@cliffwade Yep! Before the #Fediverse was born (2008). That era (pre-2008) was when the real #Web3 was coined and defined (not the crypto thing) when discussing the #SocialWeb.
A lot of ideas were discussed, which led to #Diaspora and the Fediverse.
The new #SNS: #Pebble (formerly #T2#T2social) just announced that they are shutting down the free service this coming November 1st.
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The painful truth, however, is that we were not growing quickly enough for investors to believe that we will break out. Combine that with a crowded space of alternatives - and the uphill climb is even steeper. In order to continue to build out a complete Pebble, we would have needed more investment, and more time.
Interesting essay on #SocialMedia that may resonate with other #Mastodon users. It left me wondering why I post at all and whether to vacate the #SocialWeb
“Academics Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy, both of the MIT Media Lab, along with MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral, recently conducted a study that reached the conclusion that false news spreads faster than the truth. Their research, published in Science, found that #misinformation is ’70 percent more likely to be retweeted on #Twitter than the #truth,’ and that the #FakeNews ‘reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.'”
(He admins mastodon.social & mastodon.online too — whew!)
I've had the pleasure to get to know him in his work as a core contributor to #Mastodon through #FastForward, and I'm thrilled — his thoughtful approach and deep knowledge of networking ++ will help us scale in a sustainable and healthy way.
The #fediverse#socialweb is facing some tough problems, but we're in great hands with Renaud in this role!
"In a world where we all struggle with how much we use our devices (let’s be real, we mean our phones), I think it’s kinda nice to have some places that just give up and tell us, “My dude, you’ve read it all, go do something else.”"
The BBC's experiment with Mastodon is pathbreaking in English-language news -- a major organization setting up its own instance. They've really thought this through. Key language:
"We're using social.bbc as the domain, so you can be sure these accounts are genuinely from the BBC. And by linking to and from the BBC’s website, we have verified our identity on Mastodon."
It's huge. But they have verified their identity on THE #FEDIVERSE, not Mastodon. maybe the #socialweb.
all journalists/outlets just joining together to start their own instances and regain their independence and convince everybody to follow them here is how the social media platforms (that have profited so much via ads and data mining off their work) should die.
The #BBC now has their own #fediverse instance. An experiment, but this is exactly what we need, journalistic outlets with their own space on the decentralized #socialweb. Just like when media created their own first websites in the early days of the public internet (going beyond AOL keywords etc). This place is about news imo, so being embraced by journalists is key. I hope their list of accounts grows quickly, and other outlets follow their lead.
We need to understand that the #socialweb is the only actual social network. That unlike the platforms, we are ultimately not about the personal, but our culture. We will only win if this place is understood as our best way to restore the power of the public to decide what information, ideas and art should go viral. Big media, whether it's social or old school, only exists to retain that power for owners and their advertisers. We are the revolution.
#Threads killing #Twitter and then being forced to fully support #ActivityPub (and not try to fuck with it) thanks to #EU regulation would be pretty awesome. And other governments could then adopt similar laws and other corporations could comply by just joining us here too. A simple path forward. Pretty cool. #fediverse#socialweb
best opening line on the fedi #socialweb is "that's fair". it means we're getting somewhere, not just personally, but as a civic culture. #LiberalValues
What I want from the fedi #socialweb is attention democracy. I want everyone using #ActivityPub and everything on the internet layered with it. I want the public to decide what information, art and ideas go viral in the world, with no favor given to wealth or media ownership. That's my vision.
So while I want to welcome in #meta to further this goal, I fear they are joining us just to try to co-opt it. IDK what to do next but spread the word about the revolution in culture that's possible here.
Ok, nice little social media experiment, how does the fediverse fare during an earthquake?
A midnight earthquake just hit my home city, which basically never gets earthquakes. Probably no damage at all from this one, but we all definitely felt it, which is unusual for us! (Prob ~4 on Richter scale)
Where did I go first to check if others felt it? NGL, the place I went last time there was a tremor … Twitter. And to be fair, on the top of my feed were posts from people I follow (who aren’t here) that live in my home city, tweeting about it, including links to official reports. This was very nice, as this time I was scared and thought my apartment building might be in trouble.
I quickly check #mastodon and #calckey. Nothing in timelines. Not surprising, I don’t really follow anyone or many that live in the same city as me.
Searching, mastodon’s hashtag search does ok, and surfaces a bot or two that also confirm the quake (@lastquake). But not many people, I’m not really finding a conversation. This is on an instance with ~50k users.
#Calckey’s full text search though (on calckey.social)?
Quicker. Just typed earthquake without worrying about hashtags.
And better results. More people were brought up, which is kinda what you’re after from social media during an event … reassurance. It was also surprising, as calckey has only ~2k users and therefore smaller visibility of the fediverse, but still gave me more connectivity just through search than my bigger mastodon instance.
