The Verge article extolling the #Fediverse. I personally think the writer has the wrong point. #Facebook isn't good. Its attraction is "everybody I know is on Facebook" and not any of its half-baked features. Therefore, multiprotocol / multi-network federated social is important to dethroning #corpocentric #socnets like XTwitter ( #x.com / #twitter ) and Meta's Facebook & #Instagram.
I feel this writer's exuberence will turn out to be fantasy, mostly because of misunderstanding what keeps people in the walled gardens and what it will take to free them.
@fu From #GNU_social, I only see a few of your posts in the thread. As you may know, #Diaspora's protocol is different from #OStatus, so the D* posts do not cross over.
But there's more going on. Years ago, when I hosted a #Friendica instance, posts from ~F to OStatus appeared natively. Now they don't. For example, almost never will a mention or reply from ~F to GS appear in the recipient's replies stream. This doesn't only happen on GS, though.
On Pleroma instances, ~F posts (at least from #libranet.de) appear with delays of 2-12 hours or more, sometimes out of context, usually out of order. They also sometimes change the scope when they reply to a scope limited post.
I have a ~Friendica account on libranet.de, but I barely ever use it because _everything_ seems to be broken and it frustrates me every time I try to use it. I should probably close it and check to see whether the issues are local to libranet.de or something common to all Friendica instances.
The Iris #Nostr client on #Android now has a "block and mute" function, so I've started using that against the #spambots.
Nostr has some great ideas that are way beyond what either #OStatus or #ActivityPub branches of the #Fediverse are doing, but the spam and the fact that there's a really big #Bitcoin "Maxi" faction there are chasing regular people away.
I seem to recall there's a standard API that should be common to all the #StatusNet derivitave servers. I'm pretty sure that in its infancy Mastodon conformed to that API. But Mastodon's API expanded beyond that, and I suspect some of the common API was removed, probably around the time #OStatus was dropped from Mastodon too.
But that's sheer speculation on my part.
Time to upgrade my server, so I can upgrade PHP, so I can upgrade this GNUsocial instance...
#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
I actually think that the overwhelming majority of blocking should be done by individuals curating their own timelines. I am sensitive to the effect on the Fediverse as a whole, especially as we've already been through this.
Even the original #bifurcation (when the largest instance at the time, Identica, severed communication with #StatusNet / #GNUsocial & #OStatus and switched to the #Pump.io protocol and software) and the subsequent #ActivityPub - #OStatus split have caused untold breakage. I've seen AP-side devs, admins, users patting themselves on the back while commiserating about brokenness that is built into the protocol itself or at least its common implementations.
I have also seen people telling other people to create "alts" on various instances, so that their posts can reach all of their intended contacts. Not for resilience against instance shutdowns or separating by posts and recipients by topics and interests (which is what groups and Diaspora style Aspects / GPlus style Circles are for), but because #blockwars prevents posts and members from one instance to be seen on certain others.
For the record, I think that instance governance is something that Mastodon should include in its instances.social instance-picker, along with instances' topical foci. People should have a way to see what they're agreeing to (and what the alternatives are) before the sign up.
In other words, it isn't my way or the highway so much as it is making it possible to know what one is getting into. I am certain that there are (or were) instances with democratically chosen rules. I also believe that we're not doing the people who use an instance any favor by not making it possible for them to contribute to the financing and administration of the instance. If you're paying all the costs and doing all the work to maintain and moderate the instance, it is difficult to let an election institute a policy that you disagree with. (I've started to really disagree with the idea of individuals hosting public instances wholly out of their own financial and time resources. Besides the "truck factor", it is much easier to keep an instance going if everything was already handled by a team and at least partly member supported.)
On the other hand, if the instance encourages those in its membership who can do so to participate in keeping it going, then it is perfectly reasonable to expect the admin team to carry out the decisions voted by the membership. I do realize that not everyone can contribute funds, nor can everyone do the technical labor ... but as @simsa04 will remember, things like writing documentation, contributing in discussions about improving the software, designing and implementing themes, and even marketing-type tasks such as creating a logo and a favicon or promoting the instance to people outside the #Fediverse are beneficial.
It would be nice to have a big chunk of the people who are using #corpocentric #socnets like #Twitter and #Facebook and #Instagram move some or all of their presence over to the #OStatus and #ActivityPub branches of the #Fediverse, but I'd much rather they come because they want to try something different instead of coming because they are fleeing some change or impending change over there.
