I guess my channel and its Fediverse connectivity is reliable enough now for a test post. The federation issues I had when the channel was new should be fixed.
It's my first attempt at my new meme-posting format with extensive explanations in the post which, I hope, are independent from any external information.
Image related.
Caution: Image hidden due to eye contact spoiler
Explanation
In this use of the image macro version of the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme, Boromir refers to how difficult it is to implement FEP-ef61 and ActivityPub-based nomadic identity into an existing Fediverse server application while developing both at the same time.
It is referring to the difficulties this (streams) channel of mine had in interacting with Hubzilla and connecting to anything non-nomadic and ActivityPub-based in late July and early August. I have registered my (streams) account on version 24.07.20 which was the version that rolled out the new address scheme as per FEP-ef61 plus a few extra features on the way to the implementation of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Thus, my channels were among the first with the new address scheme and these new features. However, while I could establish a connection to my main Hubzilla channel, communication between these channels was between limited and impossible. And when I tried to follow Mastodon users from (streams), they didn't even notice.
Version 24.08.08 is said to have largely fixed these issues. I don't know because this instance has been upgraded straight from 24.08.03 which I haven't extensively tested to 24.08.12 on which these issues
are largely fixed.
Find the following background explanations right below:- One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor
- Snowclone
- Image macro
- Advice animal
- Something Awful
- 4chan and imageboards
- Nomadic identity and FEP-ef61
- Hubzilla, the streams repository and the Zot and Nomad protocols
Meme template explanation: One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor
"One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" is a meme based on a quote from
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson's 2001 film adaptation of the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novel
The Lord of the Rings.
The quote in question is from the scene in which Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, explains the only possible way the One Ring can be destroyed which becomes the very mission of the novel and the film trilogy. Boromir, one of the Fellowship, played by Sean Bean, replies how utterly impossible this is to carry out.
[Elrond]
The ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Gloin, by any craft that we here possess. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade. The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. One of you must do this.
[Boromir]
One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.The first sentence said by Boromir was turned into a snowclone, and image macros based on the scene have traces of an advice animal.
Its early form as a snowclone was "One does not simply
X into Mordor" with
X standing for ways of locomotion or similar actions. It was followed by the variant "One does not simply walk into
X" with
X standing for destinations. Logically, "One does not simply
X into
Y" evolved.
This particular image macro uses another, later form, "One does not simply
X" which generally describes actions that are difficult, nigh-impossible or actually impossible to carry out.
Digression: Snowclone
A
snowclone is a phrase which has been turned into a template that can be and already has been used with its meaning slightly changed by replacing one or a few specific words in it.
It had been around for decades when the American linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum discovered it and wrote
a blog post about it in October, 2003 in which he also laments the lack of a name for this phenomenon. The blog post was originally titled "Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit Form", and the phrase "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists" used in the blog post was accurate, but similarly unwieldy.
Pullum's linguist colleague Glen Whitman eventually suggested the term "snow clone" which he had invented himself, and which was first exposed to the public in
another blog post by Pullum from January 16, 2004.
The term itself was based on what would become
the very first snowclone: The phrase "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy" had been snowcloned into "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow,
X have
N words for
Y" where
X stands for a nation or a group of people,
N stands for a number, and
Y stands for what
X allegedly have
N of.
Over the following years, Pullum collected over 70 snowclones which had existed then already. These included:
- "In space, no-one can hear you X." ("In space, no-one can hear you scream", a poster slogan in the 1979 science-fiction film Alien)
- "X is the new Y." (Probably derived from pink being "the navy blue of India" as said by fashion columnist Diana Vreeland in 1962; originally "X is the new black")
- "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords." ("I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords", said by Kent Brockman in the animated television series The Simpsons)
- "Have X, will travel" ("Have gun, will travel", a decades-old stock phrase discovered by comedian Bob Hope)
- "X are from Mars, Y are from Venus" ("Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" by author John Gray)
In the meantime, the age of Internet memes began. A whole lot of snowclones, often catalogued by Pullum as well, started out as these, for example:
- "Im in ur X Y-ing ur Z" (Variants of "I am in your base killing your d00ds", allegedly first posted on the Web on the Something Awful forums in 2003)
- "X-ers gonna X" ("Haters gonna hate" from the song "Playas Gon' Play" by 3LW from 2000 which itself turned the phrase into a snowclone already)
- "Brace yourselves, X is coming" ("Brace yourselves, winter is coming", said by Ned Stark in the television series Game of Thrones)
- "I don't always X, but when I do, I Y" ("I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis", said by the actor John Goldsmith in a television commercial for Dos Equis beer from 2006)
- "My 'X' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" ("My 'Not involved in human trafficking' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", posted by comedian Mike McGinn on Twitter on November 20th, 2013)
- "I sell X and X accessories" ("I sell propane and propane accessories", said by Hank Hill in the animated televisionseries King of the Hill)
- "I've got N problems but X ain't one" ("I've got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one" from the rap song "99 Problems" by Jay-Z from 2004, itself a quote from the rap song "99 Problems" by Ice-T from 1993)
A more extensive list of snowclones, partially already described and explained, can be found in
The Snowclone Database, created by linguistics student Erin O'Connor and launched in November, 2007.
