I made a new blog post here on uncensored, and also replied to a comment here by ahhz. My own comment was turned into a file that could be 'view'ed or 'download'ed, not like ahhz's which posted for all to see. How do i do an ahhz, and post a comment for all to see?
Also the two options on the comment post, "view" and "download", do not work as expected. View presents the text file to be downloaded, and "Download" presents the text file in a new page to be viewed in all it's (plain text) glory on the web. :)
Ah good! I still don't know how ahhz overcame this issue . (?) :)
Changing the subject to another aspect of Citadel:
I recently joined a mastodon server run by sdf.org. It's suprisingly good, i am enjoying the whole experience.
I have recently been talking about deleting my facebook account, and i have mentioned a few times the virtues of running a citadel server,
over the more well know social software like, diaspora. There is a few people very interested, i hope they join in here.
However one guy was talking of the xmpp feature here, which stopped him from taking up the system. This is not current now so he will not be looking in at
the support room. So i would like to know if he was correct in his assumptions.
He was saying xmpp here only allows plaintext auth over unencrypted streams, and there was no support for STARTTLS.
He dug up his original (mastodon) 'toot. here:
https://mastodon.technology/@dasyatidprime/99177823238413523
I forgot to say, the same guy also mentioned the source download links on the easyinstall.citadel.org page did not work.
(and an asside, i just noticed one of the guys in support talking about the delta chat app/messenger via email app - very cool,
what is the future of xmpp here at citadel though i wonder?)
( https://delta.chat/en/ :P )
I aim to delete facebook one day, and am looking at a few alternatives, aswell as citadel ;) .
I personally think citadel can fill the social network role perfectly, and has the virtue of so many powerful features.
My friends and family will be the ones to convince, when i set up a server, to coax them away from facebook, however, so i will
make a decision one day, based on that.
All the networks i am trying, federate in some way with each other, mainly using the ostatus and activitypub protocols, or the diaspora protocol. These cover a network of about a dozen FOSS decentralised social networks with well over a million users (by virtue of mastodon, otherwise in the tens of thousands for the others put together).
I read citadel will be ditching it's own federation protocol, in favour of standard web protocols. Has their been any thought, of supporting one of the social networking protocols, mentioned?
I mean citadel is a great FOSS decentralised system; in my view replacing: Facebook, and Gmail in one stroke- which seem to me the most important things to most people, apart from file sharing.
Wouldn't it be appealing to have citadel, as part of the greater Federation/fediverse? Aswell as new citadel users, you may attract some more developers for the project.
Just a thought! :)
Here are some of the systems using the diaspora protocol:
And the activitypub protocol, which some of the above systems (hubzilla for sure) can use also, is used by mastodon (sdf.org have a great mastodon server),
and many others, including nextcloud, the owncloud fork (by the original owncloud dev team):
https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-decentralized-networks/
And activitypub is now reccomended as a standard by the W3C, after three years work on it.
Former Diaspora community manager Sean Tilley wrote a good article on activitypub as a future way to federate internet platforms:
https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334
Ah good! I still don't know how ahhz overcame this issue . (?) :)
Easy ... he replied using the text client, which did not generate markdown format messages. But it's ok, everything is fixed now; markdown is now rendered as plain text if it can't be converted. I'm not sure why we didn't have that in place already...
what is the future of xmpp here at citadel though i wonder?)
One may just as easily wonder what the future of XMPP is in general.
Email is only available using a universally accepted and federated protocol because it came into existence before the Silicon Valley robber barons had built their walled gardens. XMPP held the same promise for instant messages, but all major providers have ended support for it, because the robber barons want your eyeballs permanently locked inside their jails.
I remember a time when I could use an XMPP client to talk to Fecesbook, Google, and Uncensored all at once. So this would have been 2009-2010 during my brief stay in Fuckerberg's shithole. Since then, both FB and Google have removed XMPP support from their services.
libpurple (and therefore Pidgin) does a pretty good job of supporting various services using their proprietary protocols, but you still need to have an account on every service, which makes it impossible to build inter-service hubs.
So ... my guess ... XMPP will continue to languish, and eventually no one will use it anymore, and we'll remove it from Citadel. But right now it's pretty much the only protocol available without having to write our own client.