Why? Because these networks will never give them everything that those did. I personally believe that these networks can give some benefits that those cannot, but thus far, we've mostly tried to replicate their functionality ... without the benefit of nearly unlimited VC cash and a centralized model which puts $CentralizedNetwork at the center of its users' communications, where benefits built upon centralized knowledge of users' actions / choices / contacts.
Therefore, in 2-3 weeks, I expect 9 out of 10 new users to have have returned to Twitter ... or to some centralized network that springs up to duplicate Twitter without the Musk factor.
This has happened before. Maybe not on this scale, but it has happened. Multiple times. And always, most of them leave.
I keep thinking about a couple #Twitter threads criticizing #Mastodon (the #Fediverse, really) for being inherently different than closed commercial platforms using far-fetched hypotheticals and extraordinary occurrences; while I do not want to make a useless point-by-point response, instead I'll tell you what I like about federated social media and #Friendica in particular.
After #Facebook froze my account for using a pseudonym (a spottily enforced rule), I started hosting my own #Diaspora pod because I could.
I didn't know anyone so I initially made contacts with other podmins and progressively extended my circle through shared posts. This is how I learned about #Friendica, a platform that was compatible with both #Diaspora and #OStatus (#GNUSocial, #StatusNet ) because it could.
Written in #PHP, liked both the multi-protocol approach and that I could contribute code to it. So I started hosting my #Friendica node and I kept following the same Diaspora accounts, because I could.
When #Mastodon was first released based on OStatus, I started following several accounts on there because I could. When #ActivityPub was released and supported by Mastodon, we followed suite a few months later, because we could.
With popularity came the right-wing trolls and free speech extremists who organized their own federated instances, but they never bothered me much as I blocked their entire instance domains because I could.
None of these are currently possible with commercial platforms. Not all people will end up hosting their own node and it's fine, but the breadth of possibility is what makes federated social network attractive.
(1) #Twitter has millions of users. There is no #ActivityPub nor #OStatus implementation in which an instance hosted on a $5/mo #DigitalOcean / #Linode / #Vultr #VPS could handle the volume of a seamless connection with #Twitter. If they adopted AP OStatus, #Diaspora, or any other current open federation protocol, instances that didn't use firewall blocking would topple once the two userbases had sufficient interconnections (within a few hours or a few days after they started federating).
(2) Twitter's business model is to push ads disguised as tweets. If their users could escape those and still interact with all the same contacts, they would. I'm certain that Twitter's management know this. They also turn all links into tracking links, and sell access to media (images, video, audio) uploads of important news events to news organizations.
(3) Most Fediverse instances are financed out of the admin's pocket. Some have financial contributors, but nothing like Twitter's revenue. As the largest and best-financed instance, they would immediately have to start implementing modifications to make AP or other existing federation protocols useful to them, and those modifications would (as Mastodon's currently do) become unofficially mandatory in order to be compatible.
(4) This isn't the first time that Twitter has considered federation, though this may be the first time they openly discussed it. Back when Identica was still a happening place (during Twitter's fail-whale days), Twitter considered federating. They didn't do it then, and I honestly do not believe they will do it now.
(5) I'd say that Twitter's #BlueSky initiative is more meant to try to get bidirectional connections across #Facebook's moat and wall than it is to surround Twitter with a cloud of #Fediverse instances.
♲ @AlexVoss@fosstodon.org: Student of mine is conducting a survey on the barriers to uptake of alternative social media platforms. Your input would be much appreciated. Please boost.
Just tried out the AndStatus app on Android. I successfully added accounts for pump.io and Titter, but adding this Mastodon account failed. I tried adding a Friendica account as a GNU social account, since it supports OStatus and I can't see any other way to do it, but that failed. I don't think I have a GNU social account since the Quitter. sites went down, but I'll have to check and maybe set up a new one for testing purposes.
@sl #Mastodon version 3.x and later (and #Pleroma version 2.x and later) does not use #OStatus as a federation protocol, so they broke federation with #GNUSocial. There's a little more work to do before the release of GS v.2.0, which adds #ActivityPub support.
@licho #Mastodon 3.x and #Pleroma 2x no longer speak the #OStatus federation protocol. !GNUsocial 2.0 will add the #ActivityPub federation protocol, so ask your admin to be ready to upgrade soon.