Server/Federation status update July 14, 2023
Following up on the 2 July post, the different federation issues around Lemmy seem to have been fixed and digipres.cafe has been upgraded.
While it wasn't the best timing for federation to stop entirely some positives were learning more about ActivityPub and this time the upgrade went smoothly!
Hopefully the Lemmy team have good tests in place to avoid some of the more fundamental issues in future.
Back to digipres.cafe?
Hopefully folks haven't been too put off by the experience. I see some people active on here, thanks @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] for plugging away!!
How to use digipres.cafe
A small guide has been written up here. Hopefully that's a good starting point for folk.
One way you can think about federation via Lemmy and digipres.cafe is like a hashtag (except with an '@') that allows your post from another ActivityPub instance to be indexed here and then interacted with from other ActivityPub instances. As a link aggregator it may attract different audiences and different interactions that you may not get through a single ActivityPub instance on its own. The best thing is folks interacting with your posts in the original ActivityPub instance, here on Lemmy, and on their own instance! It has the potential to broaden the reach of all of the interesting and useful links that you're looking at today!!
Server/Federation status update July 2, 2023
Hello everyone - just a brief update as we begin July.
There was some positive interest in https://digipres.cafe in the first week of standing it up.
At the end of that week was an ill-advised upgrade to 0.18 of the Lemmy Software: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy. Some of the issues caused by the upgrade have since been recovered from.
In the past week we've seen more federation issues caused by the upgrade - those seemed to be very local to the Ansible deployment: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106 and have now been fixed. The patch has been applied on the server here to help ease things.
There remains a last(?) Federation issue that really affects the user experience of Federation using Lemmy, described below.
The issue
If you take the URL for this post, and paste it into Mastodon (or another ActivityPub instance), you should be able to boost or comment it. This expands the network reach of the post and this site allowing comments and support to come in from anywhere in the Fediverse.
Since the upgrade it hasn't been possible to do this with posts here on Lemmy.
I have left a comment about it on the GitHub repository. The issue I have responded to may be too broad and so I anticipate it landing in a new specific issue sometime in the future (hopefully near).
Others have noticed the issue as well and so it's great not to be alone.
Going forward
As I say, the issue really affects the user experience of Lemmy. Digipres.cafe is meant to be a link aggregator, but there are other ways of going about that when we're not using the Fediverrse.
But the Fediverse is the unique selling point that made it seem worth standing up with the hope (as mentioned in previous posts) that the site may provide some glue between different ActivityPub instances for information surrounding digital preservation.
Until the issue is fixed, the experience here may be a little lackluster. Hopefully it won't be too long, and then the site can be promoted a little bit more.
Getting started with federation on https://digipres.cafe
Digipres.cafe is part of the Fediverse which means that while it is itself a server, and central source of information, you can also engage with it entirely from your own Federated social media instances, e.g. Mastodon, PeerTube, WriteFreely, and so on. You're completely in control of your posts if you do that - you'll be able to see replies from your followers on your Fediverse instance, plus gather replies from those seeing your link through digipres.cafe.
Hopefully like other link aggregators digipres.cafe can help to generate network effect for those who have a project, blog, or something (pretty much anything) they want to show off or talk about.
Rather than asking users to subscribe to a single central website doing this, and rather than trying to own such a resource, as a Fediverse instance digipres.cafe can simply provide some extra glue between instances connecting things a little more, especially in this post-Twitter yet multi-siloed world.
Hopefully digipres.cafe is inclusive of anything #digipres, #GLAM, #Archives, and anything digital information records management; and anything else tangential to those subjects outside of the disciplines, #InfoSec, #Software, and so on.
Something you may be looking to share more widely, or seek discussion on from your own account (usually with a link to point at, e.g. blog post, podcast, new training resource etc.), can be boosted by copying in digipres.cafe.
Posting
To do this you can use one of the existing channels here (communities) or create your own. And then you copy in that channel in your post, e.g.
There are five communities on the site currently (as suggestions), to include them in your message simply add one of: @[email protected]; @[email protected]; @[email protected]; @[email protected]; @[email protected]
E.g. to share a training course:
Interested on feedback on my new FRED guide at http://example.com/FRED_Guide @[email protected]
E.g. to share a new blog:
Check out my year in review http://example.com/Year_in_Review @[email protected]
Sandbox
There's a Sandbox to allow you to play around with federation too. Please create, delete, modify, and go wild there as you would like to understand more about what is happening when you engage with digipres.cafe.
Following
You can subscribe to channels from your Fediverse instance by searching for them using the same format as above (nb. search for Mastodon is in the top-left corner on the Desktop version):
RSS
There are RSS feeds for the communities on this site (and again for any new communities that are created):
- General: https://digipres.cafe/feeds/c/general.xml?sort=Active
- Web Archiving: https://digipres.cafe/feeds/c/web_archiving.xml?sort=Active
- Events: https://digipres.cafe/feeds/c/events.xml?sort=Active
- Jobs: https://digipres.cafe/feeds/c/jobs.xml?sort=Active
- Learning: https://digipres.cafe/feeds/c/learning.xml?sort=Active
What does Lemmy and digipres.cafe provide?
Lemmy provides other link aggregator features including up-voting and down-voting to help people to find the best posts and replies in future. You can also save posts and find them via your account (if you create one here). Regular Fediverse followers can use their favorite bookmark option.
Communities allow you to separate what you follow from the noise of other channels. E.g. maybe you're only interested in the job postings that people may share here? Maybe you're only interested in web archiving. It's all good, you can subscribe to what's of interest and use different paradigms to follow those based on whether you engage directly via digipres.cafe or, e.g. Mastodon.
It features moderation in case anything is reported or needs to be investigated. And of course, posts and links can be easily found and referenced in future, including those from your Fediverse account. Anything from outside digipres.cafe can be linked to from the original post be that on AusGlam, Mastodon.social, digpres.club, or wherever.
More on Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Connects you to the Fediverse: aka. but Twitter was never your thing
Digipres.cafe (via Lemmy) provides a minimum sign-up if anyone is interested (minimum of a username and password). This connects you to the Fediverse and provides you a way of sharing your links and resources with a wider audience but without the noise of a timeline. You can engage with others via here and it works on a comment-response like basis; again, no-timeline to bother you. As a bonus, links won't enter and leave the zeitgeist at Feed-like-speed and so should stay fresh and findable for longer.
Open
Digipres.cafe is as open as it can possibly be, allowing anyone to engage with it from within the Fediverse, and create new communities and posts. We only ask you follow the Contributor's Covenant Guidelines which will be considered given any reports or complaints.
Welcome!
Hi all - welcome to digipres.cafe. Think reddit or hacker news for digital preservation and digital preservation tangential links and questions.
The primary idea was born out of recent social media controversies and recognizing how difficult link aggregation will be post-Twitter.
You can create an account here, you can also consider creating new topics and commenting on existing topics from your Mastodon accounts or elsewhere in the Fediverse. It's all linked via the ActivityPub standard.
You can create a new topic from Mastodon by including @[email protected] in your Toot. You can reply to existing topics by replying to a link to a post via Mastodon.
See this helpful YouTube video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXUDs0ee_w0
Please help me to test the idea and understand what is needed to maintain a link aggregator service such as this 🙏(if you have comments or ideas and want to improve this site, please reply here, or elsewhere on the site and let's see what we can do!)
For more information on Lemmy - the software used for digipres.cafe, please check out the information on its parent site: https://join-lemmy.org/