smallcircles
I am @humanetech at Mastodon, #FOSS and #Fediverse advocate, mod at SocialHub, and facilitator of Humane Tech Community.
I help fight tech harms and “Promote Solutions that Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society”.
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SSPL is source-available, and not open source. There was lotsa discussion about the SSPL license, which was created by MongoDB, and it is a complex matter with all kinds of judicial angles. In summary it mainly benefits Mongo most of all, whose ‘open source passion’ is marketing-speak mostly. I forgot a lot of ins and outs, but just dug up a random find about downsides (2 parts) and impact.
A pity (for me) is the SSPL licensing, probably chosen because of the use of MongoDB. When using an alternative (maybe FerretDB) it could be Apache 2.0, which was the originally intented I heard (and still mentioned on the website).
What kind of attention, you ask? Well, read here… https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109742115695898174 … the billionaire VC kind of attention.
Super :heart:
In theory a delightful list could be hosted anywhere. But this hasn’t been tested with Delightful Club website, so I’m not sure it will pick that up as a list. So easiest is to create a repository on Codeberg for the curated list. Then you can set up the list with an existing one as an example e.g. Delightful Creative Tools. There should be a Contents, Maintainers and License section, as well as a contributors.md file. Once the repo is up, I can add to top-level repo and add an entry for the website auto-generation. And handle some small additional things via a repo issue (setting avatar and repo topics).
@N01@fediverse.ro if you are interested you might maintain a delightful curated list about these resources and be part of Delightful Club. This is an alternative to Github-based Awesome project, that is exclusively for FOSS, Open Data and Open Science related resources. See also: https://codeberg.org/teaserbot-labs/delightful
And someone might write the article: “Of course the Fediverse is threatened by the attention of the attention economy”. Don’t overly focus on whether Mastodon has attention-grabbing engagement features or not. It is an app, folks, just one app on the Fediverse. If you look around you already see how corporate interests are encroaching our space, testing the waters. And they won’t always be single endpoints that you simple defederate with a single block action. Think of cloudflare for instance. Some corporate takeover and EEE scenario’s were recently discussed on HN.
The Hacker News thread to this article is more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543379
I bumped into A better moderation system is possible for the social web, by Erin Alexis Owen one of the draft authors of ActivityPump in 2014, which has some interesting observations.
On fedi the #FediBlock process has become kinda popular, but it has its issues. From the article on the topic of blocklists specifically:
The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear.
I’m not going to say that you should not implement shared blocklist functionality, but I would say that you should be very careful when doing so. Features I’d consider vitally important to mitigate harms:
- The implementation should track the source of any blocks; and any published reason should also be copied
- Blocklists should be subscription based - i.e. you should be subscribing to a feed of blocks, not doing a onetime import
- They should handle unblocking too - its vitally important for a healthy environment that people can correct their mistakes
- Ideally, there would be an option to queue up blocks for manual review before applying them
That said, shared blocklists will always be a whack-a-mole scenario.
Posted a toot to them, where I dropped a link to Christine Webber’s OcapPub: Towards networks of consent that goes into similar direction wrt current moderation practices.
A whole set of projects around Fediblock is emerging. This github repo tracks projects: https://github.com/ineffyble/mastodon-block-tools
I read your post “The future is disruptive, and I can’t wait!”. And while I share your enthusiasm for the opportunities and potential of the Fediverse - I have been advocating them for years - I do not share the optimism expressed by the people on this thread as to the role of current Fedi culture and Free Software movement, if corporate interest comes. But I fully expected these kinds of answers.
Some time ago I had written notes on the related major fedi challenge of Complacency and intertia. Where the mere fact that we have decentralized technology gives people somehow the idea “We have arrived. We have won”. There’s the enthusiasm of the Early Web on the Fediverse now. The web that nowadays we call the “Corporate Web”. A hyperlinked, decentralized web of information. Thwarted by hypercapitalism. There’s nothing at all that protects fedi from going the same direction. All the years up to now FOSS movement have been in control. But we haven’t managed to organize a strong “technology substrate” that gives much hope of holding our position with corporate interest coming.
It is early days, I understand. But I always find it odd when such projects ask for contributions and there isn’t clarity on the license. I created an issue for that.
Indeed. I recently started using the term “personal social networking” where fediverse allows people to tailor their own social graph such that it delivers the most value to them. It is more human-scale. A huge public square like Twitter where people are all shouting for attention from their soapbox and trying to influence groups visiting the square is nice and all, if that’s your thing. In real life most people don’t do that kind of thing. They aren’t hanging around with 2,000 ‘friends’ visiting bars in the weekend.
Give me a personal social network with human relationships that are below Dunbar’s Number, and then give me access to a separate knowledge network to find information I am interested in. Hey, that last bit is the web we already have. I personally do not need advanced search in all the things that 9 million fedizens have said the past couple of years, same as I do not audio record and transcribe my daily life, interviewing my friends at a birthday party.
I do not know the exact nature of the changes in 4.x but imho it’s all about preferences. If someone wants this shield, they should use it. And there’s a whole lot of fedizens who do not benefit if someone scrapes the fedi and makes it deeply searchable.
As I see it there’s two extremes in microblogging: Public-square microblogging a la Birdsite, and personal social networking microblogging in your friends network. A Hometown server where people only use local-only toots is an example of the latter. Both are perfectly valid use cases.
