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   Mastodon Engineering (mastodonengineering@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 23:29:58 JST Mastodon Engineering

   • Next Generation Internet

   We are excited to launch a new project that will help small and medium-sized fediverse servers and their users have better access to search and discovery through the use of pluggable Fediverse Discovery Providers, supported by a grant from @EC_NGI. See our new dedicated website for details:

   https://fediscovery.org/

   • gidi likes this.
   • BeAware :fediverse: and silverpill repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     ChiefGyk3D (chiefgyk3d@social.chiefgyk3d.com)'s status on Friday, 13-Sep-2024 00:03:43 JST ChiefGyk3D

     in reply to

     • Next Generation Internet

     @MastodonEngineering @EC_NGI this is pretty cool, and means it will be even easier to use Mastodon and such over time. As a small server for just me and a few friends this will be fantastic. I am already pretty well federated but this will make it by far easier in the future.

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     Wysteria (wysteriary@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Sep-2024 00:10:42 JST Wysteria

     in reply to

     • Next Generation Internet

     @MastodonEngineering @EC_NGI Is this meant to supplant relays?

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     Scotty Trees (scottytrees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Sep-2024 08:18:20 JST Scotty Trees

     in reply to

     @MastodonEngineering eli5, what does this mean to casual users?

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     katzenberger (katzenberger@mastodon.de)'s status on Saturday, 14-Sep-2024 07:04:47 JST katzenberger

     in reply to

     • Next Generation Internet

     @MastodonEngineering

     Despite this being promoted as supporting multiple "discovery providers", the text says »This will specify how an instance will “feed” content to a discovery provider to index. And how a discovery provider can be queried to actually search and discover content.«

     Nothing is being said about why there would ever be a need for a more than a few big providers, once it is established that the big ones "work". As usual, centralization is looming here, by a few corps "generously" offering high-speed "discovery" for "free".

     Also, nothing is said about providers sharing results of the indexing, to enable fediverse-wide search - instead, the proposal almost inevitably points to few providers that everybody needs to feed if they want posts to be found.

     "Hope" will not change that hence just saying »We want to specify how a discovery provider works and interfaces with a Fediverse server instance. We hope to inspire several competing implementations of the specification.« does not make much sense.

     Nothing is said about who outside of the Fediverse gets to query a provider, or to process the data that has been extracted from a fediverse server feed - and for which purposes. It's even expressly mentioned that »These “providers” might serve other purposes than just search and discovery«

     »The protocols and implementations will respect user privacy«, but the text only offers "shoulds":

     • »Our reference implementation will respect this setting and only ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place.« (note the telling words "respect" and "ingest" here, it does not even seem consensus that providers are "fed" by Fediverse servers).

     • »All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.« Should?

     • »Fediverse Discovery Providers should only ever index content clearly marked as “public”.« Should?

     • »Fediverse Discovery Providers should honor these settings and only index user data and content from users who have opted-into that.« Should?

     Another red flag: »This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish. But rest assured that we are committed to continue working on this even after this first project has ended, so we will be able to make adjustments later on.«

     More privacy after the first implementation is out? And no: With Mastodon gGmbH being the driver of this, and with the current wording, we can not "rest assured".

     @EC_NGI

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     Mastodon Engineering (mastodonengineering@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 01:14:28 JST Mastodon Engineering

     in reply to

     • Astro

     @astro I am not sure I know what you refer to when using “ascension", but we will post here once we have a public repository with specifications.

   • Embed this notice
     Astro (astro@c3d2.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 01:14:29 JST Astro

     in reply to

     • Next Generation Internet

     @MastodonEngineering @EC_NGI Where do I sign up to become notified once there is a spec regarding ascension from Relay to Provider?