We Distribute [email protected]
The Federated Web!
WeDistribute is part of an ongoing effort to provide quality coverage of what’s going on in the decentralized personal communications space. We cover Diaspora, RedMatrix, Friendica, GNUSocial, Pumpio, Libertree, SocialWG, and anything else going on in the space! Our publishing strategy is entirely done from within The Free Network (otherwise called The Federation), and we hope to keep everyone in the network informed about what’s going on!
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2016-06-03T02:37:47Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
What's going on with OwnCloud?
The recent announcement of the OwnCloud Foundation followed by the announcement of fork of OwnCloud is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows. What happened? How did things get to this point?
Catching the Next Cloud
Earlier today, Frank Karlitschek, co-founder of #OwnCloud, made an announcement about the formation of a new project. Five weeks prior, he had left the company that he had helped start, and some of the core development team have followed him to their new project, NextCloud.
Frank describes a vision for what he wants out of this new project and its respective community: a project that does development out in the open, without any contributor agreements or dual-licensing schemes, with a new trademark held by an independent foundation. A better company culture where shares are equally held by employees, with the hand of development decisions guided by the community-at-large rather than a disconnected small team.
To paraphrase Frank, the best parts of OwnCloud are to be extended to fully support what the community has been asking for: better apps, with features that previously only existed for enterprise customers. In his own words:We will release a drop in replacement for ownCloud in a few weeks so that users and customers can easily upgrade to Nextcloud to benefit from the new bugfix and security improvements and features. Nextcloud GmbH will provide free support for all current ownCloud customers to simplify a transition.
The OwnCloud Foundation"One of Frank’s criticisms concerned the need to strengthen the Community. In this regard, we have been working on the creation of the ownCloud Foundation, the formation of which we announced earlier this week."
Recently, the OwnCloud project announced that it was setting up a foundation. While this is a welcome event for any Free Software project, it immediately raised eyebrows. Some of the main criticisms were focused on the nature of the board itself (only 2 seats are elected by the community - the other four are coporate), whereas others have pointed out that only OwnCloud Inc itself appears to have any sponsorship in the foundation.
Meanwhile, a handful of developers of the OwnCloud platform announce that they are leaving their projects. Their announcements can be found on Planet KDE. The general theme appears to be that OwnCloud is putting its corporate needs above its community needs.
The OwnCloud Foundation's had this to say on the matter:Today’s announcement by our former colleague Frank Karlitschek, that he intends to launch a competitive product to ownCloud into the market using recently poached developers, has both surprised us and – admittedly – disappointed us. In the past, Frank has made a wealth of contributions to the development of the ownCloud Community Edition. With today’s announcement, he is no longer related to the ownCloud project and has started a competing community.
This ends on a particularly strange note, as OwnCloud finally concludes that it has to close its doors after their main lenders cancelled their credit. 8 employee contracts were terminated in the process, and the company will be forced to close its doors. Paradoxically "The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority."
#NextCloudManuel , Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Jorge , sazius and 3 others like this.
Stephen Michael Kellat , mnd , Stephen Sekula , Blaise Alleyne and 6 others shared this.
This ends on a particularly strange note, as OwnCloud finally concludes that it has to close its doors after their main lenders cancelled their credit. 8 employee contracts were terminated in the process, and the company will be forced to close its doors. Paradoxically "The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority."
I'm confused. What closed its doors? I would've thought the business, but the next sentence says the GmbH is not affected. Anyone know?
I think I've read somewhere, that the US branch "Inc." has to close down, while the "GmbH" which is the German branch can continue. But I don't have a link to prove.Tobias Diekershoff at 2016-06-03T16:19:55Z
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Mike Linksvayer like this.
>> Mike Linksvayer:
“This ends on a particularly strange note, as OwnCloud finally concludes that it has to close its doors after their main lenders cancelled their credit. 8 employee contracts were terminated in the process, and the company will be forced to close its doors. Paradoxically "The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority."
I'm confused. What closed its doors? I would've thought the business, but the next sentence says the GmbH is not affected. Anyone know?”The developers themselves and the promise of their future intellectual properties was the asset or other collateral used to secure the debt?
Stephen Michael Kellat at 2016-06-05T19:41:54Z
Alex Jordan likes this.
My interpretation is that the cash flow in the US subsidiary was almost entirely debt-based, and when the original founder is leading a competing project, the creditors no longer believe in the project.
With no revenue to pay salaries and bills, they would be insolvent and forced to liquidate immediately.
