matcha_addict

The idea

I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).

App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it's Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).

Motivation

I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.

I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine:

• being intentional about content we want on our feed
• breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub)
• promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them.
• consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?

Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?

I found https://wanderer.to/ as an alternative to alltrails, but it seems not to address my main use case for alltrails: search around for potential hikes, look for reviews about them, photos, etc.

Is there anything like this? Anything close to it?

UPDATE: Resolved by deleting all files in /var and ~/.local that are related to bottles. It did not work until I deleted them from the repos directory too.

I tried to install bottles via flatpak, but I get the error:

Error: Error pulling from repo: While pulling app/com.usebottles.bottles/x86_64/stable from remote flathub: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Couldn't find file object 'fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038'
error: Failed to install com.usebottles.bottles: Error pulling from repo: While pulling app/com.usebottles.bottles/x86_64/stable from remote flathub: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Couldn't find file object 'fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038'

I have received such an error before, and usually running flatpak repair fixes it. But that is not working right now.

What else I tried?

flatpak uninstall --unused flatpak update flatpak update --appstream running all the commands as root

More about my system: I am using gentoo, but I did not think it would matter since the point of flatpak is this separation layer it has.

I read in many places that this should be supported, but either I'm doing it wrong or it is not working.

I just signed up in my-place.social which seems to proclaim federation with over 1000 instances including Lemmy ones.

I put !fediverse in the search bar, but this community does not come up.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a friendica account I can tag to ask about this, or a group I can post in for support?

The use case I have in mind: say for example, I read a lot of articles about a certain topic, such as Linux or chemistry or whatever. I want to combine the articles I write into a singular feed, and for others to be able to follow it. Call it “Alex’s Linux Feed”.

Another use case: Suppose I follow a news source (like washington post), but maybe I dont like the formatting of their feed. Maybe it does not have the full article, or maybe it is not organized right (sports news is mixed with political news, and I want to separate them right). So I create my own feed where I organize those same posts better.

The reason this would be a platform because the user should not be burdened with hosting it (even if it is not difficult), and it should be searchable.

Is there any platform like this of user created RSS feeds?

Hi all, I want to do some screen recording on my linux desktop. And like a normal-functioning member of society, I decided to do it the hardest way and learn ffmpeg CLI to do it. Why? well, something about using underlying tools and customizing their usage excites me.

I have already started doing this, and I am finding I have to do a lot of trial and error to get things right. Before I dive deeper, I want to ask: Am I limiting myself in doing this? Is there anything I could be missing out on taking this route, or something that ffmpeg could not do on its own that a dedicated solution can?

What will I use this for exactly? well, things like recording a video game as I play it (which I suppose will require hardware acceleration to be of viable quality), or recording a tutorial (requiring voice input from mic), things like that.

starting out with an unpopular opinion: of all the centralized social media platforms, Facebook was always my favorite.

Why? it is the most full featured. Has threads, reactions, groups, "Pages", polls, and it even has granular privacy controls (for hiding content from other users, not to be confused with Facebook's privacy violations and commercial data use).

This makes me wonder, could we have a Facebook-like experience using Lemmy as a backend? similar to how lemmy has a phpBB experience using lemmyBB.

Lemmy already has threads, and communities can represent groups. Pages and user pages can be simulated with communities.

We would be missing polls and reactions, which I can live with. I am not at all mad that we would be missing content algorithms either.

Although we can't make it identical to Facebook, I think it will get reasonably close and exemplify most of the good parts.

I am thinking to take this project on, but wondering if people have thoughts, if this already exists, or if people would even want to use this.

For any social network, not just a federated one.

My thoughts: The way it works in big tech social networks is like this:

1. **The organic methods: **

• your followee shares something from a poster you don't follow
• someone you don't follow comments on a post from someone you follow
• you join a group or community and find others you currently don't follow

2. The recommendation engine methods: content you do not follow shows up, and you are likely to engage in it based on statistical models. Big tech is pushing this more and more.
3. Search: you specifically attempt to find what you're looking for through some search capability. Big tech is pushing against this more and more.

In my opinion, the fediverse covers #1 well already. But #1 has a bubble effect. Your followees are less likely to share something very drastically different from what you already have.

The fediverse is principally opposed to #2, at least the way it is done in big tech. But maybe some variation of it could be done well.

#3 is a big weakness for fediverse. But I am curious how it would ideally manifest. Would it be full text search? Semantic search? Or something with more machine learning?

I am sure it was discussed here before, but I can't find a good way to search this community.

Are there any arguments against having a user's identity federate, and be compatible across platforms?

For example, let us say I sign up with my instance, matcha_addict@lemy.lol

But what if I go on mastodon, and I want to have my own micro blog. Or maybe go to write freely and post some blog posts. I'd have to make a different account on each one.

What if mastodon or write freely could just let me log in with my lemmy account (or lets call it federated account). This has several benefits:

• users don't have to scratch their head on if I am the same person or not across these platforms
• theoretically, someone following my feed can get updates on what I do on multiple platforms

Now I understand this would be difficult to implement and iron out all the edge cases, but am I missing anything on why it wouldn't be a desirable feature, given it is implemented?

From a practical sense, ActivityPub may be the obvious choice as it gives easier interop with the largest federated platforms.

But what else? There are existing platforms built on these protocols, such as movim for xmpp, and another for matrix I forget.

From a technical standpoint, are there any major pros and cons?

I heard often about activityPub being challenging to implement.

Now I know part of this is because, if you are building on activityPub, you want interop with existing platforms such as mastodon, and they do their own thing.

But ignoring that aspect, what is so hard about activityPub? What could have been done better?

I am a software developer, so feel free to use software dev concepts and terms when explaining. Thanks!

Lemmy developers have said there are no near plans for allowing users to follow mastodon or other activityPub networks, so I'm considering another platform that can do this.

It looks like mbin, Piefed and FediLab have the ability to do this. Has anyone tried them and have a comparison?

I also heard it may be possible to do from just mastodon-like platforms. Anyone tried this?