They go on to imagine some wonderful or awful scenario where the floodgates are open and #Threads becomes another #ActivityPub app like #CalcKey or #Plemora.
Maybe.... but what you are envisioning is really very unlikely. Threads is entirely algorithm driven. How's that going to work? Plus they have no interest in letting their captured users escape.
Yet another question people are asking me: "How can I, a common person, help hasten the demise of #Meta through #ActivityPub?"
Again, I want to re-emphasize this. #Fediblock is not an all-purpose tool. It's useful as a hammer. But in this scenario, we don't just need a hammer. We need drills, pliers, saws, and blowtorches.
That said, we must protect communities that choose to defederate from Meta. Which means that if those servers don't want to receive messages from any Meta-owned services, we must not only be respectful of that, we should make damn sure that those servers are quarantined from Meta. So much of the success of fighting Meta will require safe spaces from Meta.
The next thing we need is lots and lots of nodes. Currently, we only have ~25,000 nodes on the Fediverse but we need more. Preferably, these nodes should be small, agile, and well-moderated. If you have the finances and/or skill to run a node, it's important that you do so. To compete with Meta, we need to build scale -- and the easiest way to build scale is by adding more nodes to the Fediverse.
What will also be key is lobby servers. These will be servers specifically set up for migrants from Meta-owned services to help onboard them towards the rest of the Fediverse. To run such a lobby server, they need to be welcoming, moderated well, and free of the elitists and gatekeepers that poison so much of the Fediverse currently.
How to get people from Meta to try out the rest of the Fediverse? We need people willing to be ambassadors on #P92 who are ready and willing to evangelize the rest of the Fediverse. Folks like @tchambers are very good at this on Twitter, and I have no doubt that we can do the same with P92. Except this time we'll have the benefit of federation already happening 😉
Now if there's one thing I've learned about the growth of the Fediverse it's that bad corporate decisions pay dividends. We've already experienced waves of migration from Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit. And I have no doubt that it's only a matter of time before Meta makes another corporate mistake -- as they tend to do.
In which case, we need to strike fast. When another Cambridge Analytica happens, we need to remind everyone on Meta about the lobby servers that are on standby, and ready to take them on. Unlike previous migrations, let's not be unprepared for this. Let's be especially prepared since Meta plans to join the Fediverse.
Finally, we need more devs. Specifically, we need devs willing to build innovative server and client software that takes aim at Meta. And to do that, we need to support the devs that currently exist -- show evergreen devs pondering whether they should invest here that we, as a community, are appreciative of our current devs.
If you like #Mastodon, #Calckey, #Kbin, #Friendica, etc., it's important that you open up your hearts as well as your wallets and fund the next stage of Fediverse development.
This will take a lot of work. But if you want to fight Meta, challenge their dominance of social media, this is what must be done.
Personally, I'm hyped about the future of the Fediverse -- regardless of whether Meta eventually lives to tell the tale.
It is an existential threat to the very core of Meta’s social media monopoly. Surprisingly, if the goal is to fight against Meta’s hegemony, the most effective strategy may be to federate with them.
“But Chris,” some of you might state, “Even you agree that it might be better to defederate Meta – and you’ve even set up notmeta.social for expressly this purpose.”
Yes, because it’s not everyone’s objective to fight Meta, and there should be spaces where fighting Meta isn’t top of mind. Not everyone wants to be part and parcel of a fight, and that’s okay.
Let’s first acknowledge the technology through which federation happens. #ActivityPub is an open standard protocol that enables the decentralized social networking that powers the Fediverse. It allows different social media platforms (#Mastodon, #Calckey, #Kbin, etc.) to interoperate, meaning that users on one platform can communicate with users on another platform. Federation is the process by which these platforms connect and share content, forming a decentralized network.
The most important thing to understand about ActivityPub is that, more than a technology to merely send and receive messages, it’s also a common ruleset – a gentleman’s agreement that everyone will play nice when sending and receiving messages.
