Nearly two years ago, the underwater Hunga volcano in the South Pacific experienced an eruption so strong its caldera collapsed completely. A small team of scientists has partly mapped the magmatic system under the volcano from both before and after the eruption. Phys.org has more on what they found: https://flip.it/nhwv-e#Earth#Volcano#Science
Ach guck, das #Fediverse / #Mastadon wird nun immer beliebter, weil selbst Konzerne wie @SAPOpenSource und Medien wie @ntv (schon länger) hierher flüchten. Diese Welle von der #X-Flucht ist wohl kommerzieller Natur und deswegen evt einflussreicher? 🤔
Wenn du ihr #Account nicht sehen willst, könnt ihr diese stumm schalten oder sperren damit sie euch nicht folgen können (dann aber seht ihr sie gar nicht mehr). Sieht so aus, als seien #Kommerz-#Alternative'n noch unfertig und nicht reif genug 🤷
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.
@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.
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”
New blog post: Understanding ActivityPub - Part 4: Threads
A first detailed look into how Threads implements ActivityPub. Learn about the data that is shared (or not), an interesting implementation of HTTP signatures, and Threads' take on quote posts in ActivityPub.
@crepels Nice article! In particular, this is the best explanation I've seen yet of the "infinite signature recursion" problem, and the way around it.
I haven't tried to talk to Threads from my own toy implementation yet. I have a suspicion that the "instance actor" requirement is going to give me a headache.
