Some people prefer to talk about the "social web" instead of the "fediverse".
If you do, do you just prefer one term over another, or do you think "social web" could emcompass more functionality than what today's fediverse can do?
We have talked a lot about the positive sides of the Fediverse, but not as much about the downsides. For me the top negative things of this free and healthier social web are:
People are patronizing. This happens a lot more than in other places. I mostly mean the unsolicited advice: Alt text, don’t post this or that, avoid commercialism, other social medias and use content warnings for everything. While many mean good, it has been often very aggressive. This happened a lot in 2022. For a while it made the bar to post much higher because I was afraid to make a mistake. Today I don’t care as much.
Nitpicking. Comments are nice, but not when people are overly criticising about what you do or concentrating in irrelevancies. Whataboutism is the worst side effect.
Everyone has their own rules and they are often contradicting each other. Some are extreme and block every other instance, some more allowing. You might accidentally break many rules around the Fediverse without even noticing it (some servers don’t allow posts about meat or alcohol for example).
Politically too left. It seems it is not allowed to be very conservative here. People are anti-commercialism, anti-capitalist, anti-anything.
While saying this, I do not stumble upon these downsides very often since I am quite a chill guy and have my own server. I feel like I can post whatever the fuck I want.
However, I do wonder if these things are the ones that make the Fediverse less approachable by new users. On the other hand I believe the new open social web will transform the way we see the social media in general and soon it does not matter, we don’t have to think what is ”here” when the big players like Threads and Tumblr adapt ActivityPub.
Former CEO of Twitter wanted to build a social protocol no-one can control, like SMTP or HTTP for social media. Bluesky’s ATProto was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize, but then Musk happened and Bluesky started taking it to the wrong direction and everything fell apart in Dorsey’s mind.
A very revealing interview. I now see even more future in W3C’s ActivityPub.
Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
What we really need in the #SocialWeb, as the next iterative progression of #ActivityPub and its implementations like #Mastodon etc. IMHO. https://solidproject.org to store all posts and pictures etc per user, not per instance or account. This would radically reduce the scope of an implementation and allow for frictionless migration between instances. This does NOT necessarily need any change to the standard. It's an implementation detail, AFAICS. #SocialCG
”When Musk bought Twitter and there was that initial wave of people fleeing, Mastodon could've kept that momentum, and probably won out as the next big thing, if it'd (1) opened mastodon.social to registrations as the default server and (2) added quote posts. I'm convinced Bluesky's success was entirely because Mastodon didn't do (1) and (2), and while the Fediverse will still likely be the main decentralized network, once Threads federates, the process was significantly slowed and fractured.”
When will people understand that Mastodon or any other Fediverse app will not need to ”success” and be mainstream? I think we are not driven by profit and corporate gain. I think we will exist as long as there are people running their web services.
Please note: This is just my opinion. I have to state this, because I’ve been blocked for less. Comment if you agree/disagree.
I'd like to give a heads-up to #SocialCoding movement where I'm involved and plan to revive the notion of #SX or Social experience design, esp. for the #SocialWeb.
So much chatter on #Fediverse is either deeply technical or app-specific. The field of SX may offer a more holistic and inclusive perspective, focus on methods, guidance and best-practices.
It’s funny to me that some people on Threads are saying Mastodon (mistakenly thinking it’s a one service) will always be ”small” and ”closed”. Well, soon we’ll be in the same crowd with the Threads people, perhaps with others like Tumblr too.
The Fediverse can expand unlike the other truly closed social networks. This is exactly like talking about the Internet in the 80s, ”it will be a small thing for the nerds, and always will be so”.
Excellent video by @Techaltar about the #SocialWeb. You can basically send this to anyone who wants to learn what makes Mastodon unique compared to other social media platforms and what it is that we're doing here 🙂
#Threads killing #Twitter and then being forced to fully support #ActivityPub (and not try to fuck with it) thanks to #EU regulation would be pretty awesome. And other governments could then adopt similar laws and other corporations could comply by just joining us here too. A simple path forward. Pretty cool. #fediverse#socialweb
I’m not even arguing any more about which social media platform is the best. Only thing certain is that X is shit. For the rest I’m just waiting for the modern microblogging services to be connected via ActivityPub. In the meantime I’m using only Mastodon and Threads.
Have you heard of any arguments from #threads users for not turning on federation? I can't imagine one. Any failure to do so yet has to be people who haven't heard of it or don't understand what it is. #SocialWeb
The natural end state of hashtags is to eventually serve as subreddits for the #SocialWeb. but here they would overlap, allowing us to visit any space in the Venn diagram of all the tagged posts we're interested in.
"But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web."