Indymedia reboot and epicyon codeing - hackathon

Meeting ActivityPub Conference 2020
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Template and back end work on the epicyon https://epicyon.net/ activertypub code base to make a village/street level indymedia news site based on the OMN project.

We plan to get a test activertypub news site online by the end of the week, if your not sure how it should work watch the video The reboot of the indymedia project - ConfTube

Todo:

  • Add or check emoji. Many are implemented, but it might not be very comprehensive.

  • Figure out the workflow for incoming moderated posts.

  • Artwork for themes. Backgrounds, banners, icon sets, fonts. Get as creative as you want. Instance appearance doesn’t retain users but it’s an initial “this might be interesting” sign.

  • Fix polls, which currently don’t work very well. How are polls supposed to work at the protocol level?

  • Add or fix translations. Translate the website or the Gemini site.

  • Testing with i2p. Are there any new bugs?

  • Change the way that events are displayed, also ideas for how rsvp should be implemented. Is there any consensus on this?

We need to think about a database driven activertypub code base for bigger sites as well

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This sounds really exciting-- I miss indymedia!

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Some things which can be done on Epicyon:

Add or check emoji. Many are implemented, but it might not be very comprehensive.

Figure out the workflow for incoming moderated posts.

Artwork for themes. Backgrounds, banners, icon sets, fonts. Get as creative as you want. Instance appearance doesn’t retain users but it’s an initial “this might be interesting” sign.

Fix polls, which currently don’t work very well. How are polls supposed to work at the protocol level?

Add or fix translations. Translate the website or the Gemini site.

Testing with i2p. Are there any new bugs?

Testing in lynx, or a similar shell browser, with a screen reader. The UI should be accessible!

Change the way that events are displayed, also ideas for how rsvp should be implemented. Is there any consensus on this?

An advanced challenge would be to add support for WebAuth. My knowledge of this is hazy, and it might involve adding javascript to the login screen. WebAuth with a physical token might be useful in some scenarios (including journalistic ones).

Support atom feeds on the newswire.

When switching to the Indymedia theme, make it a blogging instance by default.

Metadata is removed from uploaded images. Maybe under some journalistic scenarios the metadata should be preserved. Perhaps an option box for “preserve photo metadata”.

For photo journalism, should the media timeline look any different?

Add the option to specify or suggest a petname at the time of following an account.

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Added it to the main post will share it out agen in a bit.

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Codeing happening live’ish https://unite.openworlds.info/bashrc/epicyon/compare/aa1e481b1095d377d60ce3a4321062cb595fcc2a...6dbf97e172da92e017ddb7f8de19581e63b8f8c4

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Adding a news timeline to show featured items. There will be a news instance type where this is the default timeline.

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@hamishcampbell and others;
can we define a use-case for “bigger sites” that would require backend database?
including min/max user count - there should be some kind of cap to re-enforce federation (of course, people can edit, but no reason not to encourage sense).

is this specifically for epicyon? or other relevant aspects of freedombone as well (e.g. blogging apps, etc) ?

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Were recreating an existing project with all its structures and process in place.

Indymedia worked at city level, regional/state level, national level and global level.

We are adding an extra level the hyper local to this mix.

We still need a code-base that works at city, regional, national and global.

Its a big project for thousands if not 10’s of thousands of people to be involved

This grew very fast, most in the first 3 years:

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

IMCs

www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india

United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

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ok, this is great, to get a better sense of it’s reach.

Tell me if this is too far off-topic in this particular thread.
But I would still be interested in determining some method for scaling.
These would, at the very least, be “recommended/ sensible” defaults.

I believe that once a group of people (collaborating, or even just participating in the same space, digitally or physically) gets beyond a certain capacity, moderation, consensus and forward-moving discussion/action becomes near impossible (and maybe this is a good thing).

Consider any species population on the planet. Once a certain scale is met, it will self-divide, or if not in it’s nature, it will be kept to a healthy size by a predator (do not anthropomorphise the word predator).

Example

Let’s assume a maximum size for any functioning community to be 150 (I lean toward slightly less, but it’s a more round-ish number).

