EnbySpacePerson

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

On the Fediverse, the microblogs (Mastodon, its forks, Misskey, its forks, etc.) lack a group functionality. Since tagged posts generally only federate to servers who already receive posts from the originating server, a lot can be missed. Groups offer a bypass. If I follow ActuallyAutistic, it doesn't matter whether anyone on my server follows your server or not. When you @ ActuallyAutistic, I'll see your post.

While they weren't the only group host, a.gup.pe was the main one that people were using to host groups. This had issues because the software that a.gup.pe ran on didn't play well with non-Mastodon microblogs. Sometimes it would work with non-microblog platforms on the Fediverse but it was kind of spotty.

a.gup.pe, the flagship instance for Guppe, went down recently because the policy for .pe domains allows others to buy the domains out from under the owners during a window leading up to the domain expiration.

This serves as a primer about Group functionality. It also covers serious issues with our current options.

Service / software details

Gup.pe functionality

Even if you were already an a.gup.pe user, I think you should read this bit because it's got some background you may not be fully aware of.

• To create a new group, you just did @ followed by the group name you wanted to create followed by @a.gup.pe.
• Once created, it existed and anyone could message it.
• Description, icon, etc. are generic.
• The only option to moderate messages or users for the group would be to:
  
  • Address individual behaviors with the mods / admins of servers with offending users
  • Ask the maintainers of a.gup.pe to block the servers who refuse to moderate their users
• It's not feasible to limit boosts to people who already follow the account.

The simplicity of the service was a benefit in a way but it also has drawbacks.

FediGroups

FediGroups works with “Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica”, putting it ahead of the functionality for gup.pe on that alone.

In order to create a group in FediGroups, you have to request one. This adds a speed bump to the process compared to a.gup.pe but offers several nice features. You get a lot more options including:

• The person who requests creation of the group gets to set its owner
• Display name can be different than handle
• Profile text can be set
• Option to only boost from Followers
• New followers must get approval from the Group Owner
• Boosts don't show in public feeds but only to followers of the account
• Option to keep your group out of the official directory

There's a few big caveats, though.

1. FediGroups has what amounts to a ToS. Most of that ToS is good. However, the part that isn't good is really not good. It prohibits “adult NSFW content.”
   
   • The way it's written, it may be allowable to have a group for, say, writing or reading which gets some posts about erotica or spicy romance. However, that's unclear. Even if that was made clear, I am against onerous restrictions on adult material.
   • That would be fair enough if the software was open source so FediGroups.social was merely the flagship. They could host or not host whatever they liked and someone else host a version which didn't place onerous restrictions on adult materials. Since it isn't currently open source, this is concerning to me and something potential group owners should be aware of.
2. It's not ideal to have only a single group owner.
   
   • In IT, this is often (and somewhat grimly) referred to as the “one bus problem.” I think they would be responsive to requests to reassign ownership if it became necessary but I consider this a significant oversight as currently implemented.

There are some other things I could talk about but those might be feature requests rather than caveats or complaints. Since I'm already thinking about it, it would be nice to have these features:

1. An option to hold new followers' boosts until a mod has approved them
2. An option to prohibit or temporarily prohibit a followers boosts

ovo.st

ovo.st has been around for a few years. It hadn't seen much adoption. Due to some limitations in FediGroups, some people are using it instead of FediGroups. While it's a little more rudimentary, it's very similar to gup.pe's functionality.

The status account for ovo hasn't posted in nearly three years. The software itself got an update ~8 months ago. It's hosted on a Fediverse server in Hong Kong.

This means using it as a straight-up replacement for a.gup.pe with relation to adult material may cause some issues for the community and possibly even for the developer.

Newsmast

Newsmast offers something it calls channels. They appear to have a fairly robust system but I can't evaluate it properly without going through their waitlist. Since they prohibit adult content too, I'm not strongly motivated to go through the extra hoops just to write up a full evaluation of their setup.

Backups

I've heard some chatter that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Instead, we should have duplicate groups across services. I don't think that's a good idea. Have HogansHeroes hosted on Service A and TheAvengers hosted on Service B? Absolutely. You'll get no complaints from me about doing that. However, as soon as we're putting 3GoodThings on Service A, Service B, Service C, and a hypothetical service D, we get the very fragmentation we're trying to avoid with group services in the first place. People won't remember to include all of the variant accounts and eventually one of the accounts will fall off entirely but new folks will miss the consensus group.

Conclusion

With the future of Guppe up in the air, we're left in an uncertain situation. Those who create adult material and those who like to see adult material don't have a clear path forward.

Because it's the most robust of the platforms, I hope that FediGroups makes their software open source. This would allow others to contribute functionality and potentially allow a solution to the problem adults face with our groups situation on the Fediverse today.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #TechTips #Technology #Groups #AdultContent