Owner of Eskimo North

  • 0 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

help-circle





  • In addition to Mastodon and Pixelfed, I have a Friendica, Hubzilla, Yacy, and Nextcloud.

    Federated Services

    Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.

    We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.

    There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.

    Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.

    Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.

    Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.

    Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.

    Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.

    We offer the following federated services:

    Friendica.Eskimo.Com
    Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.

    Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com
    Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.

    Mastodon.Eskimo.Com
    Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.

    NextCloud.Eskimo.Com
    If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.

    Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com
    Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.

    Yacy.Eskimo.Com
    Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.

    If you enjoy these services, please consider supporting us by taking advantage of our paid services: https://www.eskimo.com/











  • @aasatru @ALostInquirer @TheLugal I got kicked off of Farcebook three years ago for not going along with the Covid-19 Vax agenda. I started a friendica at that time because of all the fediverse software available at the time, it looked the most like facebook. My intent was to provide an alternative platform where you were free to say what you wanted.

    Since that time I’ve also put up a Misskey, a Hubzilla, and a Mastodon. I personally don’t like the micro-blogging format, thus I don’t use Misskey or Mastodon much, just enough to make sure they are working. I prefer long format macroblogging because they make actual intelligent discussions possible (even if it is a capability people rarely use), where as microblogging isn’t good for much beyond an occasional snarky remark.

    Of the two macroblogging applications, friendica and hubzilla, I prefer friendica because it displays full photos by default and it also makes better use of a wide display (I have a 2560 x 1440 monitor) so I find it more readable.

    I also like it’s support for bbcode, which while not 100% complete is still better than most other platforms. The only downside to Friendica is that it is relatively resource intensive. Originally I had it on a six core 3.6 Ghz i7-3850 with 128GB of RAM, but it had a hard time keeping up and responsiveness wasn’t great. Now it is running on a 4.4 Ghz 18 core 36 thread i9-10980xe (the machine will run at 4.8Ghz but not 100% stable) with 256GB of RAM.

    Friendica is not that hard on the database however, averaging around 300 tps, and I’ve tested MariaDB and found it, on this hardware, to be capable of almost 14,000 tps, so not straining. Seems the PHP code is just not particularly efficient.

    Hubzilla, in spite of supporting more protocols, is quite a bit less resource intensive, and Mastodon and Misskey are very resource light.