I don’t know if AndStatus fully supports C2S as the issue about it is still open. This issue is likely also the most detailed info you’ll find on implementing C2S: https://github.com/andstatus/andstatus/issues/499
I agree. And the hegemony is getting stronger by the day. The announcement in The Guardian about Mozilla for instance has this headline: “Firefox and Tumblr join rush to support Mastodon social network”. Not Fediverse, but “The Mastodon Social Network”. And I continue to see new fedizens tooting elightened thoughs that there’s more than Mastodon, yet still getting it wrong (e.g. “There are more social networks than Mastodon on the Fediverse, like Pleroma”).
Potential of Fediverse is for the creation of a single interoperable “social fabric”. I wrote about this in Let’s Reimagine Social. How the Fediverse can enable a Peopleverse, which also entails de-emphasizing the role of individual apps, which are like siloes. App-free Computing is possible.
I have been moderator of SocialHub for a couple of years. Mastodon contributors only sporadically interact in that dev community. I cannot blame them for that. They naturally care most about their own FOSS project, and furthermore that is a Microblogging app, so why care about different app types? The major challenges of maintaining open standards in a grassroots movement are all social in nature (though they may have partially social-technical solutions) and tackling how FOSS projects can be incentivized to collaborate beyond their own direct project boundary.
Btw, for anyone interested in a good overview of fedi projects, I co-maintain the 3 fedi-related delightful lists.
Is there a project page for this that I can open without Apple devices? I am wondering if this is open-source (and if it is I will add the project to the delightful fediverse clients curated list at https://delightful.club )
As some wondered… yes, the screenshot is doctored. Here is as it was published by The Guardian:
Byline was not “The platform is still a lawless hellhole of no use to anyone for advertising whatsoever according to inside sources” but instead read:
The platform is home to a devoted base of left-leaning communities – and no one billionaire can control it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/01/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk-takeover
As to the topic of this thread, and the actual byline, if we replace “Mastodon” with the more accurate terminology of “Fediverse” then I think one can say “Yes, indeed no billionaire can control it in the same way they can’t control the Web. But they sure can come to dominate it”.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012307 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011581 which just landed on the front page. I hope they’ll find some good discussion.
There are a couple share project listed on https://delightful.club/delightful-activitypub-development/
I found this article to be interesting. Dealing mostly with the lessons to be learned from the very bad way in which all this was handled: http://www.databasesoup.com/2022/12/lessons-from-raspberry-pi-in-how-not-to.html
SocialHub is also the place to discuss Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.
Also check out Bonfire who’ll also support Circles. Their social microblogging parts is only a foundation of many different functionalities to be built on top.
GoToSocial also supports local-only posting. And it is much, much lighter-weight to run than a full-blown Mastodon instance.
PS. Note that Christine Webber does not see a future in the Fediverse as it currently is. And I tend to agree, albeit maybe for different reasons.
Great article and paper @ntnsndr@social.coop and I wholly agree on this notion. For some time in advocacy I make the distiction between social networking which is what humans do for thousands of years and now extends online, and corporate Social Media. For the latter ‘Media’ is appropriate as, due to optimization for engagement / extraction, people ‘broadcast’ themself here and the algorithms expose them to a flood of info exposure that’s not to their benefit.
OTOH a social network is a personal thing. It is manageable and fits to ones day-to-day activity, one’s daily life. It supports and reflects your interests and the social relationships that matter to you. There’s many groups and communities you interact with in different kinds of roles and relationships, same as offline.
I call the vision of an online and offline world that seamlessly intertwine in support of human activity, a Peopleverse. Peopleverse can be established on the Fediverse as it evolves.
Indeed, I was less interested in the historical event and, so I generalized the concept.
Right now, not only is there somewhat of a culture clash, but a vanguard of CEO’s, CTO’s and high profile Silicon Value (laid-off?) workers streaming in.
Birdsite has a couple’a hundred million users. But the influx is potentially much, much bigger and continues going, as - due to all media attention worldwide - Mastodon and by extension the Fediverse becomes a household name.
I am not only fretting about an Eternal September to take place, but increasingly more expecting it to happen. And with the inevitable corporate takeover following in its strides.
Nice, like that. This is something to be eventually addressed by The Forgers Guild. You might post in the Ideas category of Discuss Social Coding (part of the Guild).
Ha, yes. Comes quite close to Software Guilds idea for Social Coding Movement, and - related - Ecosystem Alliances. They could be skills-oriented. The first guild we are eyeing is called The Forgers Guild focussing on “forging free software” on the Fediverse, i.e. a Forge Federation ecosystem alliance. Maybe you knew about it already, right? 😉
There are a couple of maintainers who signed the open letter, and also Otto Richter of Codeberg. When Gogs was forked, I believe initially the number of people involved in the fork was also very small. But I am fully behind an attempt to try to solve the issues without the need for a fork, and having a Gitea project that can be healthier than before. There is this opportunity for that, as now there’s a much more inclusive open discussion on community issues and project strategy / direction.
Yeah that might be a next step, though a fork needs dedicated people who want to commit to it. There’s a risk, and the split that happens in the early stages in the community is not nice either. Btw, there’s an interesting HN discussion going on about the letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471
It is like retweeting… unlike on Twitter you can’t add your own comments to the boost.
On twitter if you Like a tweet, then the algorithms pick it up and it may go ‘viral’. This doesn’t exist on the Fediverse. A Favorite / Like is just a heads-up to the author, who sees it as a notification. So boosting is what’s needed to spread posts to other people’s timelines.
Besides someone opting in, I hope that the person being quote-tooted also receives notification of that and maybe even notiications of all replies on the quote toot. This so it isn’t a mechanism to “talk behind someone’s back” which by leaving someone unaware makes it more suited tool for abuse.