Delta Chat looks interesting, because it leverages the SMTP infrastructure already in place, and gracefully falls back to email if the other end doesn't have Delta Chat. I like that. To make it useful with Citadel, we would have to do something about our age-old design flaw that only scans the outbound SMTP queue once per minute.
But i think the text client is better, because it is more reliable, and quicker to use over a slow connection.
I think, communications tecnology should be aimed at ther masses, the normasl guys in the street. And so, rather than extolling the virtues of an open architecture etc.. as the first thing to say about XMPP, advocacy of a more day to day kind might help. Basically, getting away from the fact F*ceb++k and g++gle no long use it - which i know kust have been a shock and disheartening for alot of people - but does not change the fact it is a well established protocol that seems too be well used still, and by virtue of its acceptance as an open standard, seems worth saving and further development. Fingers crossed people think of it when developing the next fashionable app.
:) I am using the text client right now also. The webcit seems to be
down? Who needs the web!? :) Actually i mainly use the web client here,
Only over http. You can still reach it over https, until someone restarts webcit, here.
The "sysop" who prides himself on perfection has the security certificate misconfigured.
supose the average person expects to be able to do all their social
communications via one medium, so ?
The average person is a shallow mundane pinhead who expects to be able to do all their social communications via F*c*book and doesn't care what the underlying technology is. You can count on the fact that they will always follow the path of least resistance, which right now consists of signing up for F*c*book and ignoring the fact that F*c*book ultra-rapes every single person on the service.
Replacing it is possible but not easy. The average person does not care that a replacement service is decentralized, or open, or even that it'll stop ultra-raping them every minute of every day. They only care that their friends are online.
This is the same reason why Open Source succeeded where Free Software failed.
For the 99.9999999999% of people who do not have the same brain damage as Richard Stallman and do not want to spend all of their days "talking about freedom", the more compelling case for Open Source was (and is) that the distributed model created a better pool of software that more people wanted to use and improve.
It's ironic that Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Stallman are not best friends, since they are both totalitarian control freaks.
Anyway ... a closed system that already "has everyone" is a tough nut to crack. It's almost impossible to "beat them at their own game" once network effects have taken hold -- just ask the Desktop Linux people, or the Windows Phone people. Instead, you have to create a *different* ecosystem that has its own compelling advantages, and then wait for the paradigm shift. IBM missed the shift to the desktop, Microsoft missed the shift to mobile, and Facebook will miss the shift to something else. Whoever creates that something else will win bigly.
What you just said, is a compelling argument, to those who know their digital onions, in my opinion. As for the other 90% who are all on facebook and instagram, it definitely would not make much sense to them.
Well - i will try running a server or two soon. If i can get a few people, even a handful, from my social circle to try something new, it would be great.
I have two things i would like, for me, and my friends: Email, and social software.
So i will set up my first citadel, and one more system, to try and get a few of my lot to try something new.
In all honesty, citadel, is all you need, i would think. If their was a good mobile client, it would clinch the deal.
btw the last access database/list thingy, whatever you call it, seems to work now in webcit. I jump straight to last conversations now, instead of being stuck in november 2017. :)
FB succeeds because they help people find each other. Not because it's an especially great platform in any other way.
Adults find it more compelling than children for that very reason... because over time, you meet people, and move on, and lose contact. FB offers a way to get back in contact with people you knew years, or even decades ago.
I might like it better if that was all it did, and nothing more. If it only helped you find an old friend, then let you use some other tool to contact them (like e-mail, web forum, phone, whatever) in some way that the old friend would find acceptable.
Old college friends, folks with whom I served in the Army, folks I knew in high school... I can find all of these through FB, where I would otherwise have completely lost contact with them.
Hell, it even helped me find my aunt when I needed to let her know that her sister died.
So it isn't completely useless in this regard.
But the way it tries to shape things... no... I don't care for that.
Here's something you might not have known:
DuckDuckGo was brought to life by a developer who built a database and software that he then sold to Classmates.com for a very large amount of money, right before F*c*book murdered Classmates.com. With that money he was able to begin working on the site and keep it running until it had revenue.
(Yeah, I think I do like "f*c*book" better than "fecesbook" because the carefully-placed asterisks make it look like a cuss word ... which it is, no matter how you spell it. Die Zuck Die.)
So how do we make it easy for the common woman/man in the street to hit F*c*b**k over the head and bury it once and for all?
(or untill they can pluck up the courage: use more than just one way to communicate/socialize online, that is not F*c*b**k?)