Which is really an interesting demonstration of how hashtags can be problematic. Plenty of people were reaching out, asking “anyone feel that earthquake?”, they just forgot or didn’t think to use a hashtag, and so couldn’t find me through mastodon. And why would you in a (slightly) nervous situation like that. “Hmmm, is this the best hashtag, do you think people will search for it … I should probably check if it exists first?” … is not a thought goes through your mind.
I basically never visit Twitter since I left, but this was a nostalgic little episode. It was nice to see the fediverse wasn’t really behind big social. Though the lack of discovery facilities on mastodon really did show themselves here.
if a news org has a website, it should have an instance imo. but I also think we should have lots of local instances for regular people as default options when they decide to check out the #fediverse#socialweb.
Been busy today and it looks like they're already gone, but I'm a lefty who strongly supports @newsmax. We should support everyone being on the #socialweb and not block their instance as long as they are not harassing others or hosting many who do that. Especially journalists. It is not their job to conform to popular opinion or what everyone already agrees is true. Only those who push that line help us make progress. I want this place as open and popular as the #openweb. #fediblockmeta#newsmax
First off, @evan sees this from the perspective of someone who's co-authored #ActivityPub. It's his job to spur and enable adoption -- and that's something he's done exceptionally well for 20 years. Of course he wants to help Meta abide by open standards. Which, even if you dislike Meta, you would hope they would do.
My perspective is as one who is building products that compete with Meta. Ideally, I would like people who use Meta to migrate away from there and instead use #Calckey, #GreatApe, and the numerous options available on #SpaceHost.
But even from the perspective of a competitor, I want interoperability with #Barcelona. And even more, I want interoperability based on open standards.
Yes, yes, yes -- "embrace, extend, extinguish". At this point, that phrase is a broken record.
But every time that phrase comes up, I keep asking folks: when has the "extinguish" part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" ever worked?
People say #RSS, but RSS is still here and I use it every day. Hell, Calckey even has an RSS widget and it works like a charm. RSS is not extinguished.
People also say #XMPP, but I can run an XMPP server right now -- no problems. People say XMPP "died" because it's no longer as popular now, but is it because Meta and Google dropped support, or is it because Slack, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, and even Matrix have come along to eclipse it in popularity? Regardless, even if XMPP is no longer so popular, it's not extinguished.
The most ludicrous example of "extinguish" people bring up is Gmail's dominance of email. But email is the most popular communications technology we have today, even though it's 50 years old. What's more, look at the raw stats. Gmail is only 18% of the email server market -- that's no monopoly. Go have a look at the stats for yourselves:
The pessimistic notion that we will "lose" by allowing Meta to interoperate with ActivityPub -- again, an open standard -- just doesn't convince me. In fact, if Meta is adopting standard ActivityPub, I think "losing" is impossible.
With Meta adopting ActivityPub, we're not losing. We're winning. We're not conceding to Meta by adopting their proprietary APIs for interoperability. They're conceding to us by adopting ActivityPub.
Again, I'm not saying you should all federate with #Barcelona. I'm saying that Meta adopting an open standard that allows for interoperability is a win because, remember, they're adopting our standard. We're not adopting theirs.
Some also ask, "But what if Meta does a bait-and-switch and drops ActivityPub support?"
Well, there's kind of precedence for that.
Not enough people realize this, but Google once adopted the predecessor of ActivityPub. Specifically, they used OStatus for Google Buzz. Certainly, like many Google products, Google Buzz shuttered.
But the development for an open social media protocol lived on, and we all use what was developed right now.
No doubt, if Barcelona becomes Meta's Google Buzz, ActivityPub will live on. It will still be developed. We'll keep using it.
In the meantime, I'll consider ways to help Meta users migrate to platforms that I believe are better.
> Of course he wants to help Meta abide by open standards. Which, even if you dislike Meta, you would hope they would do.
I mentioned it before, this is the disconnect between the #1stGen (2008–2015) and #2ndGen (2016–Present) #Fediverse users.
Us, 1st Gen, our concern is to bring the down the walls and enable a decentralised and federated #SocialWeb. The idea itself is older than the fediverse, there were many names involved and who pioneered the pushed for it and are now forgotten.
Even me, to this day, I do welcome them federating even if they already did something EEE-like before (for example, FB Messenger federating and then defederating from #xmpp).
While I do want people to migrate over to a fediverse service made for it by developers who believes in it, the main goal is still to bring down the walls, and get them to federate … permanently.
It's why I also I welcome #Flickr and #Tumblr into the fold (and waiting for them to do so).
And for someone like me who was banned from #Instagram for no reason at all other than because I am #Autistic (I rarely use my Instagram, and when I do, it was to upload a work of mine, so clearly there were no violations), having them federate would enable me to communicate with Instagram users once again.
What we really need in the #SocialWeb, as the next iterative progression of #ActivityPub and its implementations like #Mastodon etc. IMHO. https://solidproject.org to store all posts and pictures etc per user, not per instance or account. This would radically reduce the scope of an implementation and allow for frictionless migration between instances. This does NOT necessarily need any change to the standard. It's an implementation detail, AFAICS. #SocialCG