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2016-03-21T16:33:24Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora Debian Installer Improvements
Pirate Praveen** (j4v4m4n) wrote the following post 2 hours ago
Now you can install diaspora with either #postgresql or #mysql as database using diaspora-installer packages (which use rubygems.org to satisfy dependencies). Earlier we supported only postgresql.# apt-get install diaspora-installer
for diaspora with postgresql and# apt-get install diaspora-installer-mysql
for diaspora with mysql
You can install them on current debian stable #jessie from https://people.debian.org/~praveen/diaspora-jessie/
I hope to upload to to official jessie-backports soon, once my key is added to backports acl.
Note: there is also a native debian package which installs everything from debian repositories.
#debian -
2016-03-14T04:05:19Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora - IndieGoGo Campaign for Account Backup/Migration
Congratulations to @Senya on meeting his IndieGoGo Campaign goal early! The campaign managed to raise €3500 EUR with over 7 days to go! You can still donate here.We have done it!
Hey, people! Just a short note - a few minutes ago a message has arrived from IGG that my goal was reached!
I don't ask of anything more, 3500€ is just enough, however if anything more is donated, I'll stretch my work time respectively and work on some more issues of diaspora*.
Thank to everyone who helped to make that real :)
#senyadiasporaaccountmigration
#diasporaAlex Jordan likes this.
Alex Jordan shared this.
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2016-03-09T16:47:51Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
diaspora* HQ wrote the following post 19 hours ago
diaspora* security release 0.5.7.1
We just released diaspora* version 0.5.7.1 which disables post fetching for relayables. Due to an insecure implementation, fetching of root posts for relayables could allow an attacker to distribute malicious/spoofed/modified posts for any person.
Disabling the fetching will make the current federation a bit less reliable, but for a hotfix, this is the best solution. We will re-enable the fetching in 0.6.0.0 when we moved out the federation into its own library and are able to implement further validation during fetches.
Updating
Please update as soon as possible. Update instructions are available as usual in the wiki.
#diaspora #announcement #release #0571 -
2016-03-07T00:00:27Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Hubzilla Wordpress Plugin - Federated Posts and Comments
@Mike Macgirvin released an updated plugin for the #Wordpress platform recently. Allegedly, it allows for the federation of posts and comments between #Hubzilla and Wordpress.This is an update of the excellent redmatrix_wp plugin to connect WordPress and Hubzilla posts and comments. This is installed on the WordPress site and the wppost plugin should be installed in Hubzilla. The plugins communicate with each other to share posts and comments between both programs.
At the moment, the plugin is informally attached to this post. We hope to see continued development in a repo soon, and look forward to testing it with a Wordpress installation. -
2016-03-06T20:36:56Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Alex Jordan likes this.
Alex Jordan shared this.
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2016-03-06T20:33:39Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Federated Follower Tally
Here's the latest user stats for people connecting with We Distribute. This is just for fun - it's always interesting seeing what parts of the federated web our channel connects with. This is not necessarily representative of each platform's amount of active users.
At the moment, Diaspora is currently in the lead with the most followers, with Pump in second place, and Hubzilla in third.Alex Jordan likes this.
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2016-03-04T06:55:46Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Hubzilla Plugin enables PubSubHubbub subscriptions
A recent plugin was added to the Hubzilla Plugins Repo called Pubsubhubub.PubSubHubbub is an open protocol for distributed publish/subscribe communication on the Internet. It generalizes the concept of webhooks and allows data producers and data consumers to work in a decoupled way.
PubSubHubbub provides a way to subscribe, unsubscribe and receive updates from a resource, whether it's an RSS or Atom feed or any web accessible document(JSON...).
This protocol is used as the subscription component of OStatus, which #GNUSocial supports. I enabled the plugin on my personal channel, which required no setup or configuration of any kind. After entering my handle into GNU Social's remote subscription form, my name and avatar appeared instantly.
I decided to take things a step further by sending over a test post. At the moment, it appears that old posts created before a connection is made don't get federated over. Still, it can correctly reflect any status I post on #Hubzilla.
Unfortunately, comments do not appear to federate back or forth at the moment.
Still, it's clear that this plugin is showing a massive amount of potential in connecting different parts of the federated web together.Alex Jordan , Jorge , testbeta , Christopher Allan Webber and 1 others like this.
Christopher Allan Webber , Sean Tilley shared this.
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2016-02-29T15:00:24Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
MediaGoblin Federation - First Demo
(originally shared on the Pump.io network by the #MediaGoblin project)It might not look like much, but the screenshot above is the first demo of federation in MediaGoblin. This is using the Pump API, with MediaGoblin talking to Pump.IO!