Now when Meta opts to use ActivityPub, they’re abiding by the agreement: to play by the same rules as everybody else. Should they renege on this agreement, they are no longer using ActivityPub. They’re using something else.
But let’s assume for a moment that Meta is abiding to use ActivityPub, and they indeed will play by the same rules. Knowing Meta, this is a tall order – but still, let’s assume.
ActivityPub means that whatever of Meta’s userbase that’s exposed to federation will diversify into other platforms. This is because, through ActivityPub, smaller platforms can connect with each other and offer a combined user base that competes with Meta’s centralized network. This diversification reduces the dependence of users on a single platform, giving them more choices and potentially drawing them away from Meta.
This creates an erosion of Meta’s network effects. Meta’s entire monopoly is based on ownership of their platforms’ network effects, where the value of the platform increases as more users join. Suddenly, by federating, Meta no longer own the network effect. This is because federation challenges this by breaking down barriers between platforms, allowing users to interact regardless of the platform they are on. This reduces the exclusivity and advantage Meta holds, as the network effects become distributed across multiple interconnected platforms.
Federation also gives Meta’s users power that they never previously had. Federation promotes decentralization by giving users greater control over their data and interactions. With ActivityPub, users have the freedom to choose which platform they prefer without sacrificing connectivity. This user empowerment threatens Meta’s control over user data and engagement, potentially leading to a loss of influence and advertising revenue.
ActivityPub poses a tangible threat to Meta’s monopoly on social media. By choosing to federate, Meta might be opening Pandora’s box. The moment Meta’s users receive a message from a server not owned by Meta is the moment they’re exposed to something else beyond Meta’s control. Inevitably, this will create more diversity of ActivityPub-enabled platforms – not less. This will erode Meta’s network effects. For people who use Meta, the power of decentralization – giving them more freedom – will prove revelatory.
Of course, this is a fight. And just because Meta federates doesn’t mean it’s game over. In the next post, I will explore what Meta is hoping to gain by joining the #Fediverse.
I'm very sorry for all of the degraded performance lately on calckey.social. As you may or may not know, we've been testing changes with our codebase, database deployment, ims deployment, and a whole lot more. After a lot of testing and changes, I thought that we were good enough to start opening signups again. Turns out... we're not. As I continue to work on things and start team up with some very smart people who've worked in deployment and scaling systems, we're going to do our absolute best to make sure that we can handle things on all ends, and hopefully get extra hands on deck for day-to-day operations, so it's not all on my shoulders. I was sadly unable to attend to a lot of things yesterday due to being out of town for the holiday, and being in a no-service area for the majority of the day, so I didn't know that there were issues until it was too late. Thank you for your patience as we go through growing pains. A full write-up on what went wrong, the steps we took, and how it's fixed (once it's fixed!) will be made after all this is done. For real.
I did NOT expect this amount of support, interest, and coverage! Hitting 13k from 11k in a little over 2 days across all servers is still boggling my mind. And it's not just calckey.social -- so many other servers are getting new users, and even ~30 new servers cropped up! Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. I'll make sure that I do my hardest to make sure you all have a great experience.
As promised, you all deserve a peak into what we've been working on in secret for months. More details to come tonight/tomorrow. Stay tuned. 😉
A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for...
Yes, Calckey is undergoing a full rebranding!! But it's more than that. We've worked for MONTHS on this, and there's going to be a lot of changes and exciting things coming up. This includes:
Press releases?!?!
A super sick trailer video
A full roadmap for the next couple YEARS
A new flagship server that will be AUTOMATICALLY MIGRATED TO from calckey.social (a Fediverse first!)
A cute new mascot :calc_swear: <(I'm not cute?!)
A new code hosting service with better CI/CD
The stable release you've all been waiting for, but not as v14.0.0... as v1!!
So, I tried installing #Threads to check it out, but I ended up uninstalling it pretty quickly. Here's the deal: it's just another Twitter clone that's all about algorithms.
