191–200 of 217 posts
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No, it’s when you decline to federate content that some users don’t want (and many do).
If the users wanted the content it's accessible, I'm not sure what your issue is. Do you use mastadon or is this a feelings issue?
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They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize. They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality. Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreci…
Obviously it's not up to me to decide for them. It's not like we gave Aghanis the option to move out if they didn't like it. Still...
Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter. I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either: a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous; b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable; c) get a lot of negative emotions f…
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In North Korea, you can’t start your own instance to say what you want. They will still jail you for what you say. That’s the actual point. The fact that other people want to be on a system that blocks you is their business, not yours. The point of the fediverse is you get to choose your own censorship.
If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on. Sometimes, even knocking off servers you had connectivity with that were indirect. The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.
That is not censorship!
This conversation is frustrating exactly because people think a group “excluding” someone is “censoring” them. Except that's not what censorship is.
Censorship is about you not being allowed to say what you want on a sign outside your own bar.
You complaining about a different bar, not letting you in because they don’t like you. That’s not censorship, that’s just people being jerks to you… and that is allowed. Nobody has to listen to you if they don't like you. Nobody has to even let you in the door to where they hang out if they don't like you, especially if the reason they kicked you out was something you said.
Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem. There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form. There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs.…
It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website (or go even lower level to reinvent), with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.
This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). (Mastodon was never one of these & is not now.) This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.
Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control (absolute authority, can-move/credible exit), that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.
It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies bring, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.
That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society. Both are expansive & space filling, but their characteristics are as far apart as I can imagine.
@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing (https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing), a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.
> It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit
I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.
Tl:dr: actual humans have lacked the means to explore and build the techno-social, and it is absolutely nuclear hot fire that I have all this from little apps a bunch of creative friendly awesome neat people built that lets me capture this stuff (https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso/). This is proof that we have a general social networking system right here today available for use, experiment, & play. Not proof, but imho the roots are strong & good. This is how we escape the capture-entrepreneurialism. We have lacked fertile soil & good foundation for new things to get started on. I'd characterize the distinction as alive, adaptable, usable systems, versus stagnant dead systems, and imo, stagnant fixed systems aren't serving us well now, and over time decay & en-badification to serve us worse. Hence my advocacy of aliveness & possibility. (And my disdain for Mastodon as barren anti-ecosystem.)
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> Those differences are not so complex and confusing One might ask why Bluesky has more sign-ups and monthly active users acquired in less time even without the facestagram login power funnel that Threads has. And of course Threads has waaaaaayyy more. The evidence of what people want from a social media service is right in front of us and very clear. This reads to me very much like the timeless words of Seymour Skin…
Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers and Threads is owned by Meta and is integrated into Facebook. What is that supposed to prove, beyond that advertising companies are good at advertising themselves?
The marketing people are the ones who tell you to not use terms like "federation," "instances," or "tooting" when designing a social networking product.
They're the ones who tell you not to force dark mode down everyone's throats by default, when usability studies going back to the 1980s say that's a bad idea.
The marketing people are sometimes wrong. But on the whole, not usually.
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This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality. Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreci…
I'll admit I don't understand the situation in Afghanistan. Rejecting liberal democracy isn't surprising, but the Taliban sucks and it's hard to imagine that it's actually popular. Obviously it's not up to me to decide for them. It's not like we gave Aghanis the option to move out if they didn't like it. Still...
I wonder what you think that means and why they rejected it?
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I run my own mail server, thank you. “It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?
You could run your own Fediverse server. Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? ( not that I know of ) Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? ( with some exceptions, but mostly yes ) Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to acce…
I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.