Most FOSS are tool kits or building blocks (akin to box of tools you find in a garage, or lego blocks) and not products. Capitalism influences some creators and maintenors to brand and present them as products though, which may be part of the confusion. @bram
A browser plugin that simplifies following or interacting with other users on remote Mastodon instances in the Fediverse. It skips the "Enter your Mastodon handle" popup and takes you to your own "home" instance, without having to enter your Mastodon handle on remote instances.
Nice mission statement of the #fediverse (which Snowden uses to describe 90s Internet): "purpose was to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms..."
Mayel (mayel@pub.mayel.space)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2019 00:05:49 EDT
Mayel“As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time – the stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence – the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms of service agreements. To this day, I consider the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.”
An additional feature that a fediverse client or server could build on top of circles would be bridging. Say I create a family circle, but have a couple family members who aren't on fediverse (weird, I know!), I could add them to the circle via their email, phone number, or even their Telegram handle (or whatever other thing competitive network effects has trapped them in), and my fediverse app or server could push my post to them through those channels. OK, now this just sounds like early TWTR :/
@bhaugen@lynnfoster@yaaps to clarify, I think anyone should be able to take an action within a group (as long as the group is discoverable publicly) by simply @ mentioning it (or an equivalent UI based way to post within a group), rules on the group's home instance then decided whether to take into account that particular activity from that particular actor (eg. whether its a member of the group, whether its a moderator, whether this user has permission to create an event, etc) and then publishes an Announce activity that points to the original activity, this making it an official group activity.
@bhaugen@lynnfoster@yaaps in AP a Group is an Actor, so it could definitely be an agent, or you could use the Organisation Actor for more formal structures. In my mind every action taken by a group is taken by a member (possibly based on roles/permissions) and the Announced by the group, while an Organisation could take actions in its own name.
@hhardy01 yeah probably in ActivityPub the solution is to use Group Actors on the user's home instance, so only they know group members (and can keep them private, maybe privately Announcing/retooting any replies the group receives to group members, like @datatitian's software does). So this would just be a UX layer on top of groups, as @xj9 suggested, with membership curation and visibility limited to the group creator.