I get it, that's what most people are into. I understand that influencers, media, and celebrities attract a lot of attention. But that's just not my thing.
I might sound a bit "weird," but I actually prefer my reverse chronological feed where I have complete control over what and who I see. If I want to discover more stuff, I'll just use #Calckey's search feature, which may not be the best but works well enough for me.
Oh, and I deleted my Meta accounts for a good reason. Whenever I'm there, I feel this weird sense of discomfort, like I need a good shower afterwards.
I know I'm not your typical user. I've been part of the Fediverse since 2018 and have genuinely enjoyed it, even when it was just a small community of a few thousand people. We have a nice little community going on over here, and I don't need all the fancy stuff that Threads is offering right now.
I'm not trying to bash Threads or judge anyone who uses it. It's just not the right fit for me, plain and simple.
On the latest release candidate on calckey.social, I noticed that there’s an expand tweet button that will show a full tweet embed if someone sends you a Twitter link.
Don’t ask me for the full details on how this works—I don’t do the coding for #Calckey 😉
I’d like a genuinely honest response. For those of you that don’t believe in membership fees, ads, etc what is a sustainable model for keeping instances up and running? People can’t be forced to donate #mastodon#fediverse#calckey
I'm working on https://schizo.social again. There's still tons of basic client stuff I could work on, like logout, or rendering boosts, but my goal is to build a client for managing multiple #Fediverse accounts; things like syncing following/mutes/etc. Not really trying to build a client you'd use to read. I want to implement #Calckey login, but calckey.social is down. Maybe I should start with handling multiple #Mastodon accounts first? #schizoSocial
I was messing with #calckey over the past few days. I really prefer the UI over there, but I don't want to leave this server or the people who follow me on Mastodon. I'm hoping #Mastodon borrows some of the great UI attention from Calckey.
Waiting for the next version of #calckey to be released! Looks really good. If more mobile apps come with support, I think it’ll be a serious competitor to Mastodon and many people who bailed in the early days of the twitter migration would probably find it a better fit.
Usually, I'm the one explaining the #Fediverse to other people, but this time I'm a little confused.
Do I need to create an account to use #Lemmy or can I do it from my #Mastodon or #Calckey account? I see you can follow communities, but can I interact with them the same way as I can with a Lemmy account?
(now, I guess it's better to create an account anyway if I don't want all the posts from all communities I follow to show up on my Mastodon/Calckey feed)
"Calckey heißt jetzt Firefish, … sonst ändert sich nüscht." 😉
Hab die Meldung mal aktualisiert:
Alles was auf Mastodon fehlt: Firefish im Fediverse mit zig Zusatzfunktionen
Die Zahl der Twitter-Alternativen wächst und wächst. Während die meisten das Vorbild ziemlich stark nachbauen, gibt es aber auch Versuche, weiterzudenken.
Many people are asking me, "How will #ActivityPub ultimately be #Meta's own undoing?"
Meta's current business model is not built for an open protocol like ActivityPub. It's very much dependent on them owning and controlling the network effect of services like Facebook and Instagram.
Not only does Meta want to collect all your personal data -- they want to control it too. They enforce this control through proprietary APIs. In this sense, they're not different from Twitter and Reddit.
The point of ActivityPub is that services, such as #Mastodon, #Kbin, and #Calckey, can depend on an open protocol instead of a proprietary API.
What if I, the admin of calckey.social, don't like what a dev is doing? Well, too bad. The protocol is open. I might be able to twiddle with my own server, but I can't do jack with anyone else's.
And what if I'm a greedy asshole who wants to monetize the user data on my server? Too bad for me, everyone on my server can migrate elsewhere.
This is not how Meta does business. In almost all ways, ActivityPub is counter to their business. Yet, here they are -- wanting to join the Fediverse.
The tech industry is awash in stories of big corporations that own proprietary tech that become undone by open standards.
