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Fediverse

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Re: Fediverse

#81

Post by nileshtrivedi »

taurusnoises wrote: post #22

I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to. I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense (I know what they are, just not what to do with that info), and for better or worse doesn't…

ActivityPub is a generalization of Email. Email gives you a cloud-hosted inbox that others can put stuff in. ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out. Check out this diagram: https://activitypub.rocks/static/images/ActivityPub-tutorial...

The stuff here is called an "Activity" around "Objects". Follow request is a "Follow" activity with the "Actor" as the object. A tweet is a "Create" activity with the "Note" being the object. There's an entire vocabulary defined in the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#object-typ...

This way, all kinds of social platforms - from YouTube to GitHub - can be modeled in this general distributed pub/sub system.

Re: Fediverse

#82

Post by riffic »

emptysongglass wrote: post #65
Ambolia wrote: post #3

Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam an…

Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview

no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.

Re: Fediverse

#83

Post by emptysongglass »

riffic wrote: post #82
emptysongglass wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview

no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.

You didn't come with any numbers so I will and they contradict your claims: https://hatryx-lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-...

Re: Fediverse

#84

Post by tonguez »

pavlov wrote: post #61

I feel the branding here is just not very appealing. "Federated" brings up associations of something boring and complicated and bureaucratic. And now because of the metaverse hype, "Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents. Take a leaf from the crypto pumpers and call it web4? "It's like web3 but advanced beyond money. You know, like in Star Trek. Hoarding tokens is just so 20th century."

yours is the most important post here. so i need the fediverse to escape the feds? sounds confusing. here's an example of a conversation that will never happen in the real world: "Why should I use the Fediverse?" "It's federated"

The types of names that become popular are things like Beats or Goop. Is there anything remarkable about Beats headphones? No there's literally nothing except the name because it makes the average braindead person think it must be bass-boosted or something, and this was enough to make what dumb rapper came up with that name, a billionaire. But apparently this is just too intelligent for any nerds to figure out, so the Fediverse will remain unused.

Re: Fediverse

#85

Post by moron4hire »

phicoh wrote: post #77
moron4hire wrote: post #36

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those politica…

In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them. There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter. Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both…

> Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates.

I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor.

Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would.

It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem.

Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.

Re: Fediverse

#86

Post by anderspitman »

echelon wrote: post #10

A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully P2P. Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain about today. P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore anything and re…

P2P is just a special case of federation, where n=1. IMO PKI is simply not a realistic identity platform for the average person. You have to back your private key up with some reliable third party and their recovery system is going to be based on email so you may as well just use email for identity.

Re: Fediverse

#87

Post by beepbooptheory »

riffic wrote: post #80
JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with Bluesky?[1]

1. https://blueskyweb.org

Re: Fediverse

#88

Post by riffic »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #87
riffic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with Bluesky?[1] 1. https://blueskyweb.org

probably. Fortunately Bluesky is vaporware so the Fediverse and ActivityPub actually have the advantage here of being a standard that has an established community of implementors, and momentum.

EDIT: I've said before, the PBLLC should be working with the W3C, IETF, or other open bodies, and they've always had a seat at the table (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/join).

Re: Fediverse

#89

Post by moron4hire »

parksy wrote: post #46
moron4hire wrote: post #36

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those politica…

This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so…

I never ran an popular board. I had ran some small ones, mostly folks I knew in real life. I've also ran several in-person clubs over the years, which obviously don't scale to the same degree. But I do have some inkling of the issues you're talking about.

The newess of the whole thing is a great point. I keep hoping that Internet culture as a whole will invent a new sense of manners. (At the risk of being accused of being an Eternal Septemberist, which was actually before my time) 'Member when people talked about being a "good 'netizen"? We had trolls, but they knew what they were doing was against good manners (indeed, that's why they did it).

Somewhere along the line, people stopped getting on-ramped onto the Internet. They got dumped on instead and the only role models they had were other folks who couldn't see the humanity behind the handle.

A lot of the issues you talked about still exist in general-purpose social media. Indeed, the platform reinforces it, as it gets to know your political proclivities better and pushes you into their engagement bubbles.

I think the decentralization is a bulkheading against those issues. When they happen--and they will happen--the limited scope of the topic board limits the damage to that subculture. It doesn't impact the Whole Damn Nation. Can you imagine someone like Donald Trump winning the presidency without a one-stop-shop of advertising and propaganda dissemination that Facebook provides? You don't even have to spend that much money, you can get the people to organically self-sustain it with the right meme seeding.

We had competing boards, too. I was active on two different game development boards. There were more that I just didn't bother with. If one started to feel like shit, I could dump over to another one. There was some continuity, but it wasn't absolute.

IDK. I know I'm probably rose-colored-glasses on the issue. And you're right, there's no putting the cat back in the bag. Maybe the bigger problem is that most people really are shit and smartphones gave them access to the internet. "Garbage in, garbage out". But it seems like they'd all be fighting it out on the ESPN boards, away from my eyes, if it weren't for general-purpose social media.

Re: Fediverse

#90

Post by pfraze »

riffic wrote: post #88
beepbooptheory wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with Bluesky?[1] 1. https://blueskyweb.org

probably. Fortunately Bluesky is vaporware so the Fediverse and ActivityPub actually have the advantage here of being a standard that has an established community of implementors, and momentum. EDIT: I've said before, the PBLLC should be working with the W3C, IETF, or other open bodies, and they've always had a seat at the table ( https://www.w3.org/Consortium/join ).

We're absolutely not vaporware. We're also completely happy to live in a world where both ActivityPub and Bluesky exist, and prioritize different problems with different approaches.
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