The fediverse continues its trend of rebuilding popular large platforms, but with #activitypub. This week two projects were announced to be in development:
Loops, a platform for short-form video
Ibis, a federated version of Wikipedia
also a fascinating paper about the hashtag #asstodon, and much more news this week.
In recent weeks, a few posts had appeared on the #asstodon tag that were of butts, not donkeys, and controversy ensued.
Here it is worth describing some key features of #Mastodon in additional detail.
First, #federation, and #feeds:
As noted, each user is hosted on a specific #server; and this #network of servers comprises Mastodon.
Each user has a personal feed; a “home/neighborhood” feed; and a “federated” feed.
Because of how federation stitches together a user’s experience from the vantage point of their home server, views looking outward to the network vary.
While one can follow individual users across other servers,
👉whether one sees the posts of users one does not follow in one’s personal and “federated” feeds is dictated by interactions and follows across servers.
A user on a very small instance
— and some are as small as a dozen users, or even a single user
— would not see posts from other servers in their “federated” feed unless their instance-mates were following users across each of those servers.
Some servers also choose to, at the server level, silence other servers, often because of lax or poor moderation that home moderators fear will affect their own home users.
Depending on whether this is a silencing or a full block, a user can personally follow another individual user on another instance;
but unless they have a pre-existing reason to know about that user, they might be unlikely to ever encounter them.
By contrast, very large servers, some with over 50,000 users, have quite a lot of activity right at home, before even federating outward.
Those users will see a very lively feed on the “home/neighborhood” feed; and a much bigger pool of posts can be seen on the “federated” feed, as it will be populated by people across many remote servers with whom “home” server-mates interact.
@inquiline Many lessons to draw form this, thanks. I somehow missed the hot ass controversy (what a mess!), which sounds fairly fitting re:
> “Lossy distribution” aka ... the phenomenon of how posts get seeded in a manner that suggests they are viewable to a wide, undifferentiated audience; but in practice results in, well, loss. And not only loss, but unknowable, invisible loss.
It might be true for all things social web. Yet more so for the Fediverse?
@inquiline@athena Got around to reading it. I really enjoyed learning about the Moreno Valley burros and the ways the human residents have held space for them and tried to protect their autonomy. People posting pictures and saying “oh the gardeners showed up today”… laying out blankets for a newborn foal… giving burros reflective collars to avoid traffic deaths… watching, listening, troubling themselves over questions of wildness and domestication.
New portrait of Manuel. I like the way this captures the great seriousness and vigilance of scanning the forest edge for possible predators… while there is a piece of hay hanging out of his mouth. #asstodon
I was exploring down a gravel road, and stopped to take a picture of this Donkey sitting in a field, but it got up, and decided it wanted pets, and then three dogs, small, medium, and large, also came running from across the road, to get pets too. They have a whole racket going on!
Re a series of boosts: I can now say I've been harassed on Mastodon by an apparently maladjusted donkeykeeper, over the proper use of a hashtag I started.
I wasn't going to write about this but now I may, maybe. In any event that wasn't a sentence I thought I'd ever write!