@FinchHaven @DrPen

Oh my, lolz. With specificity, I recommend you checkout the archives in the Fediverse City Matrix community where so many Fediverse lead devs share, and then there's dozens of news articles and blog posts I've covered over the years with respect to #Fediverse, #ActivityPub, and #FOSS daemons in general.

But real quick, I can offer a couple of nuggets for you to take a look at and evaluate for yourself...

Android:

- Relatica is one of the finest clients for Friendica, not to take my recommendation lightly because I rarely recommend any client specifically designed for a single platform.
- Fedilab is IMO, perhaps the best, supporting your deprecated mastoSilo, #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, #Pleroma, and most other Fediverse platforms and their families of forks.

If the devil is in the details, then translation leveraging via #LibreTranslate, lightning fast cross boosting/liking/bookmarking/scheduling, quote posting, dynamic character count limits per account/server, multiple input methods and just way too much to list.

A few years back when many apps were getting booted from the playstore, the trust of their userbases eroding for their crippleware practices when several of them, and most notably tusky, hard coded blocked lists of Fediverse servers that their users could not log onto. This violated truth in advertising laws and it's water under the bridge now but the stain remains, and #Fedilab was almost singularly the app that refused to violate the spirit of #FOSS or alienate users. Get it at F-Droid.

Web:

- Without a doubt the best experience is almost universally the native web UI. Some exceptions do exist, and have even spawned entire Fediverse server projects. This is unfortunately why I don't use the excellent platform #GoToSocial very often, although I like it, and I no longer use Takahē much nowadays either since they dropped their excellent web UI.
- Phanpy is a fav of many #Mitra users, although I can't use it because it breaks webfinger addresses through what @cheeaun calls "short usernames", often rendering identification extremely problematic on a regular basis. I prefer the good looking native web UI for Mitra anyway, mitra-web, because Mitra is a privacy conscious publishing platform that does indeed natively support #Monero based subscriptions for anyone in the Fediverse (think substack or medium but respecting privacy - even anonymity) - I believe Ethereum support has already been completely dropped. Maybe you can still login that way. There's been quite a few specialized projects spawned from Mitra, perhaps not in small part due to it's stubborn commitment to only open standards, like FEP-ef61, along with #Streams - the bleeding edge in Fediverse technology, actively developed by the same dev that created #Friendica, arguably the oldest extant Fediverse platform 🙂
- I would be remis in my list if I didn't include Pinafore, once considered the most cross-server compliant client, but like anything built with frameworks that are replaced wholesale, the dev felt it just wasn't worth it to go through and completely modernize the entire base (there's a blog post about why).... Well, there's a lot of pretty little third rate semi-crappy clients nowadays, and a few top notch ones too. I'm only giving honorable mention to a few that I recommend you familiarize yourself with for grounding :)

I really like #SocialHome too, another full on Fediverse publishing platform, but the web UI is really the way to go.

On the publishing platforms in the Fediverse, the real beauty Stones when articles are boosted to other platforms that also support #Markdown, #LaTex, #MFM, etc. And of course they can also do whatever that shitty one trick pony 'mastopub' can, literally a cheap Twitter clone that strives to itself be the next deprecated monolithic silo (just check the list of Twitter cofounders on the board).

Desktop:

I'm only going to mention Sengi real quick here, there's a few, but here's a bit of advice from someone who's been administering #Linux servers since 1992 and #UNIX in general since the 80's - avoid snap and flatpaks and appimage unless you're rolling your own or there's just no choice for your skill level.

Depending upon your particular distro, look for usually a .deb or a .rpm package (you can thank me later, as you'll get the full featured experience as the dev intended that's the native package for your Linux distro).

Okay I kinda like Whalebird too, it's what I use for GoToSocial and I like it for #Misskey flavors too, including #Iceshrimp and #CherryPick🍒 is a fav in that family too.

I've tested very little of anything in Windows however, and completely, categorically dismiss anything Apple 🍏 that's Post-Woz 😜

If you have alterations related to historical aspects of any of these platforms or apps that long predate the existence of masto, feel free to hit me up and I'll see if I can't point you towards some good resources.

I hope that helps! Live long and prosper 🖖

#tallship #nomadic_identity #Fediverse_clients #Takahe

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@silverpill @Hyolobrika

Hehehe.... I suppose this is my opportunity to plug Joshua's free domain name service here that's been a trusted mainstay for over 20 years :p

Perhaps one of the best parts is that you can see how many days (years) the domain has been part of the service, to dissuade concerns over whether there's a likelihood of it suddenly disappearing :)

And.... who doesn't love #FreeBSD?