Remember IBM's dominance of PCs? It was undone by the EISA standard.
Remember Novell's dominance of networking? It was undone by the bundling of TCP/IP in operating systems.
Remember AOL's dominance of online services? It was undone by the World Wide Web.
ActivityPub is yet another standard that pierces the opaque walled gardens that largely depend on proprietary technology owned by one company. And Meta happens to be one company that owns an opaque walled garden.
If history is to be repeated -- and usually it's worth learning from history -- then Meta opening the door to ActivityPub is company suicide. It's the first domino to fall before everything else in their catalogue of walled gardens also falls. Contrary to popular opinion, creating an ActivityPub enabled social network does not "kill" ActivityPub -- it validates it.
As it happens, I've known quite a few people who work at Meta. I have a little insight into what they're thinking.
Most folks at Meta know very well that Facebook will eventually die. But not just Facebook, Instagram too. Social networks, by their nature, are generational and transient. They have a shelf life.
Meta very much wants to build the app that kills Facebook and Instagram.
They have to build it because they can't acquire competition. That will raise the ire of regulators.
Likewise, Meta have already tried to leverage their own proprietary APIs to build compelling platforms. We've already seen this with the likes of Portal and Oculus.
What's apparent is that, even for a Big Social company like Meta, it is extremely hard to build a network effect from scratch. Sure, billions of people use Facebook and Instagram, but it was a whole lot of work for Meta to do that themselves.
And what was the end result of building Facebook and Instagram's network effect? More regulation by governments.
Thus, ActivityPub gives Meta two things it craves: the ability to piggyback on the network effect of an open protocol, and the ability to head off regulators by saying, "Hey, we don't own this protocol -- we're no different from Mastodon and Calckey."
Again, open protocols usually mean the demise of big corporations who leverage success through proprietary APIs. And ActivityPub will be no different.
Meta joining the Fediverse means that Automattic was right to build ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. It also means competitors, such as Apple and Microsoft, should probably start investing in ActivityPub.
What else does it mean? That small developers should start building apps that appeal to people who use Meta services. They should build these apps based on garden-variety ActivityPub -- because Meta can't own or control ActivityPub.
Maybe it’s due to being autistic but I have no idea how others perceive me.
For three years of my life on the Fediverse, I pretty much just talked to myself and was content with that. I would say whatever and it wouldn’t matter because nobody was reading anything anyway.
When someone responded to one of my posts, it was usually spam. When it was actually someone real talking to me, it was like speaking to a unicorn.
Then one day, people started talking back. And what’s more they gave a damn about my opinions. For what reason, I don’t know. They just did.
Because some people talked to me, more people started talking to me. And everything started carrying more weight.
The moment I realized that I crossed the precipice of influence was when, one day, I typed some Unicode into a post.
This got lots of accessibility advocates angry. They were specifically angry because I was deemed an “influential” account. So I cut it out and haven’t posted any Unicode that way ever since.
Because of this, I have become more and more careful about what I post on this account. For example, I used to talk about my personal life. Things that I thought were innocuous upset people. One particular time, I said that my daughter and I listen to vinyl every day. That post got lots of blowback, and so I’ve stopped sharing stuff like that.
Sometimes people assign motivations where there is none. Recently, people have suddenly assumed I have something against #FediPact. This is not the case, and though I have not joined FediPact, I sympathize—and have even set up notmeta.social as a #Calckey server that pre-emptively defederates Meta.
Constantly, I get messages asking if I have something against this person or that service. And almost always, it’s never. If you think I do, talk to me directly, and I’m happy to iron out any misunderstandings.
In my actual life, I do my best to avoid conflict—to the point it annoys people. If I genuinely don’t like someone, I don’t argue with them. I make it impossible for them to contact me.
If you can contact me, it means that I probably like you.
An interesting case of moderation in the fediverse (blog.ownlifeful.com)
A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for...