How do we feel about Flipboard federating?

Mars2k21, 5 months ago

Glad Flipboard is expanding in the Fediverse, I've been following their various news accounts on Mastodon for a while now. It especially helps the fediverse feel more complete as a social media platform.

Sure, these don't really matter for Lemmy and Kbin, but they are a huge deal for microblogging platforms like mastodon or misskey.

iso, 5 months ago

I guess they’re federated with kbin too: kbin.social/u/@theverge

SamXavia, 5 months ago

It's not a bad thing, gives you the option to read them on the Fediverse and it proves that the Fediverse could possibly be the future of Social Media. It's good to see other people want to see it grow.

If people don't like it then personally block it, the only reason for blocking a whole instance, instance wide is if it has morals that conflict to much such as a Anti-LGBT instance vs a LGBT one.

Blakerboy777, 5 months ago

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 we have to preemptively defederate with any corporation! The fediverse must always stay small and never improve other companies. The vision is for open technology that few can use, right? I'm just worried that if Flipboard helps make the fediverse more appealing by providing more content for our users, that they can pull a fast one and defederate from us later, and then all of our users will leave and go to Flipboard instead! The only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure they never hear about Flipboard in the first place. Please reference any arguments used for defederating from Meta if you need more "sky is falling" arguments to whip you into a frenzy of senseless fear.

Mmccue, 4 months ago

I respect your choice to defederate. That's of course one of the first principles here.

Re: flipboard, we're completely rewriting out backend around activitypub. There is no turning back. We, as they say, have burned the ships. We will now live or die based on how we conduct ourselves in the fediverse.

Blakerboy777, 4 months ago

@Mmccue I was being sarcastic, I think the fediverse is about improving how people use social media- not driving all existing social media extinct. The idea that people would be unhappy that enormous companies are adopting the fediverse, which inherently loosens their grip on their audience and relinquished some of their power- it seems insane. Pre-emptive defederation seems insane.

Mmccue, 4 months ago

Ah. I see. Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you. The fact that this is happening at all is really quite amazing. The ultimate irony is that if Elon didn’t destroy Twitter we wouldn’t be seeing the rise of the social web right now.

TheArstaInventor, 5 months ago

I don't think these things matter man, unless they create a community on the threadiverse, most of us on kbin use threads, microbloggig is the minority and full-on microblogging people simply use mastodon.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568, 5 months ago

I'd disagree that they don't matter at all. Even if you don't, there are plenty of people who use the microblog side of Kbin and care about what's in the microblog feed. Obviously, this doesn't concern people who only use threads, but that's not a reason to assert that we shouldn't care.

TheArstaInventor, 5 months ago

Sorry I did not mean it does not "matter at all", but I certainly think this is going to be a minority. Although this will be great for Mastodon users, Kbin's userbase is already small, young, growing but small, and the portion of users using microblogging of that is low.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568, 5 months ago

Ah, I follow. Even so, I'd love to see Kbin grow as a platform for viewing, interacting with, and posting microblogs. I have gotten a ton of value out of the All Content view, and I think that more robust microblogging will make Kbin a much more attractive platform. Thus, I think it's important to consider the impact (for better or for worse) of big contributors like Flipboard and Threads, even if most of the people on Kbin rn aren't bothering with microblogs.

TheArstaInventor, 5 months ago

Yeah it might be an added "Bonus" for people in the long-term besides threads, I think Kbin is certainly starting to cater to the audience that are mainly here for threads but it's also "nice" to have microblogging to keep in touch with both.

NotTheOnlyGamer, 5 months ago

Pitchfork being on an alternative social platform just feels right to me. So I say, go for it.

Microw, 5 months ago

Well it seems like they chose a way to federate that doesnt work well with Lemmy, but more with Mastodon and kbin

0x1C3B00DA, 5 months ago

If you take a look at their CEOs fediverse acct, you'll see he's pretty caught up in the mastodon hype. He's coming at the whole thing from the perspective of mastodon being the platform, instead of the weird disjointed fediverse. People have tried explaining things he's not understanding fully, and he kinda brushes it off. I think even in a decentralized network, there are some ppl who still need some centralized platform to focus in on.

Mmccue, 4 months ago

I actually come at this from an open standards pov and believe in the power of interoperable systems on a shared network. I built a startup in the early 90s called Paper which launched a 3D plugin for Netscape called WebFX built on an open standard called VRML that held the promise to create a 3D web. Paper was acquired by Netscape and then I worked on a bunch of open standards like XML, HTML 4, RSS, etc. Then I started a new company called Tellme which was the forerunner to Siri and Alexa built on VoiceXML, an open standard that held the promise to create a voice web. As cool as that work was, an open voice web or open 3d web never happened. These days at Flipboard I'm focused on ActivityPub and I see an incredible amount of diversity and decentralized innovation happening here in such a way that the open social web could very well happen. And that would be good for everyone. But I've fought these battles before and lost enough to know that this is not a sure thing. There are many twists and turns along the way and I am hoping to do my part to navigate those in way which is a win for good acting members of society, non-profits and businesses.

re: Mastodon I see it as the largest use case of the social web today. But there are many others as you well know. We just stood up a peertube instance today for example and I love my pixelfed account. I have been following kbin and Lemmy with lots of interest though reluctant to sign up and engage mostly cause I am worried about spreading myself too thin across all these amazing activitypub services.

re: your broader point. I agree that most people have no appreciation for the fediverse beyond mastodon. And people get confused when they think of Mastodon in terms grounded in the centralized model used for how social media mostly works today. It reminds me of how people thought AOL was the best way to be online and that the internet was super confusing and just for scientists.

There will be a lot of education and evangelism and, more importantly, new apps and use cases that will be needed to make this vision of an open social web actually happen. I'm just happy to be doing my part to help.

0x1C3B00DA, 4 months ago

re: Mastodon I see it as the largest use case of the social web today. But there are many others as you well know. We just stood up a peertube instance today for example and I love my pixelfed account. I have been following kbin and Lemmy with lots of interest though reluctant to sign up and engage mostly cause I am worried about spreading myself too thin across all these amazing activitypub services.

This was my point. You shouldn't need an account on all of these services. You should be able to interact from your single Flipboard account. But its likely that, like most new fediverse services, you were testing mostly (or probably solely) against Mastodon. Despite Flipboard having more in common with link aggregators like kbin/lemmy, yall went for mastodon compatibility first.

A lot of people are worried about large orgs/companies like Flipboard/Meta joining the fediverse and controlling it, but Mastodon itself has been in that position for a long time. It's controlled and limited the fediverse for a while and people keep reinforcing its control instead of expanding on the fediverse's plurality.

Mmccue, 4 months ago

I agree with you that the fediverse’s plurality is crucial to reinforce right now. This is why integrated with Pixelfed and promoted it to our users early this year. We will be able to introduce people to other services across the fediverse once we’ve completed our activitypub cutover.