Digression: Image macro
An
image macro is an image with one or multiple witty pieces of text or catchphrases edited in, similar to captions. They were invented as early as 1905 by the photographer Harry Whitter Frees who took photographs of dressed-up cats and added captions, the first being, "What's delaying my dinner?"
On the World Wide Web, the Something Awful forums were one of the earliest places where image macros were regularly used. It was there where the term "image macro" was invented in early 2004. On February 12th, 2004, a user named Eclipse posted the first definition of the term. The definition is only accessible to logged-in users, so there is no link to it.
From 2005 on, image macros started spreading elsewhere, including the imageboard 4chan. It was there where the definite shape of image macros was created, namely including text in bold white letters using Monotype's Impact type face, pre-installed on Microsoft Windows, with black outlines. The most notable exception are demotivational posters, parodies of motivational posters that first came up in 1998, also because they have the text below the picture rather than on it.
Digression: Advice animal
An
advice animal is a style of image macro that is usually built around a picture of a human, an animal or the like. Sometimes the picture is reduced to the character in the centre, and the background is replaced with a colour wheel which is individual for each template. In other cases, the image is only cropped around the character in the centre, and the background is left in.
A key element of advice animals is that they usually have text at the top and at the bottom which either automatically fit or are made to fit the character in the centre. It's usually a short joke with the setup at the top and the punchline at the bottom.
The foundation of the advice animal genre was laid at The Mushroom Kingdom, a fan forum for the
Super Mario video game franchise, on September 7th, 2006. A user named TEM posted an edited version of a picture of his dog he had posted three days earlier, but with only the dog's head surrounded by a colour wheel with six colours. It wasn't used as an image macro with text yet back then, though. Even though the image is gone now,
the thread is still there.
On July 5th, 2008, the image first appeared on the imageboard 4chan as image no. 76000000. After that, it was quickly turned into the Advice Dog image macro template. It was named "Advice Dog" because these image macros give "advice", but always of a kind that doesn't make much sense, and/or that should not really be followed. For example, the texts could be "Hire clowns" and "For funerals" respectively. From then on, an ever-increasing number of advice animals were created with or without a colour wheel.
Digression: Something Awful
Something Awful is a comedy Web site created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999. Amongst other things, it includes a blog and bulletin-board forums which have become the most influential part of Something Awful. These forums, whose users are rather known as Goons, were very active and influential in the creation and spreading of memes especially in the 2000s, maintaining a culture not quite unlike that of parts of the imageboard 4chan.
The Something Awful forums were the place where image macros were first culturally exploited online in larger quantities, and where they received that name.
Digression: 4chan and imageboards
4chan is an imageboard created by Christopher "moot" Poole in late 2003 as an English-speaking alternative to the Japanese imageboards 2channel (2ch in short) from 1999 and Futaba Channel (2chan in short) from 2001.
An
imageboard is a special form of a Web forum which specialises in posting images and then commenting on the image posts. Sometimes the posts are actually about the images, sometimes the images are mere decoration for a post which inevitably required an image. Thus, images are key elements of imageboard culture, and imageboards are natural breeding-grounds for image memes. 4chan, in particular, was the driving force between many memes, meme genres and entire memetic fandoms throughout the 2000s and 2010s, also due to its extremely high activity.
Originally, imageboards were a Japanese invention. Early imageboards in English language were focused on Japanese media, particularly manga and anime, but they would also cover other topics later.
One feature that sets *chan imageboards apart from other online communities is that they can be used completely anonymously. Many don't even have user accounts which makes it difficult for users to identify themselves if they so desire. This is also the background of the collective and movement known as Anonymous: It started out on 4chan, and everyone who partook in it, like practically all 4chan users of course, "identified" themselves as "Anonymous". Thus, a swarm was born which is Anonymous because everyone in it is Anonymous.
Context explanation: Nomadic identity and FEP-ef61
FEP-ef61 is a so-called
Fediverse Enhancement Proposal, FEP in short, a suggestion for an addition to the ActivityPub protocol upon which most of the Fediverse is built. As a suggestion, it already has a certain validity, and it can be implemented by Fediverse software.
FEP-ef61 in particular is a proposal for implementing something also known as nomadic identity in ActivityPub.
