Once again, in the name of simplifying, #Fediverse developers will trade away any advantages of federation in order to make something with a centralizing tendency tendency.
The Verge article extolling the #Fediverse. I personally think the writer has the wrong point. #Facebook isn't good. Its attraction is "everybody I know is on Facebook" and not any of its half-baked features. Therefore, multiprotocol / multi-network federated social is important to dethroning #corpocentric #socnets like XTwitter ( #x.com / #twitter ) and Meta's Facebook & #Instagram.
I feel this writer's exuberence will turn out to be fantasy, mostly because of misunderstanding what keeps people in the walled gardens and what it will take to free them.
@fu I don't know much about #Gitcoin, but I'm sure the anti #cryptocurrency crusaders throughout the #Fediverse and in other #FOSS contexts are going to try to roast #Tor over the hottest flames of hell.
If this gets revised, I hope developers consider what exactly "block", "mute", "silence", and so on mean in current implementations (and consider that some have different terminology for similar functionality) and only then decide what curation & protection functionality is needed and sensible in a federated and / or peer-to-peer network.
The Iris #Nostr client on #Android now has a "block and mute" function, so I've started using that against the #spambots.
Nostr has some great ideas that are way beyond what either #OStatus or #ActivityPub branches of the #Fediverse are doing, but the spam and the fact that there's a really big #Bitcoin "Maxi" faction there are chasing regular people away.
#Meta / #Facebook is building a #Twitter clone under their #Instagram brand. Apparently, there's discussion of various #ActivityPub #Fediverse projects' lead developers signing an NDA and having discussions with them.
The participants appear to be deleting evidence.
I'm not spinning a conspiracy theory. I just don't think Gargron or Dansup have any idea what kinds of restrictions an NDA can contain. They risk long-term damage to their projects and some impact on their careers.
That seems like instance admins are too powerful. This is just a guess, but each community probably has a home instance. That instance's admin could then ban the community or ban people from joining / interacting with that community, even if they're on another instance.
Likely the issue comes from everyone (users and communities) piling onto lemmy.ml.
That said, it has been a frequent complaint that #Fediverse admins have too much power. Networks like #Nostr attempt to remove or dilute such power.
There are a number of weird right wing platforms (I'd guess most are pay-for-use) and at least one weird left wing platform that are also receiving relatively large numbers of Twitter refugees. It isn't just the #Fediverse.
As with any censorship resistant network, both #Nostr and the #Fediverse are going to have to concentrate some energy around anti-spam and on improving user-level curation tools.
There are other reasons, of course, but weak curation tools lead to #blockwars such as #fediblock.
RP @simsa04: My 9 yo nephew got a Raspberry Pi for Christmas and I'm tasked by my sis – thank you for that, moron! – to give him deeper insight into the machine and what can be done with it.
I don't know why he needed one nor why his parents chose that as a gift as my nephew already writes his little Scratch programs on his laptop, but here we are. So, dear #fediverse people, please point me to guides that explain what the machine does, what kids can do with it taht makes some fun and how to do that. And also how to present the output of the thing on the display of my newphe's laptop.
#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
One thing about this surge of people migrating from #Twitter to the #Fediverse is that people who gave up on #federated #socnets years ago and solely used #corpocentric platforms are now coming back.
Thus, I get announcements about people I knew from #Tent (thanks to fellow former Tentler @bthall) along with news about people from #Identi.ca and other #StatusNet and #Pump.io instances returning.
Tim Bray discusses the ethics of moving to #Mastodon (and probably the #Fediverse in general), considering the views of groups such as #BlackTwitter whose norms and needs differ from those of most Mastodon users.
He concludes (correctly, I might add) that it is ethical to leave #Twitter and move to Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Also, #Vivaldi now has its own #Mastodon instance. I think #Brave Browser had an unofficial instance at one time, and #Mozilla intends to open theirs early in 2023.
I'm still not "there" yet, but I am doing some #PHP stuff. Maybe I'll be able to help make !GNUsocial and #Friendica competitive candidates for $ORGANIZATION deploying their own #Fediverse presence.
Anyway, Paul Graham (@paulg@twitter.com) had his #Twitter account suspended over a link to his #Fediverse #Mastodon account. Last I checked, the suspension seems to have been reverted.