Aside from lotech #Sneakernet schemas, there's also several FOSS based community driven initiatives. There's been a lot of real-world, ad-hoc development since my years of participation in the IRTF/IRSG DTNRG. Full disclosure, I was also formerly employed by Semtech. The notion that there's a use case for communications that can take months, even decades to arrive (or never at all) is a valid concern for many practical applications.

More immediate, and relevant communications systems for most folks here on Terra Firma include projects like Lokinet, which has some great info HERE, and also aspires to the same level of, um... disconnectivity (sneakernet-like) or operability that @silverpill mentions above - the value of having a client/server architecture that is prepared to exploit this out of the box is much relevant that one might think.

Some of these semi-production or production ready real world initiatives and communities are:

- CellSol - It is noteworthy to mention that Texas is the only state in the USA that sports an (actually only mostly) autonomous electricity grid (not dependent upon the national grid), although it's not publicly managed, and has been criticized as such due in part to nearly 1000 deaths occurring in the winter of 2021. The repo is HERE. Here's a PoC for one such use case from the PoV of a native Texan: Apologies for directly linking to an article in the monolithic silo space.

During my years living quite literally off-grid in the wilderness of the forested mountains in Northern California, I had the privilege of meeting and contracting for several farms and individuals deeply steeped in what is generally referred to as the prepper movement. These weren't cray cay militants (at least not most of them) or paranoiacs calling for revolution or believing the end is nigh, but rather, farmers and families who were, rightfully so, extremely concerned with security and safety for their small communities and loved ones. To survive in places like that, which exist all over the world, one must begin with self-sufficiency that covers 4 seasons; beyond that, protecting the 'me and mine' aspects of your assets and property are very real considerations.

The work I focused on led me to developing microwave surveillance systems using inexpensive, solar powered Ubiquiti Nanostations with ranges capable of exceeding 10KM, strategically placed in almost inaccessible locations overlooking entire valleys as well as within small perimeters of their farms and households. This included off the shelf PTZ cameras, many of which were capable of license plate and facial recognition, but more importantly, being able to determine the difference between things like Bears, Deer, and Humans - false positive intrusions detected are quite frustrating, lolz.

All of this was coupled together with Shinobi, which can be monitored and controlled from anywhere, on any device. The repo is here.

With the extreme threat levels of thievery and other concerns in those regions, and continuous incidents of such, a comprehensive #FOSS based, #solar powered communications and surveillance system is an in demand market. Internet access is of course, problematic in such regions, which creates the market for WISPs operating in the unlicensed microwave bands a high demand commodity as well.

This is merely demonstrative of the need for another niche type computing arena - community networks completely unconnected to the Internet:

- A BLE LRMN project - The git repo for the dual-licensed software is [HERE(https://github.com/mwaylabs/fruitymesh).
- Many more BLE projects (many in Rust) here
- More BLE for IoT
- Off-Grid Mesh Networks using LoRa and/or BLE
- BSD licensed OpenThread
- Message Queuing Telemetry Transport - NOTE: For XMPP, ejabberd has native broker services.
- Freeing up Zigbee devices w/MQTT
- OSS-7 / Dash-7 Lora/LoraWAN technologies are sub Ghz.
- More (dry) IEEE related Mesh stuffs

All of these projects, protocols, and initiatives have solution based choices for the various kinds of Delay Tolerant Networking standards and communities actively developing for connectionless, intermittently connected systems, or autonomous networks that aren't neccessarily interdependant upon a classic, traditional, Internet connection.

Not sufficient to just eschew the deprecated, privacy disrespecting monolithic silos, it's also not prudent to depend upon clearnet aspects of the Internet either. In practice, it's possible to take pretty much any platform technology that listens for packets and fashion the ability to be accessible and available via I2P, Tor, IPFS Yggdrasil, and other IP routed constructs, yet moreover, the majority of people only consider intercommunication in terms of the IP routed packet switched network we call the Internet (powered almost entirely by Cisco IOS and the like), without due consideration given to the fact that this single common denominator is also a single choke point - kludgy platforms like masto that can't even keep up with the contemporary movements in the social networking landscape aren't going to fare well when it comes to the expanding horizons opening up with movements like those above, while others like Sreams, Mitra, and perhaps protocols such as Nostr that exhibit the ambitions to explore and exploit emerging technologies in communication will fare much better, adapting (and embracing layer 1 & 2 networking) along the way.

#tallship #DNS #nomadic_identity #sneakernet #PTZ #WISP

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