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 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…
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.
"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.
For me it was me looking up alternative social media platforms on Google, as I never had any liking towards the mainstream social media platforms in any way.
Then I chance upon this "Mastodon" and am intrigued by it.
I sign up for it....
I have been here 2 years and counting! :blobcatgiggle:
Happy birthday to the accidental typo, John Mastodon! Started when a writer misread the Mastodon account that was banned from Twitter as "John Mastodon" instead of "Join Mastodon", John Mastodon may not be real but thanks for the memes and everything else. Let's celebrate John Mastodon's birthday by tooting about what you love most about the #fediverse. #JohnMastodon#Mastodon
Handmade.social welcomes all handmade artisans to join the Fediverse community. Create an account for your business or shop and showcase your unique creations to a broader audience. If promoting handcrafted items is your goal, consider making handmade.social the home for your artisanal brand.
While I am an active critic of distributed privatisation (i.e., #Fediverse as we know it), I will still choose that over corporate privatisation if public service internet is just not a thing yet. Why?
• Corporations under capitalism have but one guiding tenet: the profit motive.
• Social media corporations profit from advertisement operations — especially data harvesting.
• It is their objective, therefore, to maximise profits by maximising data exploitation in every possible way.
Glad to see the entire #fediverse roadmap for Threads laid out. Mastodon and other Fediverse users will be able to follow Threads users and vice versa. You will also be able to see comments from Fediverse users on your federated posts in Threads.
The long term goal is to allow people to take their followers with them from Threads to other Fediverse apps. The last one is huge and wasn’t on my radar. 🤯
Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, praises Threads entry into the #Fediverse because it makes Mastodon “a far more attractive option.”
This is fairly obvious and basic network effects since both Threads & Mastodon become more valuable as their users can now share content across these services seamlessly.
This angers Mastodon admins for whom the fact that not a lot of people use Mastodon was a selling point. They do not want it to grow and be useful to more people.
Hey hcommons.social and the #fediverse: we've made the decision not to federate with #Meta and #Threads. We do not feel that we can adequately protect members of our community from potential attacks from anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Black, anti-academic, or other extremists who can freely create accounts and sow hatred on Threads unless we block the server. We do not want to allow any kinds of connections that would make our most at-risk users less safe.
We understand that this may disappoint some of you, and that you may wish to seek another instance that will allow you to communicate more freely with your friends on that network. Please read more about our reasoning on our team blog: https://team.hcommons.org/2023/12/15/threads/
Way more interesting and healthy fediverse news is happening in the shadows and is barely getting discussed! Which is: Discourse has federation between different instances of itself and other #fediverse software such as Mastodon working!
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
A case for preemptively defederating with Threads (kbin.social)
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...