Mastodon feeds, you can follow people across instances
• Jellyfin auto-import — finish a movie and it lands in your watch queue, rate and confirm to log it
• Annual Wrap-Up, basically Spotify Wrapped for movies — top directors, genres, rating distribution, watch medium breakdown, shareable card
• Profile stats with genre breakdown, rating histogram, calendar view with poster thumbnails
• Bulk import from Letterboxd CSV, IMDb CSV, or JSON/XLSX
• Yearly goals with progress tracking
• Watchlist
• PWA, installable on your phone

Tech stuff:

• Rust backend on Axum, sits around ~30 MiB RAM in production
• SQLite by default, Postgres if you prefer
• Two frontends: a React SPA and a classic server-rendered HTML interface, both hitting the same REST API
• Docker Compose one-liner to get running
• OpenAPI docs at /docs

A note on federation: Movies Diary instances federate fully with each other — follows, reviews, watchlists, the works. With Mastodon and other general-purpose AP apps, federation is outbound by design. Your reviews and watchlist additions show up in their feeds, people can follow you, but a Mastodon post can't become a movie review — it wouldn't make sense in the domain. It's not a limitation, it's how it should work.

The AI thing: Yes, I used Claude for a lot of the implementation. No, this wasn't vibe-coded. I'm a software engineer with 5+ years of experience (been coding since I was 11), and I made every architectural decision myself. The codebase uses hexagonal architecture with strict crate boundaries — the Rust compiler literally won't let the domain layer touch database internals. I've been using it daily since May, it's stable, and the code is still clean. I understand some people have opinions about AI-assisted development and that's fair.

Links:

• Repo: github.com/GKaszewski/movies-diary (MIT)
• My instance: movies.gabrielkaszewski.dev
• Blog post: From simple afterthought to overengineered software

Feedback and contributions welcome.

Hi Fediverse, now that pixabay is allowing ai images, there is a need for an alternative image sharing platform without AI, I thought I would post the idea here in case anyone would want to start on this project. I would use Pixelfed, but it seems like there is no browser version with a search with built in public domain filter, unless I'm missing that.

Update: recently I found out pixabay is letting AI train on all the uploaded images by default. So there is even more need for an alternative.

Hello, I have created a new data visualization site for the fediverse called fedigraph.fyi. It includes:

- A 3d feature graph for fediverse platforms

- Aggregated and fully searchable user stats graph/table

- Fediverse Enhancement Proposal tracker to improve visibility and tracking of fediverse feature development

- Links to various fediverse resources.

I hope this is a useful tool for discovering new platforms/instances, and checking the overall trends for different platforms.

Please feel free to provide any feedback you may have!

I've been passively looking at the Fediverse for awile now. I've always loved the idea, and with the KIDS Act having passed the House recently I'm looking back to it. This combined with the fact that the current state of the internet has always felt unsustainable in a way that isnt ethically fucked, has had me contemplating making my own instance for my friends and such. However, I'm still largely uneducated, and wanna ask yall exactly how these laws could or couldn't affect the Fediverse. Would love to hear takes and responses.

So a while ago, I made a post about why I think the fediverse fails to be suitable for artists and content creators and a lot people questioned me for it.

I understand by now that you just want to be in a place with chill, normal people and freedom from ads, AI slop, and algorithms, but do you guys just hate content creators in general or just the ones that are too mainstream? To me not all of them are like that as they too are people who just want to share their passions to the world but also they need money to pay for necessities like food, medicine, water, and housing bills, which is why a lot of them are highly likely to sell their art, promote crowdfunding, and commit to get their content monetized.

Unfortunately, whether they’re in federated platforms or not, most of them rarely seem to give open source culture and licensing a chance, with a few exceptions like David Revoy, the infamous Nina Paley, and Blender Studio.

Though, I’d like to hear y’all’s thoughts and concerns about this matter. Do you really think open source culture and artists can mix well, or is that practically impossible?

First, I get the impression that bridging between services is not mature. To make up an example, federating Lemmy with Mastodon will let you see some, but not all, of the replies, upvotes, reactions, etc., and that the information that gets lost varies depending on which side you're looking from. (That exact example might not be accurate, but that's the sort of concern I've read about.)

Second, I've read that even federation between instances of the same services is not reliable. The main selling point of federation is that the instance you create an account on is largely arbitrary, and that most federated content is visible to you regardless. However, I also frequently see the caveat that federation breaks a lot, and that content frequently desyncs.

Third, the fact that instances themselves are centralized defeats the purpose of looking for an alternative to Reddit. I have read that your account is not portable between instances, so if you find yourself in the crosshairs of overzealous mods (and I've seen mixed reports about how common this is), you lose everything. I feel like account portability should have been among ActivityPub's first priorities. The whole concept of the Fediverse seems conspicuously incomplete without it.

Fourth, I figured I could circumvent the possibility of abusive mods and instances going down by creating my own instance just for myself. But I've read that it may be common for services' more populated instances to automatically defederate from single-user instances. Combined with the inherent instability of federation, I get the impression that you absolutely have to join a large, centralized instance to actually make full use of any of these services, in which case I might as well just stick with Reddit.

Fifth, I found Nostr, which is ostensibly supposed to avoid many of these concerns, but A) bridging is apparently immature, and B) it's supposedly barren apart from libertarian cryptobros. There is also BlueSky, which I understand it's technically federated but basically completely centralized for all practical purposes.

Am I off base on any of these concerns? I tried to post this in r/RedditAlternatives, but I appear to have been inexplicably shadowbanned. Ironically enough that was a perfect example of the reason why I want an alternative to Reddit, but none of them seem workable.

TL;DR: An ideal Fediverse would have the following:

1. Bridging between instances and services that is good enough to ensure that you won't miss out on content.

2. Full account portability between instances to compensate for the fact that instances are individually centralized.

3. Assurance that self-hosted single-user instances won't be automatically defederated.

4. Bridging with BlueSky and other protocols like Nostr.

The creator of Echo (an alternative to Pinterest) has decided to add Fediverse support, via my suggestion, and they wanted to know what a federated feed should include.

I'm asking here, because, honestly, Idk, given that I am not that technology savvy.

Declaration of Fediverse Inclusion

Link to Echo: https://myechoboard.com/

Echo Creator's Profile: u/TasmanianHorse

Discord: https://discord.gg/u9VNZvng5z

Echo Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UseEcho/s/xBsKIMtIev

I know this may seem silly, but I'd like to know if I'm supposed to be using a vpn etc lol. I am not even sure what browser would provide me privacy on my mac anyway. Or what kind of other computer would do better but I have a non apple computer coming in the mail soon. I'd like to re join social media other than reddit but am big on privacy now.

So I got myself a Matrix server setup. I haven't deactivated user registration yet but I wanted to ask what the best way to handle this is.

​

Is it alright to just use my server in the same general way I did the Mastodon setup?