The Mediagoblin project has been making great strides in incorporating the upcoming ActivityPub standard, and have gone as far to have developed a related toolkit for Python called ActivityPy. One noteworthy feature of the ActivityPy toolkit involves its ability to load both ActivityStreams and Microformats side by side and convert both things into into Linked Data. The Mediagoblin blog had this to say of it:The agreement that ActivityStreams, Linked Data, and the “IndieWeb Stack” (for lack of a better term) were not required to work together, and that we could produce multiple deliverables, has eased that tension in the group and allowed us to work collaboratively.
The project has reiterated that there is still much work to be done. However, it is very exciting to see their progress.James Dearing , jrobb , gledof , Scott Sweeny and 2 others like this.
Fabián Bonetti , Christopher Allan Webber , Jose Carlos Jimenez , EVAnaRkISTO shared this.
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2016-02-29T05:23:58Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora - IndieGoGo Campaign for Account Backup/Migration
CLICK HERE to support Account backup and restore for diaspora*
My name is Senya and I am a software developer from Russia with 7 years experience of commercial software development. I've been participating in diaspora for the past six months and already have some code merged in the upstream (and here is some from the diaspora_federation gem). There are a plenty of jobs available for a programmer such as myself, but I dream of doing something fundamentally important and don't wish to waste my time participating in yet another company's commercial product.
The feature I propose to implement is an account backup/restore (also referred to as account migration). This is one of the oldest open issues on the issue tracker. In a federated social network such as diaspora, you choose a node in the network (a ‘pod’) on which to open your account and store your personal data. Over time, however, you might want to move your data to another pod: perhaps a pod has opened for a community you’re involved in, perhaps your current pod isn’t performing so well, or perhaps you want to set up a pod of your own so that you have complete control of your data.
Best of luck on your campaign @Senya ! :)
#DiasporaEfraim Flashner likes this.
Efraim Flashner shared this.
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2016-02-28T02:26:18Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
News Pipeline 2016
We apologize for the lack of coverage over the last few months. We're looking to schedule regular updates moving forward for this year, as there are many exciting and new developments within the decentralized web application space. Check in soon for the latest community news! -
2016-02-28T02:22:35Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
LibrePlanet 2016 - Unofficial Live Coverage , Sean Tilley like this.
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2016-01-13T20:27:57Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora - Proposed Design Improvements
It looks like some new design changes are being proposed for the #Diaspora platform by @Fla . The active pull request on GitHub can be seen here.
Main Stream:
Tag page:
It's exciting to see Diaspora's interface receive some much-needed love. We're excited to see what comes of it!Luis , Jorge , gdk , Christopher Allan Webber like this.
Christopher Allan Webber shared this.
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2015-12-22T21:10:58Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Friendica 3.4.3 Release
Friendica 3.4.3 released
Dear Federation,
we are happy to announce the release of Friendica 3.4.3, the last planed minor release of the Lily of the valley family before the release of Friendica 3.5 in spring 2016. As such version 3.4.3 bundles a couple bug fixes with a number of new features. For the full list, please read the CHANGELOG, but let me highlight some things from the long list.- []Support to events attendance. Users can mark their participation to an event,[]Private forums are mentioned automatically like community forums,[]The UI in the aspects of dealing with contacts was streamlined,[]The Forumlist widget moved from the addons into the core (you can just disable that addon),[]Federation with Diaspora and GNU Social was improved,
- The API was improved, especially to fix some incompatibilities with the AndStatus clients.
How to Update?
If you have an installation using the git repository directly, all you have to do is a git pull in the friendica directory and the addons directory. That will fetch the new version from the master branch and you are ready to go. If you want to use the bleeding edge code from the development branch of Friendica 3.5 Asparagus, checkout the develop branch in your repository.
Alternatively you can find a zip file of the released version of friendica at github.com for download. Just unzip it on your local machine and replace the files on your server with the new files.
Friendica at the 32c3
Friendica will be present at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32c3) on Day 2 (that is Monday, December 28) at the Assembly of the FSFE. Have a look at the congress wiki for details on the session. A great opportunity to meet some of the Friendica developers and other users in the real world.
Have a merry time!Freemor likes this.
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2015-12-04T07:38:20Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Hubzilla 1.0 Released
#Hubzilla announced today the initial 1.0 release of the platform, which you can learn more about at https://hubzilla.orgMike Macgirvin wrote the following post 9 hours ago
Hubzilla (1.0) release
High Range Australia, 4-December-2015
Announce: Hubzilla version 1.0 aka "Pacific Sunrise"
The Hubzilla developers would like to introduce our project to the world. Basically what we have is a community software platform that links different website communities together into something much larger. It's part CMS, part blog, part social network, part personal cloud, and all exciting and different in the way we provide privacy and single sign-on across all the connected communities; throughout the internet.
