silverpill

You can find some useful tips in this guide: https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/guide.md.

>Any common pitfalls or things to avoid early on?

Don’t use JSON-LD.

It does not. That is as optional as fiat exchanges with cryptocurrencies.

Taler claims to be “not a currency”, that means it has to be used with existing currency such as Euro. That means an exchange is not optional. I guess it can be used with a cryptocurrency too, or fake money, but obviously this is not what people are interested in.

And the resulting tokens are like physical cash and can not be de-anonymized by the exchange or anyone else in the chain.

Again, according to the Taler website, the exchange tracks every transaction in order to prevent double spends. If it has a full view of the network, it can employ statistical analysis.

I think you should really inform yourself better before making yourself look really stupid by confidently spreading such non-sense.

Only you make unsubstantiated claims here.

If you believe Taler is decentralized, provide an example of it being used with a widely accepted peer to peer currency such as Bitcoin.
If you believe Taler is fully private, show us a security audit which confirms Taler’s resistance to statistical analysis.

It’s not centralized at all

It depends on the banking system with its proprietary APIs and centralized money issuance.

privacy for buyers, but not sellers

In order to spend money, you need to receive it first. I don’t know if it makes you a “seller” in Taler, but in any case, this partial protection probably makes de-anonymization of all transactions via statistical analysis much easier.

Potentially, maybe. Taler is centralized and has poor privacy protections, but if it ever takes off it might become a good option in jurisdictions where decentralized currencies are illegal.

Meanwhile, Monero already works for the Fediverse:

https://deadsuperhero.com/the-fediverse-and-content-creation-monetization/#honorable-mention-mitra

Blockchain is a bad choice for a social network, it’s expensive and all data is public. But since we’re talking about decentralization, let’s make a rough comparison.

Bitcoin: 24229 nodes (source: https://bitnodes.io)
Fediverse: 30005 nodes (source: https://fedilist.com)

Most of blockchain networks are much smaller than Bitcoin, so they don’t even come close to the Fediverse in terms of decentralization.

It federates, I was told that it uses FEP-1b12. However, I haven’t yet gotten past the actor discovery because there is always some bug that prevents further interactions 😅

Mastodon enforces character limit for its own posts, but not for posts coming through federation. Most Fediverse platforms work in the same way, so differing character limits is not a problem.

I don’t know about Bluesky, it may truncate long posts because it uses a different protocol.

ActivityPub is supposed to be a solution to this problem.

As far as I know, Mastodon and Pixelfed are already interoperable, and shouldn’t need a cross poster. Bluesky users can be reached through BridgyFed. Lemmy is only partially interoperable with Mastodon, but this is a result of developers’ choices and not a limitation of the protocol. I can post to all four services, for example.

Fediverse is tens of thousands of instances. You may need a VPN to access your home instance (e.g. if it is blocked in your country), the rest of the network can be accessed from there.
I never heard about instances doing KYC (which is usually done by payments processors). If your home instance requires KYC, you can always move to another instance that doesn’t require it, because there are so many of them all across the world.

VPNs are not much different from the Fediverse, by the way. It’s just servers, they can be blocked by ISPs, and they can geoblock users. This is also true for Nostr relays, IPFS gateways, Tor relays, etc.

@fediverse

Fediverse is very good at censorship resistance, much better than alternatives.
If internet is restricted in your country, use a VPN. If you’re an admin, move your server to a different country.

If internet is not restricted, then there is nothing to worry about.

@fediverse

@Teknevra It can be done with FEP-ae97:

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae97/fep-ae97.md

Which enables shared identity and seamless migration as you describe, but I don’t think traditional web login needs to be abandoned. Fediverse will support both types of identities.

@fediverse

@5dh @fediverse Financial incentive is not the only possible cause. If project leaders stop listening to their users for some other reason, you’ll get the same result.
And there is another, more subtle problem: protocol bloat. Fediverse services are getting more and more complicated, and the cost of creating a new platform is constantly increasing. If this problem is not addressed, at some point Fediverse will start looking like a web browser market, where new players can’t compete due to an immense implementation complexity.

@deadsuperhero @fediverse @quillmatiq Protocols described in these FEPs are currency-agnostic and developers can build actual platforms and solutions on them (as I did). This is the only ongoing effort to bring a payment layer to the Fediverse - there are no alternative proposals. FEP-8c3f was withdrawn in favor of FEP-0ea0.

Okay, you didn’t know about it. But now you do and it would be nice to include at least some of that information in the article.

@deadsuperhero @fediverse You cite an abandoned project and withdrawn WebMonetization FEP and then say “most efforts have not advanced beyond the planning stages”. This statement is misleading because those planning stages are far behind us. Mitra had subscriptions since 2022 and there are other projects that provide monetization options, like PeerTube Lightning plugin and PeerTube Premium Users plugin. FEP-0ea0 and FEP-0837 were published and implemented. Your co-author @quillmatiq should be well aware of these developments because we talked about it

@deadsuperhero @fediverse

Why did’t you mention Mitra, the open source and fully decentralized Fediverse service that also offers paid subscriptions, and which has been around for several years?

@maegul @fediverse Some ActivityPub implementations already work as social media browsers. For example, my server can interact with microblogs, but also forums, blogs, events etc. The more activity / object types are supported, the closer software is to a browser.

@Ferminho @maegul This proposal describes a very simple marketplace, and some things were intentionally left out. However, it is based on Valueflows system which can be used to describe many different economic processes, including planning, production and transportation:

https://www.valueflo.ws/introduction/core/

So developers may use object types and properties defined there if they want to build something more complicated. And social interactions can be represented as standard ActivityPub activities. I think Valueflows and ActivityPub nicely complement each other.