I dunno who first coined the phrase “the re-wilding of The Internet” to describe the post-enshittification push towards the #Fediverse, blogging, self-hosting etc, but I love it.
Over the past year these are the top arguments against the Fediverse:
Too left wing
Too difficult
Not enough people
Not enough mutuals
Too nerdy / too niche
Too confusing
Too ugly
Too many different options and apps
Too many servers
Not owned by a corporation (yes, really, one person told me he prefers an oligarch)
There is no algorithm
Hard to discover people
Many of these are based on the attitude and feeling, but there is some truth to it, for example discoverability is still a bit of an issue. I personally find most of the Fediverse web UIs clunky considering the big world standards, but I’m sure they will get better over time.
@rolle i think this crusade that so many on here have joined is a fruitless one. i think if we all just chilled out on here, ppl would start showing up. like, part of the issue of the fediverse is that half of the convos on here are about the fediverse or how we get more people to join.
if 30 ppl were all standing outside of a bar shouting about how great it is in there, would any of us believe them?
We tried to simulate 1000 viewers on a #PeerTube video, and then on a livestream. (Note that 99% of twitch livestreams are under 1000 simultaneous views.)
We optimized accordingly... And here are the results: it works!
With a ~20$ server, PeerTube can now support such usecases.
@darnell This is so awesome! Thank you for putting the time to pull this together Darnell. I've already sent this to my board in email and flipped it into the Flipboard Team Magazine which is our private mag where we share posts together as a team. Will come back to you with thoughts next.
While Mastodon is quite a lively place, my attempts with #peertube were disappointing. Did I start on the wrong instance?
Youtube has a lot of interesting content, and I pay them to get rid of ads. They collect revenue and share some of it with the creators. That allows them to sustain an ecosystem, where independent creators can make a living from their uploads. Also, they get on my nerves by suggesting a lot of right-wing videos, and by making me pay to suppress ads. Advice?
The last 10 days have been a whirlwind for the #fediverse. Important new versions of @mammoth and @ivory launched. Wordpress and Tumblr reaffirmed their commitment to ActivityPub. And Threads and Flipboard began to federate. What does this all mean for the fediverse? How will moderation work? Who will be next to federate?
I'm excited to let you know that we have stood up our very own #PeerTube instance. This is so cool. We've posted all the videos for my Dot Social podcast. We also posted our original Flipboard launch video for fun.
I don’t believe the EEE narrative about Threads federation. The number of #fediverse citizens isn’t large enough to justify the (substantial) investment in Fedi/Masto/ActivityPub interop if the goal is just to bring them to Meta. @mosseri explicitly said that the goal was to enable people to move off Threads and I believe him, because…
…All the Big Techs are under considerable political pressure to be less lockin-y and more interoperable. Especially in the EU. If any Threads user is free to step over to some Masto/Akkoma/whatever instance, it’s hard for any regulatory agency or politician to make a case that Meta is locking people in.
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
The whole point of the fediverse in general is that there is no single “we”. There are those ActivityPub servers that one federates with and those ActivityPub servers that one does not federate with. Lack of consensus is built into the technology by design.
but I think it’s still important that everyone at least thinks about what they want the fediverse to grow into
To have wants about the social constructs that sit atop the technology is to misunderstand the technology. The technology enables your enemies/people you don’t like/etc. to communicate and benefit in all the ways you do. By design. You cannot exclude from the fediverse, you can only exclude from your server. If you have wants about excluding then you’ve misunderstood the technology.
@rah Maybe I'm not being clear. When I say that "we" means "the fediverse in general", I don't mean that everyone should gather 'round and come to a consensus on what values they should uphold and who should be excluded. This is obviously something that should occur on an instance or individual level, as (A) there are a large variety of different people and instances on the fediverse with different priorities and (B) as you stated, anyone can implement ActivityPub and tap into the fediverse if they want to, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
What I mean is that people should be thinking about what they think instance owners should aim for and form their opinions on the current situation based on that. My goal with this post is to show what I think an "ideal fediverse" looks like and have others share their thoughts. Having thoughts about what's healthy for people on the fediverse and having wants based on that isn't misunderstanding the technology — it's simply expressing preferences.
"If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook
"What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls”
