Today, we launched our new Mastodon instance. It will ensure a privacy-focused space to engage with and get the latest from our Commissioners, departments, and the official voices of the Commission.
We want to thank @Mastodon for stewarding us and helping us make this possible.
Fostering European digital players is vital to our strategy for a stronger #DigitalEU.
This is a unique opportunity to grow the community even more. Let's get there!
Delightful 💕 to see that #EuropeanCommission now has an official #Mastodon instance. #EC loves Mastodon, as the image clearly shows.
I hope this love will expand further to not just extend to one #FreeSoftware microblogging application, but to become a full embrace of the #OpenStandards based decentralized #SocialNetworking environment and #SocialWeb technology ecosystems that have formed around its open protocols, such as #ActivityPub.
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 🙂
A new episode of Dot Social, the first podcast about the open social web, is out! In it, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with ActivityPub co-author @evan about what the protocol unlocks for builders and entrepreneurs, how open-source social networks change our relationships to content and each other, and why any of this matters at all. Learn more and take a listen!
What’s the BBC up to in the Fediverse? What have they learned so far from their experiments? And how is all this like the early days of the internet? In the latest episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden), Senior Firestarter at @BBCRD. (How cool is that title, btw!)
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.
(He admins mastodon.social & mastodon.online too — whew!)
I've had the pleasure to get to know him in his work as a core contributor to #Mastodon through #FastForward, and I'm thrilled — his thoughtful approach and deep knowledge of networking ++ will help us scale in a sustainable and healthy way.
The #fediverse#socialweb is facing some tough problems, but we're in great hands with Renaud in this role!
When the social media conceptualized in the late 2000s, new services started to pop up every other week. Some of them were even popular. I remember being registered to over 160 different social media services. Jaiku, Qaiku, Bebo, Ello, Tsu, Path, PicPlz etc… there were so many. Then they died one by one after Facebook and Instagram took over.
Some people who remember this are saying the same is happening to Mastodon, Pixelfed and Loops. But they clearly do not understand the concept or interoperability and the social web, Fediverse, that is. They think of these platforms as a singlular, centralized services and they are using the commercial mindset.
The Fediverse will last. It will prosper. And it has already. That is what I sincerely believe. Since 2022 nothing has proven otherwise. I like the direction this is heading to.
The #IndieWeb service #Bridgy is ready to handle bridge AT protocol and ActivityPub protocol posts and replies once federation is enabled in production (already working in sandbox test server).
The format will be:
To follow a #Fediverse account from BlueSky / AT protocol: <username>.<server_domain>.ap.brid.gy
To follow a BlueSky / AT protocol user: <username>@atproto.brid.gy
Example: @atp.youronly.one@atproto.brid.gy
This allows users from each side to see new posts and to reply to these threads.
What is more interesting is that, if you have IndieWeb support on your website or blog, you will see comments from BlueSky / AT protocol appear as a comment, thanks to #Webmention. It is already possible to do this with Fediverse / ActivityPub. ^_~
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.
If you haven't heard, sadly, #ChirpSocial, one of the popular #ActivityPub “groups” platform, is shutting down “probably” on February 29th.
In an email they sent to admins, the owner and developer can no longer support https://chirp.social financially as they failed to find a new job after they were laid off by #Google last year.
This reminds us the importance of having a built-in groups feature, and one where the groups feature actually federates.
Back in 2008, when the #Fediverse was born, we did have a built-in federated groups in #Laconica / #StatusNet (today known as #GNUsocial). We used bang (!) instead of at (@). A built-in groups feature is more stable as established instances can host them.
Today, we have #Friendica and #Hubzilla (as well as #Streams-based instances) to fill in that, as groups is a built-in feature in those software products. It's just a matter of finding an instance that's open to hosting groups for any topic for the ActivityPub protocol.
That said, any Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams-based instances you suggest for groups?
@molly0xfff is a leading cryptocurrency critic, but get to know her and you’ll see she’s anything but cynical about the future of the web. Hear why this researcher, writer and software engineer thinks so in this fascinating conversation with @mike:
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.
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?
Looks like the #threadiverse has been widely used by the #Lemmy and #Kbin communities for years, but now it's slowly being co-opted (including by #Meta staff) to refer to the #federation of #Threads.
I predict a complete takeover of the #hashtag, and term in general, before the end of 2024.
When coming back from the algorithmic social medias I always feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing the fact that on the Fediverse boosts really matter, because they make the posts pop up naturally as there is no "For you" feed. It's actually fun to boost posts here, because you know YOU are the algorithm. It's more fun and meaningful that way.
The #BBC now has their own #fediverse instance. An experiment, but this is exactly what we need, journalistic outlets with their own space on the decentralized #socialweb. Just like when media created their own first websites in the early days of the public internet (going beyond AOL keywords etc). This place is about news imo, so being embraced by journalists is key. I hope their list of accounts grows quickly, and other outlets follow their lead.
Part 6 of "A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website)" is now out.
Sorry about the delay, this is the part that not many people will like, I assume. I try to explain how to implement the inbox, which by nature is dynamic non-static.
The vibes on Threads have been shifted. The For you feed brings up negative and controversial posts. Unsurpisingly no such negativity exists on my chronological feeds on Mastodon.