Homebrew Social Networking
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Homebrew Social Networking
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Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#2Moving to Discord?
An interesting choice seemingly in opposition to decentralization.
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#3Moving to Discord? An interesting choice seemingly in opposition to decentralization.
Exactly my thoughts as well!
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#4Moving to Discord? An interesting choice seemingly in opposition to decentralization.
Doesn't seem very "homebrew" either.
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#5mastodon reminds me more of the hobby shell boxes of the 90s. where all the ex-bbs-sysops would offer free mail, webhosting and shell accounts to their friends.
fun times!
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#6mastodon reminds me more of the hobby shell boxes of the 90s. where all the ex-bbs-sysops would offer free mail, webhosting and shell accounts to their friends. fun times!
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#7> Decentralized ones, by contrast, can be a mess but they democratize innovation
well that's an interesting take. granting that the fediverse is decentralized, is it democratic?
my instinct would be to say "no: i don't need to hold a referendum and get a majority vote in favor before bridging my site to the network: i just do it and each other site either federates with me or doesn't." that sounds more anarchic than democratic.
on the other hand, the vast majority of the network has all settled on ActivityPub as a protocol. one could say that users and developers "voted with their feet (or their actions)", coalescing around that protocol and now it's effectively legislated (in the sense that a democracy would legislate English to be the official language, or for Pacific Time to be the regional timezone).
but AP could still be displaced/improved without any appeal to authority. Misskey added all sorts of wacky protocol extensions and it didn't need to ask permission from anyone else on the network: whatever useful features it adds sort of disperse outward. i wouldn't describe that as "democratic". if someone really wanted to use a political metaphor, i guess you could say that decentralized networks federalize innovation? still feels like the wrong class of metaphor though.
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#8Maybe I missed it but I didn’t see much about home brewing a social network. App.net was an amazing structure for a social network. It went way beyond micro blogging although that’s what most people associated it with. When it went offline a lot of it was open sourced. A group of app.net fans now hang out at
It is a solid micro blogging service that has an API developers can use to build different apps for. I use one for posting and use a web app for a weekly meetup to request and watch videos together.
Using tools like this can be used for anyone to make a nice “Homebrew” social media platform.
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#9mastodon reminds me more of the hobby shell boxes of the 90s. where all the ex-bbs-sysops would offer free mail, webhosting and shell accounts to their friends. fun times!
Those still exist today, check out the tildeverse and their family of niche shell boxes:
https://tildeverse.org/
Re: Homebrew Social Networking
#10mastodon reminds me more of the hobby shell boxes of the 90s. where all the ex-bbs-sysops would offer free mail, webhosting and shell accounts to their friends. fun times!
Those still exist today, check out the tildeverse and their family of niche shell boxes: https://tildeverse.org/
that's cool, but it's not the same as like being a teenager at the dawn of the internet boom where you and a bunch of your irl friends all have shell boxes and you judge people based on their choice of os, configuration thereof and what cool or uncool stuff they're hosting.
also hosting is cheap and easy now and participating in internet mail seems like a terrible headache.