IFTAS is happy to announce the public availability of our DSA Guide for Decentralized Services – a practical guide for small and micro services that are subject to the EU’s Digital Services Act.

If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, even if you are not based or hosted in the EU.

Developed in collaboration with the great people at Tremau, our DSA Guide is designed to help independent social media service providers navigate these complex regulations and achieve compliance with these new rules without compromising the unique qualities of federated, open social networks.

As part of our Needs Assessment activities, we’ve heard a repeated need for help understanding the complex regulatory landscape that decentralized services need to consider, and this DSA Guide is the first of many in our plan to provide clear, actionable guidance to a range of regulations for the community.

As of February 2024, all online services and digital platforms that offer services in the European Union are required to be fully compliant with the DSA.

However, various portions of the DSA are not applicable to “small and micro” services, and this guide will show you clearly which parts apply and which do not.

For administrators of platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Pixelfed, the DSA Guide can help demystify the requirements and offer practical advice on achieving compliance for the over 27,000 independent operators of these and other decentralized social media services who otherwise may not be able to obtain the guidance and advice that larger operations can afford to invest in.

Download the DSA Guide for Decentralized Fediverse Services.

To join the discussion, visit our community chat service at matrix.to/#/#space:matrix.ifta… or stay tuned to join our community portal in the coming weeks!

about.iftas.org/2024/04/09/dsa…

#ActivityPub #BetterSocialMedia #DSA #Fediverse

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2024.03. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains several fixes for security issues reported by snajafov, arcanicanis and r1pu5u – Thank you for the reports! We strongly recommend all Friendica admins to update their installations to this stable release.

The highlights of Friendica 2024.03 are

• We could optimize the performance in some areas.
• An OCR addon based on Tesseract was added to optionally create missing image descriptions from the text containd in an image.
• The Channels feature–our user defined algorithm to sort the network stream that was introduced with Friendica 2023.12–has been improved and expanded.
• The handling of videos and images has been improved and support for WebP has been added.

Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.

For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.

What is Friendica

Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumbler and BlueSky.

How to Update

Updating from old Friendica versions

If you are updating from an older version than the 2022.12 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as it contained some breaking changes.

Pre-Update Procedures

Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.

Using Git

Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2024.03 release would be
cd friendicagit pullbin/composer.phar install --no-devcd addongit pull
If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.

Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.

Using the Archive Files

We experience some problem with the build process for the addon archive of the stable branch and will add instruction how to upgrade your installation using the archive files as soon as possible.

Post Update Tasks

The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.

Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.

Known Issues

At the time of writing this, none

How to Contribute

If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!

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friendi.ca/2024/03/21/friendic…

#release

Even if you’ve been a part of the Fediverse for a long time, you’d be excused if you had never heard of Nomadic Identity. Within the confines of Mastodon, it’s a relatively unknown concept. But, for some of us, it’s something of a pipe dream: decentralized identity management with remote access control. On paper, that doesn’t sound too exciting, but it’s a huge concept. Even more exciting: the guy who designed it is bringing it to ActivityPub.

What the Heck is Nomadic Identity?

Nomadic Identity is a concept pioneered by Mike Macgirvin, a longtime builder in the Fediverse. If you’ve ever used Friendica, Hubzilla, or Streams, you’ve used software written by this guy.

Got Zot — Mike Macgirvin on building your own apps and protocols
An interview with the brilliant mind behind the Zot protocol, MagicAuth, and Nomadic Identity.

One of the big problems in federated social systems involves permissions, identity, and data. We can sum this up in three parts:

1. Permission Management – If I visit a friend’s site to interact with something, there typically isn’t a way for me to do anything while I’m over there. I have to go back to my server.
2. Identity Management – Okay, I have a way to validate that I’m really me. What do I have as a fallback if that fails?
3. Data Portability – What happens to my stuff if my server goes down? Can I move to another servers and get my statuses, messages, and interactions back? Could I even just do it temporarily, to keep my followers, while my server gets sorted out?

From the end user’s side of the house, everything boils down to how their identities are coupled to their instances. ActivityPub-based systems like Mastodon do a pretty decent job with letting people migrate from one server to another, letting users pull in remote statuses from a URL, and letting users decide who is allowed to see or reply to their posts. It’s a far better situation than what came before ActivityPub.

At the end of the day, though, what is currently provided in the ActivityPub side of the network is somewhat limited, compared to what the Zot protocol brings to the table with Nomadic Identity. Let’s dive into the three different components: OpenWebAuth, Channel Relays, and Data Migration.

OpenWebAuth

OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.

The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.

spectra.video/videos/embed/98b…
A really old video of Hubzilla doing it. I’m navigating from my site to Andrew’s.
OpenWebAuth solves one of the most frustrating UX problems the Fediverse currently has: dealing with remote content that you discovered somewhere else.

Channel Relays

Channel Relays are the second major piece of the puzzle here. Using a common ID, you can associate separate accounts across the network with one another. Each relay is verified through an Authorization process, and then each relay is tethered to one another like so:

Using your credentials, you can log into any one of these three relays, and post to your followers. If the server my work account is on suddenly goes down, I can still log in to my family account or blog, and keep interacting like nothing happened. I’m still in contact with my followers, and if I want, my relay accounts can replicate statuses posted from elsewhere.

A few clear benefits emerge from this:

• Network Resilience
• Censorship Resistance
• Ease of Migration

In fact, this mechanism is so good, it feeds directly into the next use-case: Data Migration.

Data Migration

So, we already have two pieces: multiple identities can be connected together across a network, logging into one can allow you to post from another, and a person can decide, at any time, which account will serve as their primary.

Because all of these things are set up, the act of moving your stuff becomes relatively trivial. All of your accounts are aware of each other. If you switch to a new primary, you can trigger an update to all of your existing conversation threads and comments to switch the author, and replicate the data on your end. Thanks to the way that Nomadic Identity is set up, those verified parts of your identity can perform those kinds of actions, whereas no other account can.

Why is This Important?

As we continue to think about how to further develop the Fediverse and give people more robust tools capable of doing more things, we have to consider the plumbing that holds it all together. Identity Management is one of those pieces of plumbing that’s surprisingly shaky, and requires serious consideration.

Digital Identities aren’t something unique to the fediverse and it’s not something Mastodon could stop if they wanted to. Nomadic identity is coming to the internet. The only question is who is going to own your identity. VISA/Mastercard, your government, Google, Microsoft, or you.

Mike Macgirvin

As Threads, Tumblr, and other big social networks come into the space, developers need to think about the stakes. The user migration flow is decent for moving from one server to another, but it’s relatively brittle, and currently only updates a reference from one account to another. The network lacks meaningful ways for people to pull their posts, messages, and media from the place they left.

The biggest takeaway here is that these are mature, time-tested mechanisms that could add extra layers of user agency and control to the Fediverse.

What’s Next?

Mike is already doing the work of figuring out how to retrofit these concepts onto ActivityPub. It’s likely that we’ll see additional Fediverse Enhancement Proposals to accommodate certain needs. For implementers, there are a few existing FEPs in the DRAFT stage that come recommended:

• FEP-ef61: Portable Objects
• FEP-521a: Representing actor’s public keys
• FEP-8b32: Object Integrity Proofs
• FEP-61cf: The OpenWebAuth Protocol

wedistribute.org/2024/03/activ…

#MikeMacgirvin #NomadicIdentity #Zot