tallship

2023-01-20 02:02:49

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

takahē – A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPub – this is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at:@[url=/@/tallship@public.mitra.social]tallship@public.mitra.social[/url]

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

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Welcome | Takahē

Takahē is an ActivityPub server designed for efficient use on small- to medium-size installations, and which allows you to host multiple domains on the same infrastructure.

^{jointakahe.org}

Bradley D. Thornton

2023-01-23 09:46:11

Yes, back when SNI first enabled us to move away from IP based VirtualHost containers in Apache to the Name Based VirtualHost where many websites shared a single IP address, there were some interesting issues, such as the default VirtualHost being displayed if you didn't also specify non RFC compliant hostnames as aliases.

For example, there was a trend at the time to ignore proper usage of hostnames, with "www" generally being used as the traditional defacto, default hostname for a host delivering HTTP. i.e.,(http://www.SLD.TLD).

Similarly, you would usually name your first FTP server "ftp", and the protocol was specified as "ftp", yielding ftp://ftp.SLD.TLD, and gopher would be gopher://hostname.SLD.TLD in the address bar of your browser. Other protocols followed that same "protocol://hostname.4LD.3LD.SLD.TLD format, these child zones being a very common practice in universities in the .EDU and .MIL TLDs, as well as the .UK, .FR, .AU, .US, and some other ccTLD's (Australia has recently dropped that whole requirement for .com.au and .net.au finally lol).

So, although it was merely convention to name your hosts after the services they were delivering, like "www, www2, www3, Etc.", or ftp, gopher, Etc., Those were only conventions and you could name them whatever you wanted.

But you weren't supposed to use the canonical domain name as the hostname!

Nevertheless, as the "web" became more ubiquitous and average users, oblivious to other protocols, began to ask the question, "why do I need to type in all those extra characters for www.ibm.com (like http://www3.ibm.com) instead of just ibm.com?", in conjunction with the popular trend of browsers defaulting to "http://" protocol (unless you manually specified another protocol), many providers started to accommodate those hosting customers by breaking with the RFCs and pointing DNS A RRs to "@" or "SLD.TLD" - the canonical domain name, akong with another A record for "hostname.SLD.TLD" (usually still using www for the first website).

Now, when you query a DNS server for a hostname, it returns an IP address, no problem so far. And with IP based hosting it really doesn't matter what you call your website in your Apache server's VirtualHost container - it's just going to return a web page for the server at that IP address, coz that's all it's being asked: "Do you have HTML to send me for the IP address on this HTTP server?", And then it sends the page - coz there's only one website per IP address!

But with HTTP 1.1 and SNI it's a compound question:

"Do you have HTML to send me for the IP address with the hostname of 'www.SLD.TLD' on this HTTP server?"

If yes, then serve the page. If not however, it gets a little weird. The default VirtualHost container is usually the first one defined in httpd.conf, so on many web servers that's the page that says - "It Works!" lolz.

So, in DNS you had to have two A Resource Records (RRs) one for say, 'www', and one for '@', or you could use a CNAME RR if you're one of those lame-o boneheads (bad form - don't use CNAME's!), AND... You also either need to specify two <Named VirtualHost> containers pointing to the same directory, or just one with an Alias directive.

NOTE: you 'could' point to two different directories, but in 99% of all cases, why the heck would you do that?

I dunno why, but maybe coz many hosting providers didn't understand how to write a DNS zonefile in BIND or maybe coz they didn't grasp that the browser was actually now asking for an actual hostname with it's request to the IP address that httpd was listening on, but this resulted in a lot of "no joy" when people neglected to type in the "www", resulting in delivery of either someone else's website or the comical "It Works!" page (ROFLMAOPMP).

Adding insult to injury, the opposite could be the case when leaving out the hostname and just typing in the domain into the address bar, depending on how httpd.conf was configured - many knowledgeable sysadmins resisted this the because it wasn't RFC compliant, but eventually (the customer's money is always right), most default websites today just serve the canonical domain name as the main (or maybe even the only) hostname in a VirtualHost container in Apache with an alias to the 'www' hostname (or server block on Nginx.

As a little epilog, that came back to bite hosting providers, and moreso, their customers, in the last decade or so when the evil Cloudflare and ever popular WordPress came into prominence - To enforce their predatory vendor lock-in practices, Cloudflare offered free CDN services to people with websites... But only for one hostname per domain, AND, that hostname HAD TO BE "www", lolz...

Well, after a couple of decades of dumbing down the user and people setting the main name of their WordPress sites to, "SLD.TLD", this would cause, in the best scenario, to have their websites served to most people without the (so-called) benefit of Cloudflare's CDN... Unless you could retrain every user on the entire planet to type in the actual hostname (www), OR... pay Cloudflare lolz.... 🤘🤡🤘

Well my friend, That's all I've got right now, I hope you found that a bit amusing in a sort of nostalgic kinda way.

#tallship #ramblings #lamentations #humor #geek porn #BOFH #comedy

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tallship

2023-01-18 12:00:10

"IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up."

— Tim Paterson