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The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

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Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#211

Post by brightlancer »

piaste wrote: post #177
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #155

My concern with scholarship on the fediverse would be clash between academic cultures, and potential exclusion. Some fields of the humanities in some parts of the world do not have the absorbing interest in race/sexuality/gender/power that North American and Western European academia does; they look at those developments with bemusement or horror, and frequently complain about how funding gets tied to using Westerner…

This is a truly bizarre critique, because it seems completely backwards in every respect. The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place. And all other alternatives are far worse in that specific aspect you bring. There is a very mild barrier to running your own Mastodon/PeerTube/etc. instance (you don't even ha…

> The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place.

But you're ignoring that this is dependent upon not being blacklisted from the majority of (and the biggest) servers for not agreeing with their politics.

Folks regularly make the comparison to e-mail, so let's go with that: anyone can run their own e-mail server and send/ receive e-mail from users on other servers. We would find it unacceptable to blacklist an e-mail server because of the politics of the owner or users. Spam, sure, but not _politics_.

The main Mastodon developers also run the main instance, run a directory of other instances, and blacklist instances which do not follow their politics.

So anyone can run their own instance, but the other important part of federation is BROKEN.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#212

Post by zoogeny »

indigochill wrote: post #171
zoogeny wrote: post #92

This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific probl…

> There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals. > Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution. To be clear, federation and even the ActivityPub protocol have nothing to do with the tweet-like interface of Mastodon (and ActivityPub isn't the only way to federate, either. Email is federated), although TBF the…

I'm not an expert on ActivityPub nor academic publishing. What I'm trying to say is that what is built on top of the protocol has more to do with its suitability for a particular purpose than the foundational technology.

The first quote is an observation that It is unlikely that Mastodon will be a suitable drop-in-replacement for the current process.

The second quote is an observation that perhaps there is a way to use the technological pieces that are currently available for federation and apply them to the organization of scientific/academic societies. But that whole system is going to be significantly more than the federated aspect.

Part of this is I remember Google Wave and the unreasonable hype around it. It would replace email, newsgroups, instant messaging … basically all forms of text based communication! Some of the hype for these more contemporary niche technologies is even wilder, this article for example claiming it should force a complete re-think of academic publishing.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#213

Post by zoogeny »

justinpombrio wrote: post #111
zoogeny wrote: post #92

This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific probl…

Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it! Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up…

That is fair, I have no reason to paint all academic publishing with a single broad brush. Personally, I am strongly on the side of free and open - probably in the direction of things like the Open Data Institute (ODI).

But data, including academic papers published by scientific societies, being free and open has nothing whatsoever to do with the communication protocols underlying those societies. You can have free, open and peer reviewed journals distributed by email, by FTP, by carrier pigeon, etc.

So if your beef with academic societies is merely the cost or the closed nature, federated protocols needn't be part of the discussion at all.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#214

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Jerrrry wrote: post #200
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, how did we get from “we don’t call black peoples slurs here” to “WHITES ONLY drinking fountains”?? White people arent weird troglodytes unable to be around a black person without slurring them. Calling black peoples the n word is not an essential part of being white!

You are helping the troll string up a straw man, no one has mentioned blacks aside from him. And the left is completely ideologically unable to be around a black person without first acknowledging their privileged presence by an oppression tirade of apologizing blithering woke-double-speak. The left and the right are equally racist for similar reasons, for example; they both think blacks should had gotten the vaccine…

Dude I’m literally just saying that I don’t get how calling black people the n word is some kind of bubble. Basic human decency is a crazy social filter I guess. I feel like this jump is hysterics.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#215

Post by zoogeny »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #114
zoogeny wrote: post #92

This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific probl…

> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. That is a decision by granting agencies and administrators who distribute funding. The scholars will organize around whatever the people who pay them tell them to.

This is the only response that actually addresses the article and my criticism. You make a good point that pressuring the governmental agencies that distribute funding to adopt a set of requirements could push the entire academic body in a particular direction.

I still don't see the point in choosing federated protocols as a mandate if we were to do this. My preference would be to use that energy towards free and open data sources. I think arXiv is the best example for that and not Mastodon.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#216

Post by fingidiotta »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #178
Sophistifunk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all why mastodon doesn't have search. It's all about stopping "bullying" when you post something stupid.

I'll see if I can find the links, it's been a while since I last saw them, but there was a very active GitHub issue on the main Mastodon repo back in 2017 or 2018 related to search. It came down to concerns over content that is considered acceptable in some cultures and child pornography in others.

[dead]

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#217

Post by sleepybrett »

Hamuko wrote: post #134
sleepybrett wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... yup, email was a total failure.

From a federation standpoint, it arguably is. If you try to host your own private email server from your garage, you're going to struggle with the big email providers not accepting your emails in fears of spam. And trying to debug your way around this is extremely tricky because the email filters are black boxes, again in fear of spam. I wouldn't be surprised if Mastodon also went the distrust-by-default route if it…

I've been running my own email server for myself and a dozen or so friends since 1998. It hasn't been a problem. I had to evolve it over time and set up DKIM and DMARC. Spamassassin, greylisting, etc have helped me cut down on my incoming spam. It hasn't been a ton of work, maybe a day or two a year to deal with a new version of whatever that needs to some config changes.

I've been running my own mastodon instance for me and a few friends as well. It's been fine, we federate fine, no bans that I know of, no reports about my users. I think more smaller instances is probably better for the health of the network than a few huge instances. Especially if those instances are free to users.

Large instances need more moderation than a couple of admins can handle, I am concerned that instances like msdn.social or whatever may not be sustainable from both a 'actual costs' standpoint (bandwidth, hardware, etc) but also from a moderation standpoint.

In terms of my instance, the costs are very low, the mastodon software itself is frankly kind of painful to maintain, it's designed to run in a way that is scalable but that makes it a bit too complicated for a smaller instance..

I hope we see some more interesting experiments in moderation, tools like spamassassin for mastodon to automatically score and flag local posts for moderation review.

It's early days. I think we may just end up with what we see in email like the blackhole list. Have an instance full of nazis you refuse to moderate, your instance ends up on the list and everyone who subscribes to it will just defederate automatically.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#218

Post by Zak »

jmyeet wrote: post #5

Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users. Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscriptio…

I'm confused by this comment. It's written as if federated social media is a hypothetical technology someone is proposing. It isn't. It's a real technology with dozens of interoperable implementations, thousands of running servers, and millions of users. A precursor of the currently popular ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon launched 15 years ago with Laconica and has been under continuous development since.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#219

Post by sleepybrett »

fy20 wrote: post #51
echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> user-friendly moves Such as? Difficult onboarding? I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.) It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it. Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level. For example one of them had an option to…

The mastodon web client seems pretty similar, qualitatively, to twitters web client. Granted cross-instance search is not a thing but in terms of the timeline and how you interact with it it's largely identical.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#220

Post by sleepybrett »

candiddevmike wrote: post #50
jdlyga wrote: post #4

The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.

You could run a battery optimized, opportunistically available mastodon instance from your phone, but Apple and Google won't let you. The amount of wasted compute in everyone's hands is staggering.

How is the relevant to the conversation? Sure, we have very powerful processors in many devices in our home that are idle much of the time. What, exactly, is your point.
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