More details at https://macgirvin.com/page/mike/hubzilla-1Mike Linksvayer likes this.
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2015-10-20T06:50:36Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Dennis Schubert wrote the following post 5 hours ago
(check the stared revisions for older release announcements)
diaspora* version 0.5.4.0 released! As planned, a new minor release following the new release schedule is now released. Over the past six weeks, we have managed to collect 90 commits made by 12 contributors for this minor release.
A huge thanks to all the contributors from diaspora's amazing community! If you want to help make diaspora even better, please check out our getting started guide. Please see the changelog for a complete list of changes made in this release.
Notable Changes- []diaspora users can now get promoted as moderators. See the pull request for more information.
- If you are really bored, you can now watch a stream of all public posts received by your pod.
git checkout masterbefore the update to get back to the stable release branch.
Next minor freeze (0.5.5.0): 2015-11-22 Next release (0.5.5.0): 2015-11-29
diaspora* Rapid Release: ICS feed, HTML version
#diaspora #announcement #release #0540Luis , Stephen Michael Kellat , Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) like this.
Stephen Michael Kellat , Jorge , Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) shared this.
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2015-10-15T23:16:56Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Now on Hubzilla!
We Distribute is back in action! After migrating to #Hubzilla, we can finally return to providing quality coverage of federated communication projects!Mike Linksvayer likes this.
Sean Tilley shared this.
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2015-08-17T03:06:11Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora Debian Packaging Progress
Pirate Praveen** (j4v4m4n) wrote the following post 13 hours ago
Accepted diaspora 0.5.2.0+debian-1 (source all) into experimental, experimental
apt-get install diaspora is real!
Now we have to get it to unstable, testing and backports (jessie). Please test the package and give your feedback.
#debian #debian-diaspora #diasporaClaes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Douglas Perkins , Efraim Flashner , Stephen Michael Kellat like this.
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Douglas Perkins , Stephen Michael Kellat shared this.
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2015-08-04T03:12:40Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
MediaGoblin - State of Federation
Jessica Tallon from the @MediaGoblin project has posted a great entry over at the project blog about turning #MediaGoblin into a full-fledged federated platform. Their federation protocol is based on the ActivityPump standard, which is being actively worked on by the W3C Social Working Group. Later on in the entry, Jessica details some of her involvement in implementing the protocol.Over the last year I’ve been building up the foundations of federation, creating the necessary APIs and infrastructure needed. I am currently finishing the last of that, modifying the models to handle federated data. This is a challenge as the models were designed without federation in mind. There is a lot of new data that is being stored as well as remote and local versions of the models.
Once I’ve finished working on the models I’ll be starting the work on actually getting the media and comments federating across instances.
This is a very exciting development update for the platform, as it means that self-hosted instances will be able to fully benefit from users being able to subscribe to one another and comment on each other's media![email protected] , Stephen Sekula like this.
Olivier Mehani , Stephen Sekula , Sean Tilley shared this.
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2015-08-03T14:45:59Z via deadsuperhero.com To: Public
Diaspora API Update - Kent Shikama
As per yesterday's update regarding #Diaspora API development.Kent Shikama wrote the following post 2 hours ago
Hey everyone! It has been a little over a month now since the API development has started and I got some news to share about the API. First of all, big thanks to @Augier (for initiating the API/OpenID Connect effort and implementing various features within OpenID Connect), @Jonne Haß (for his consistent reviews and daily IRC support), and everyone else in the Diaspora development community for their encouragement. @Jason Robinson your Loomio post was probably what sparked me to join in on this API development in the first place, so shoutout to you too.
So why am I so excited about this post?
This is the first public post created entirely through the API using cURL Specifically, I can now go through the entire OpenID Connect Authorization Code flow including dynamic client registeration and then create this post. You can even add a poll as I have done with this post. I wouldn't use it on a production pod yet but you can checkout theworldbright/openid branch to test it out yourself. I'll leave a link to the instructions in the comments.
We still got a long ways to go until the API is ready for release. The OIDC authorization infrastructure still needs some final touches but it is now possible to work on the actual API routes simultaneously. Each route is fairly independent and so we could use a lot of help from everyone to accelerate the process.
#diaspora #api #post #openid #podmin #developer #thanksStephen Sekula likes this.
Stephen Sekula shared this.