15,000 people choose to be involved within one IMC, and they do not wish to divide into several smaller (approx 67 IMC’s) - one option might be:

  • Divide the 15,000 into 100 “sub-IMC’s” (groups) of 150 members

    • each work with an equal proportion of the data flows coming in and going out from the IMC (blogs, reports, toots, etc…)
    • there is no division based on content
    • each group should be capable of handling all content types

  • Within each 150, have tight “guilds” ranging (default) from 3-12 members

    • for a particular sub-set of the data flows - maybe determined simply by a specific set of #hashtags
    • 3 minimum, required for consensus
    • 12 is already a risky maximum for being able to maintain reasonable consensus

  • Each “guild” shall likely be “specialised” in their expertise

    • multiple guilds may have the same specialty
      • sharing a proportion of the sub-set of data flows, or based on #hashtag, etc
    • consensus should be reached between related guilds
      • automatically propogated out when making decisions within the guilds’ “specialty”
      • before propagating out to the wider set of guilds - for IMC-related decisions

  • Further “guild-level” consensus may be implemented between groups for manageable “web”- (as opposed to hierarchical) decision making for the IMC at large.

  • Each of the 100 groups could similarly have a “web”-based decision making approach, in order to achieve consensus among the IMC in toto.

    • at this level, should consensus be difficult to reach, particularly repeatedly, this would be a strong sign to split
      • obviously the splits would ideally remain connected as “trusted peers” within the larger network of IMC’s.

  • Regarding consensus, there could be more “levels” between “guild” through to “group”, but kept to a minimum here for brevity.

    • sets of 3 “guilds” may have to first achieve consensus before
    • here we enter realms of more complication that require more thought, and would be more diverse in approach between different IMC’s

Of course, I accept that an IMC might choose not to follow this, but I believe we would be utterly remiss if we were not to encourage this.

If there is any level of agreement for this approach, I would happily discuss it further, as I feel it would greatly help in building a genuinely robust network, that may be resistant to the inevitable in-fighting and collapse of “oversized colonies”.

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Its interesting to think about this, but likely not useful as almost all these decisions are made at the user/affinity group level and our mission is to build tools that allow them to take different paths, that still interop - activertypub.

In the indymedia project most decisions already have a default - thus more a historian thinking, how did it used to work is the question… and its more complex than that - as how did it work at the successful start and how did it work at the dieing end is also a argument we do not wont to repeat :slight_smile:

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Think the were 5 used codebases and a few verations working over indymedia history, the is a page some were :slight_smile:

In the UK the were all these IMC running on the same server, running java based Mear, just with different front ends
Birmingham

Cambridge

Liverpool

London

Oxford

Sheffield

South Coast

Wales

http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2020/10/08/how-should-the-hyper-local-indymedia-rollout/

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indymedia
indymedia1000Ă—462 76.1 KB
we have a retro interface #indymediaback

We will need some UX crew to do a modern one as well soon.

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Hey folks, trying to catch up with development of Epicyon and can’t seem to access the Matrix server @ matrix.freedombone.net (currently 403’ing) and I see that https://code.freedombone.net has also no public sign-ups or open issues on what is being worked on. So, from a developer on-boarding perspective, it is a bit tricky. I’m up for throwing in a bit of time into this if I can, so just letting you know that it is a bit hard right now. Thanks for the great initiative.

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At present it’s best to add issues on https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/epicyon. My own server doesn’t have the capacity to handle a lot of git cloning of large repos. The matrix server should be operational, but it’s not a public server.

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Ah ok! Although @hamishcampbell recommended that I see/create issues over @ https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/epicyon. Are you both (or whoever is doing this project) active/responsive to @'s there? Also re: matrix server, if not public then how do I join? I guess public would be easier, especially from a perspective of getting other people involved. Just trying to figure out the lay of the land.

EDIT: re: matrix server, its advertised as the place to come and chat on https://epicyon.net, so I assumed it would be public.

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Yes you can make issues there if you prefer. I can pull in PRs from anywhere if they occur.

Matrix is decentralized, like the fediverse, so it doesn’t matter which homeserver you join. Search for #epicyon:matrix.freedombone.net