Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Jussi Pakkanen ☛ CapyPDF 0.9.0 released
There is no major big feature for this release. The most notable is probably the ability to create structured (or "tagged") PDF files. The code supports using both the builtin tags as well as defining your own. Feel free to try it, just know that the API is guaranteed to change.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Thinking aloud about companies in the Fediverse
But there’s more to it than that. The Mastodon developers are non-profit, and Mastodon itself represents a fundamentally different operating model for social networks. Anyone can host an ActivityPub-compatible site; my Mastodon account is on the BSD Network, run tirelessly by a few lovely people in the OpenBSD space. The common protocol means we can all communicate across disparate sites and servers. It’s beautiful, and gets us back to the architecture the Web was supposed to have from the start. Open protocols, distributed servers, accessible software, and people having a choice where they want to go.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Meta updates Threads to connect with Mastodon and other fediverse social networks
The capability, announced by Meta’s engineering team on Thursday, allows users in the United States, Canada and Japan to “federate” their user profiles to ActivityPub-compliant servers. This will also allow other users on those servers to like, reply to and repost their posts.
The fediverse is a larger decentralized network of social media servers linked by the open protocol ActivityPub, widely popularized by the decentralized social network Mastodon. The word, combining “federation” and “universe,” represents the ability for anyone to run their own independent server and connect to the broader social network, which runs as a decentralized network with no central authority.
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The Register UK ☛ Meta connects Threads to the Fediverse
ActivityPub is a protocol devised by the World Wide Web Consortium that allows interoperability between social networks that implement it. The protocol has come to be associated with the "Fediverse" because it enables federated social networks – in which posts flow form one network to another, regardless of owner or operator.
Federation is not new – it's the concept that allows discrete email servers to exchange messages without the need for a central digital post office – but social networks mostly started life as private entities, so preferred to keep participants within their own virtual walls.
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Quartz ☛ Instagram joins 'fediverse' after Mark Zuckerberg, Meta dump metaverse
The fediverse is more grounded in reality than the metaverse, but arguably more confusing. It’s a combination of the words “federation” and “universe.” Simply put, the fediverse is a group of social networks that can communicate and work together across platforms. Meta breaks it down further.
"One way to think about the fediverse is to compare it to email. You can send an email from a Gmail account to a Yahoo account, for example, because those services support the same protocols. Similarly, in the fediverse you can connect with people who use different social networking services that are built on the same protocol, removing the silos that confine people and their followers to any single platform. But unlike email, your fediverse conversations and profile are public and can be shared across servers. -Meta describing the fediverse in its announcement Thursday"