I hope it goes on. And being open source, it definitely will! (e.g. Mbin)
Ernest likewise will be remembered, fondly or otherwise, for his contributions in starting it.
That said, I’m close to personally blocking it due to all the spam hitting other servers from it, and the FBI may come knocking soon as well if people decide to hit it with illegal stuff like CP.
@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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm here because I wanted to get away from anything corporate and mainstream. And I quite like it so far. I will definitely block anything threads. And if it seeps in too much I would rather quit alltogether, find me a good book and never look back. That said I'm all in for preemtive defederation.
I’m friends with a furry artist and he wouldn’t join fedi mainly due to fears from fediblocking, unhelped by how fandom drama gets in general, not just in the furry sphere, and major drama with mastodon.art using some grifter’s block list which blocks like over 50% of the fediverse.
From what I’ve learned, being friends with him and other artists (and following ones I’m interested in), a lot of creators want a ready-made audience to advertise their artwork to, which was where Twitter came into play and why a lot of them are going for Bluesky instead since it’s recreated that experience for them. It gets hairier when it comes to NSFW content, too, since some places on the fediverse are absolutely fine with it on their timeline, and some places are definitely not. Though Bluesky has popularised CWs for adult content in that sphere, some instances don’t like users posting NSFW and will request it be unlisted if it’s allowed at all.
If the creator is SFW only, they’ll have a lot of good luck using a general purpose Mastodon instance, unless they find a community that suits them better. Joinmastodon.org has a good list, and a lot of them don’t have that networking issue except with very fringe instances.
Thanks for sharing! Looks like a lot of agreement and no opposition. Just a matter of getting it done. Hopefully someone who has the skill and time will get it on their TODO list someday.
That is correct, we do not have an "official" instance or an "official" magazine. What follows now is MY OWN opinion, other community members might think differently.
Mbin is aiming for a federated and decentralized social network, I think the whole point of the fediverse is that there shouldn't be one main instance, right? Feel free to create a magazine where ever you want! Isn't that the beauty of activitypub? Maybe the idea takes some getting used to.
Your community members ("I do love Mbin") are expressing that they are unhappy with the mediums available for discussion and feel excluded. What is done about it?
I feel a bit of negativity from you. This will be my last reply in this thread. She has resolved it herself by creating a magazine by herself on Mbin for Mbin: https://kbin.run/m/Mdev
Because Twitter replacement only works if it gets critical mass and Mastadon is not going to win that fight. You’re never going to see cities switch to putting notices on mastadon, but you might see them end up on Threads.
I wouldn’t say “never”. I’d say decentralised social media grows more slowly but it’s only a matter of time before threads does its own enshittification and there’s another mass exodus to Mastodon. Sites that don’t do enshittification because they aren’t centralised and corporate won’t have that kind of exodus, and will grow over time.
If they become so ubiquitous that they’re the de facto standard, then cities will put their notices on them. You’ll probably get official civic instances for notices, maybe hosted on their regular website domains.
I mean unless corporate social media finds some other way to subvert activitypub that’s more effective than “look at me I have money for developers and advertising”, then I don’t see this trend changing. Corporate platforms don’t seem capable of learning anything from their repeated failures, which is really strange. I think it happens because their hierarchies are inherently insulated against learning anything.
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This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.