Nomadic identity is a Fediverse technology that detaches the Fediverse identity with everything that belongs to it from the underlying server, from the underlying login and account. It makes it possible for the same Fediverse identity to simultaneously reside on multiple servers.
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by Mike Macgirvin, an experienced developer with a particular skill for communication protocols. In 2010, he had already created a protocol named DFRN, short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network, and used it to build a very powerful, free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative first known as Mistpark, then renamed Friendika with a "K" in late 2010, and eventually renamed Friendica with a "C" in early 2012. Friendica still exists, and it is part of the Fediverse.
Early on, Mike noticed one issue of decentralised projects: Server instances, even public ones with open registration, were generally run by private people. And not always were they long-lived. Sometimes admins of Friendika nodes announced the impending end of their nodes. Other nodes would shut down for good with no prior notice. Everyone who had an account on one of these nodes would always lose everything and have to start over elsewhere from scratch. The introduction of account export and import made moving possible, but it had its limitations, and it was of little protection against unannounced node shutdowns.
The only feasible solution was for online identities to no longer be bound to any one account on any one server, to simultaneously exist on multiple server instances. An entire ecosystem would have to be built around this feature so that user identities would know and understand that other user identities are spread across more than one server instance.
And so Mike conceived the idea of nomadic identity which should achieve just that. In order to uncouple a user's identity from the account, the user's data from connections to posts to files etc. was uncoupled from the account and placed into a container known as a channel. The account no longer had any control over identity or content; it only served to grant access to the channel. This channel would then be possible to be cloned onto an account on another server instance. The original, called the main instance, would supply the domain that would still be part of the ID.
The main instance and each clone would then be live, real-time, hot backups of each other. Anything that would happen on one of them, a post being sent, a post being received, a new contact being established, a file being uploaded, would be almost immediately synchronised to the others to keep all of them identical.
A key element of nomadic identity was for the user to be able to log onto any server where they had a clone of their channel and use it there. One or several servers with instances of the channel on them could be offline, but with any one of them still being online and accessible, the channel would remain active. Also, it would be possible to make one of the clones the new main instance. The ID would switch to the domain of the server with the main instance on it, and all connections would be modified accordingly, including on remote servers.
Still in 2011, Mike implemented nomadic identity in a new protocol named Zot. In early 2012, Mike forked his own project Friendica, named the fork Red, after Spanish "la red" which means "the network", and re-wrote the entire backend and large parts of the frontend against Zot.
Today, nomadic identity is available on Hubzilla, which evolved from Red or, as it was called from 2013 on, the Red Matrix in 2015, and in what is commonly called (streams) from 2021. Hubzilla is based on the latest stable version of the Zot protocol, Zot6, and (streams) is based on an incompatible descendant of Zot named Nomad. Nomadic identity in ActivityPub is still in an early stage of development and not available to regular users.
Digression: Hubzilla, the streams repository and the Zot and Nomad protocols
Hubzilla (
official Web site) is a Fediverse server application that is a multi-purpose combination of a social network, a cloud server and a content management system. It was derived from the Facebook alternative Friendica by Friendica's own creator, Mike Macgirvin. It has been around since March, 2015, ten months before Mastodon was launched. It is based on the Zot6 protocol which provides nomadic identity, but it can also use a number of other protocols, including but not limited to ActivityPub, OStatus and the diaspora* protocol.
The streams repository is an open-source code repository on Codeberg which contains a distant descendant of Hubzilla, created and still being developed by Mike Macgirvin and focusing on secure, private, nomadic social networking. This server application is intentionally without a name and without branding in any shape or form, and it was just as intentionally released into the public domain.
The history of both began in 2010 when it had been revealed that Facebook spied on its users and made money off their private data without their consent, in fact, without even telling them. From March to July, Mike built a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark. It had some extra features such as full long-form blogging capability, no character limit, multiple profiles per account which could be assigned to specific contacts, groups of contacts which pre-dated diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles, built-in file storage and an event calendar.
It was built on top of Mike's own protocol DFRN which is short for Distributed Friends and Relations Network. In addition, it supported other protocols such as OpenMicroBlogging, later OStatus, the protocol created by Evan Prodromou in 2008 for Laconi.ca, meanwhile StatusNet, which was later merged into GNU social, and it both could subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and produced Atom feeds itself. It would later gain the ability to connect to diaspora*, the crowd-funded, highly anticipated decentralised "Facebook killer" whose first early alpha version came out two months after Mistpark.
Later the same year, a German user told Mike that "Mistpark" sounds like German for "manure park" whereupon it was renamed "Friendika" with a "K". The spelling would finally be changed to "Friendica" with a "C" in early 2012.
