This post is written on https://normals.me/ and delivered to [email protected] over #ActivityPub, so if you are reading it the basic plumbing works. Now let me explain what is this.
Normals is a forum with communities, threads, and questions with an accepted answer. It is a single instance, not software you can host, and the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons. The federation module will be published separately with implementation notes (FEP-67ff).
What federates today Every community is a Group actor following the Lemmy model (FEP-1b12). Follow @[email protected] or any other community from Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin or Mastodon.
Posts and comments go both ways. Replies from your instance appear in the thread on Normals, replies from Normals go back to the origin.
Remote content is labelled with its origin, links back to it, and is never copied. Media loads from the source.
Signed fetches, so it works with instances that require authorized fetch. NodeInfo 2.1 is up.
Policies, in case they matter to you, it has no ads, and no paid reach, and of course no AI training on posts. AI crawlers blocked by default, public mod log with reasons, and no automated removals. Numbers at https://normals.me/transparency so please take a look.
If something from your instance shows up wrong here, or something from here shows up wrong on yours, reply with the URL and I’ll fix it. Andy Piper mentioned NodeBB uses the same group model, if anyone runs a NodeBB instance I’d like to test against it, if possible.
I hope we all have fun. Cheers!
I think its funny when someone doesn’t disclose it’s an ai project they get hella upvotes
The entire description reads like it was written by a LLM. Fediverse users have a decent nose for generated images, so I’m surprised this generated language flew under the radar.
That said, I can’t fault OP for using AI to build a thing they wanted to build. The plagerism machine is real, but it’s hard to tell people not to use it. Even more so when it’s being used to create something that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (ie it’s not replacing anyone’s job).
As soon as they said “the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons,” the red flags started flying
The very first sentence made my ai-dar already go off
If your “anti-abuse” security requires your software to be closed source, then your software is not secure. Well built software can be open source, and still secure.
You imply that your code could not prevent abuse if it was known, so, no offense, but that code must be pretty bad!
I like the fediverse because it distributes power. I, as a user, have the power to choose my instance, choose my moderation, choose the structure that my social interactions are built upon (threads based, microblogs, etc) and if I dont like something, I have the power to change it. Thats why open source is such a perfect fit to that model. Closed source federation then, sounds to me like you didnt get it.
Based.
closed source federation is fine. Federation is sharing the content and allowing users to remain connected across platforms it has little to do with what app is being used.
Sure, its still federation. But in my opinion, its contrary to its philosophy of user control.
Its not a black or white thing. You can give users more or less control without giving them full control or no control. It still aligns with the philosophy because its giving users more control over their experience compared with other more mainstream platforms.
You can give users more or less control
It still aligns with the philosophy because its giving users more control
🤔
Added the “make no mistakes” to the prompt, but forgot the “make it secure”. Rookie mistake.
This is what those higher level Prompt Engineering courses really come into play. This is big boy stuff.
(I really hope I don’t need the s tag)
Closed source and clearly completely vibe coded? Just look at the site, it reeks of AI. Even this post has so much AI-speech.
Yea, no thanks.
It’s a shame you see it this way, Andy Piper disagrees but you’re free to think as you wish, it’s an open forum :)
In fact, the UI is purely Tailwind, and the design is based on the best of each platform. I’m sorry if you don’t like the Tailwind CSS. But it’s the framework I know best. I considered Bootstrap, but honestly, it felt too rigid. Thanks for the comment any way :)
tailwind doesn’t have the centered highlights, on container borders, but every vibecoded site does.
who, or what, is “andy piper”?
He’s watching. Do not speak to andy piper, andy piper speaks to you only if he wishes.
Why is this so funny. I can’t stop laughing about Andy Piper omnipotent invisible judge and executioner
Andy Piper is the new Ronnie Pickering
Whos that
if the core is closed for the stated reason, does that mean you are unsure about the safety of the system?
Good question, however the security model doesn’t depend on the code being secret, and it shouldn’t. The auth, signatures, permissions and input handling are standard and went through an OWASP review before launch.
What’s closed is the anti-abuse layer, spam, rate-limit tuning, the signals for detecting ban evasion and coordinated accounts. Those work partly because spammers don’t know the exact numbers. Lemmy’s and Mastodon’s are public and they get played for exactly that reason. Hope it helps :)
not really, no.
Nothing stops those being adjustable tunables.
Yes. They could just not set them at all in the published source, and just set them in their deployment. They are at least dishonest about the reasons for keeping the source closed, which is sad.
Lots of people are getting pissed at it being closed source. I get that it isn’t the norm. But, there are closed-source paid software on the Fediverse. This isn’t anything new. Also, there’s ways to disagree and share opinions without being hostile - we are not children here nor teenagers lacking a fully developed brain
As a counterpoint, sloppy projects are being shared all over and it’s basically spam at this point. Even /r/rust had to disallow code projects, because there was simply way too much slop being posted all the time.
People share projects because back in the day, a project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code with a cool website and a lot of features were evidence of a lot of hard work, a lot of design decisions and a lot of tradeoffs.
Vibe coding has made that a bad metric. These things no longer mean that any actual work has been dedicated to this project. Anyone could use an afternoon prompting an agent to build the same thing. There is no value in sharing such a thing. At best, it’s worthless and at worst, it’s borderline a scam, an attempt at disguising a project as something it isn’t.
Epic
Edit: closed core…
Hello world. :)
418
Please no. Fediverse, open standards, open source, free software, no bullshit.
I don’t believe all software should be open source. In that you’re wrong. I think @baldur did a great job here.
i think you’re wrong and a bad person for having that opinion
@[email protected] @[email protected] um not all software on the Fediverse is Open Source
Hello! Good luck!
It’s weird running these things. Why was running a Lemmy or Piefed instance not right for your taste, if I may ask?
Am I right in taking it as sort of a stackexhange alternative?
ACK !
I think SYN comes first, not ACK
closed source and symmetric blocking. two strikes.
Symmetric blocking?
when you are blocked, you can’t respond. it’s how twitter, Facebook, and new reddit blocking works. it’s a great way to stop people from correcting misinformation, since they can’t see it when logged in, and couldn’t respond even if they could see it.
Blocking seems kinda pointless, its just muting if itsnt symmetric
symmetric blocking is too powerful. it lets non-admins/non-mods decide who can comment. straight blocking removes specific users from your experience without giving you a veto on whether they see and can interact with content downstream of you.
they may not even be responding to you, but a comment of a comment on a post you happen to have made. why should your block be able to stifle that??
Ah yeah I’m aware of that anti-feature, though I hadn’t heard it called that before. Did OP mention that, though? I don’t see it in their post.
Ah yeah. One of the reasons I’m not on piefed, that nonsense.
the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons
That’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, really bad excuse for not releasing the code. Better be upfront and admit that you don’t want to share the code.
Media loads from the source.
This might actually be a problem. If your instance gets popular, you might end up overloading a remote server. Add a proper caching proxy, or even better look into content-addressable systems to allow multiple servers to share the load.