As a countermeasure against people losing their online identities whenever a Friendika node shut down, Mike conceived nomadic identity and created a new protocol named Zot in 2011. In early 2012, he forked recently renamed Friendica into a new project named Red after the Spanish word for "network" and mostly rebuilt it into a Zot testbed. As the name didn't work well enough, it was renamed "Red Matrix" before seeing its first stable release in 2013. Along with the rebuild, it received support for nomadic identity and multiple channels on one account as well as a new permissions system.
But Friendica was mostly targetted at self-hosters of personal instances which made nomadic identity largely superfluous, and the Red Matrix didn't have any significant advantages otherwise that would justify the switch from Friendica for node admins. So in early 2015, the Red Matrix was redesigned to be more attractive to public server admins. It was turned into a multi-purpose system and received features such as a CalDAV calendar server which shares a GUI with the calendar inherited from Friendica, a CardDAV address book server, long-form articles, a wiki engine and a Web page server. And thus, Hubzilla was born in March.
In order to further develop the Zot protocol, Mike created two new forks in 2018, Osada and Zap. Both lost many of Hubzilla's content management system features. Zap was reduced to only Zot as the remaining supported protocol to keep interference from non-nomadic protocols out, also because Mike expected the new protocol version Zot6 to be incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Osada, in the meantime, kept many of Hubzilla's connection features, but lost nomadic identity. It was intended as a gateway between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse.
As this didn't work out, and Zot6 turned out to be compatible with ActivityPub, Osada was discontinued and re-created as a soft fork of Zap which received ActivityPub capabilities. Now, the only differences between the two were ActivityPub and the branding, and in 2019, after Zap had received ActivityPub support itself, it was just whether ActivityPub was on or off by default, next to the branding. So Osada, which had seen a stable release along with Zap, was discontinued yet again. But along with Zap, Zot6 had matured and brought a new feature along with itself, namely a magic single sign-on system named OpenWebAuth which automatically detects users logged in on other instances.
In 2020, Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6 and equipped with OpenWebAuth. Also, Mike made three new forks based on Zap to work on Zot8, another Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Mistpark 2020, also known as Misty. The intention appeared to be to have three states of development, but in fact, all three always shared the same code, save for the branding. Mike would later admit that the actual reason why he made three forks was to confuse the brand fetishists. Crossgrading between all three and Zap was possible.
Probably because the new Osada and Misty were actually used for public instances, Mike forked one of the three into a new project named Roadhouse in early 2021. Zot was about to reach a point at which it would become incompatible with previous Zot versions. So Zot11, which Roadhouse was based upon, was renamed Nomad. Zap, the third Osada, Redmatrix 2020 and Misty could be upgraded to Roadhouse by rebasing the server code.
In October of 2021, Mike forked Roadhouse into a successor which he intentionally left nameless and brandless. He released most of it into the public domain with the exception of some contributions to official add-ons whose licenses he left untouched. This combination made it unfeasible for commercial software companies to try and relicense the whole thing to something proprietary and non-free. It also had most nodeinfo code removed, it doesn't transmit any statistics, and it is intentionally kept away from Fediverse project and instance listing sites. These probably couldn't crawl for and discover instances anyway because this server application is the only one in the Fediverse with an easily customisable and therefore not unified identifier for server instances.
The code repository with this software inside needed a name, though, and so it was named streams.
When the word about this software spread, enthusiasts decided they needed something to call this software by instead of just referring to the repository. So they started calling it (streams) in parentheses. It was originally intended for other developers to fork and use in their own work, but people started running vanilla (streams) instances.
(streams) was simplified further in order to make development and maintenance easier. In addition to its own Nomad protocol and Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, it only supports ActivityPub. But ActivityPub support was moved from an add-on into the core because Nomad allowed for a closer integration of ActivityPub than Zot6 for which non-nomadic protocols are a hindrance. Even the RSS and Atom aggregator was removed, as well as support for multiple profiles per channel. On the other hand, the permissions system was improved further over Hubzilla's.
Unlike its four predecessors, (streams) was considered a stable release, as was its Nomad protocol. On New Year's Eve of 2022, Mike officially discontinued Zap, Osada, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 and Roadhouse. Instances of all five could be upgraded to (streams).
In 2023, Mike began to work on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub itself. One goal was to one day make Nomad and Zot superfluous. The other goal was to make it possible for the whole Fediverse to become nomadic beyond project borders. FEP-ef61 was to become a key element in this work, and (streams) became the development platform.
In August of 2024, Mike forked a new project named Forte off the streams repository, the first and so far only (streams) fork. Its exact goal is still unclear, but it might be what Mike will use to experiment with new features and developments, seeing as (streams) has unexpectedly become a daily driver for a few dozen users already.
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