There's a lot of shit flying in the #Fediverse lately and a lot of times perspective seems to get lost. Yes, there are things we need to talk about, and yes there are things we will not agree on. And that's okay.
But leave the pitchforks and torches out of this.
Fedi admins put in the hours and effort and emotion into making fedi happen. Sometimes they make decisions we might not agree with. We should criticize, but we should not pile-on.
And to make this abundantly clear… regardless of how much you disagree with a person and how much you feel their decisions might be wrong:
👉 harassment is harassment, and is unacceptable
👉 calling for harm is calling for harm, and is unacceptable
👉 pile-ons are pile-ons, and are unacceptable
People who engage in that sort of thing are like locusts. They join a community, destroy it, and move on.
If you care about fedi, push back against that, even if it targets someone you disagree with.
> Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole #Fediverse, on a single instance.
> Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.
@edavies@rysiek part of why i liked using mastodon is that i enjoyed looking at the local feed, and my posts being seen by people there. not only on this art instance, but also a more generalist one which has a specific aesthetic that imo attracts people i more likely would enjoy reading. i haven’t had that experience so i can’t say for sure, but i think that mastodon.social users might not get the appeal of mastodon unless they try a smaller instance right away.
This is not the first instance of somebody donating their time and expertise to translate a blogpost of mine. Each and every time I am thankful and humbled by that! :blobcatblush:
Every time that happens I am also reassured that CC By-SA :cc: :ccby: :cc_sa: is the right license for my blog.
She suggests Famous Five but I would like something with a bit more modern "mindset" than the girls always helping in the kitchen and the boys in the barn.
Ideas?
Also, thanks for boosts as my bubble is German speaking.
Also, wow! boost some of those good answers from the #Fediverse community... wow! ⬇️⬇️⬇️
@samsteiner depending on her reading age. Anything scholastic is fun! I loved Tamora Pierce (knights in fantasy) but it might be a bit to YA for middle grade...
I am once again encouraging #Fediverse#admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.
@drahardja@seb Meant to respond to your earlier post (a couple weeks ago IIRC) to strongly endorse this suggestion and to encourage developers, especially those of us who offer open APIs, to do the same. (We already have thanks to your suggestion)
@drahardja@seb Hi Dave! This is something the admin team is already working on, along with some other policy updates.
I'll push this to the top of the queue.
We have a lawyer on the team (that's me), so no need to collect money for the updates; I do SFBA work on a pro bono basis.
Actively pushing against others to adopt your protocol is how you ensure that your protocol won't "win." I'm a firm believer that a decentralized protocol will be the future of social networks/feeds as we know them. I don't know if it is going to be #ActivityPub or #ATProto or something else. But I believe a decentralized protocol will be the future. But the winner will be the one that centralized-acting services adopt. That's a good thing for everyone. It means users have data portability. 🧵
But I'll tell you right now who will not win: the protocol and community that wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to adopt/build-off of and interoperate with. Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and Theora tried to do the whole "open" standard audio and video codec thing. It was bad quality and hard to implement, but “open.” Everyone smart used MP3 anyway. And eventually, MP3 became patent free. Even smarter people started working on things like VP8 and VP9 and HEVC and eventually we have AV1
@gbhnews
(TL;DR, cut the unnecessary predatory parasitic middlemen.)
This is the way to make the content you work so hard to produce directly available to the public in a familiar, easy to consume post/microblog format without the need for us to login through abusive external intermediaries that siphon and exploit users' personal information and don't even provide you any tangible benefit in return.
@TCatInReality@Hey_Beth@gbhnews@Dragon i honestly think it is exactly like the 1990s with the birth of the web. Media just doesn't "get" the advantage of the open social web yet, they are still wrapped up in the previous paradigm. They will get there though.
I do believe more #mastodon users should use #BlueSky there’s a lot that the team and users in general can learn from those in the #fediverse and clear up misconceptions
Tech people, especially OSS folk, expect non-tech folk to do way more work than is realistic. Our decision to underinvest and under-prioritize both marketing and user experience design, is directly responsible for people choosing different options.
But rather than internalize this as "How can we onboard better / explain value better / increase safety?" We tend to externalize it as "Why don't they get it?"
@supernovae@damonoutlaw@mekkaokereke@atomicpoet Here's a list I put together of things I read and heard in case it's helpful. Haven't shared publicly til now, but feel free to share if helpful.
Looking back at it in the context of this discussion, it clarifies why some people would feel more comfortable on a nascent BlueSky than on Mastodon as it exists today.
what do we have to do to make the #ActivityPub plugin attractive to more #WordPress users? We are currently at 4000+ active users on WordPress.org + the WordPress.com users.
I think what Stefan may be talking about is a kind of directory that lists available fediverse wordpress blog accounts, perhaps along with the profile description and gives you the option to follow them.
@pfefferle I would love to see ActivityPub get put into WordPress Core, and an interface developed capable of reading articles from other ActivityPub-enabled WordPress blogs.
One real headache we have right now with @wedistribute is that we want to output our articles as the Article type, but Mastodon doesn't support that. We can switch to Note, but that's more of a social status thing, rather than something specifically intended for publishing platforms and readers.
I think a picture of what this could ultimately might look like is:
Make ActivityPub a standard thing in every blog that's easy to turn on.
Add sections to the dashboard for user following and notifications of ActivityPub interactions.
Turn the like, bookmark, and reply functions into ActivityPub actions.
incorporate it in such a way that articles, likes, and responses can be seen within the WordPress dashboard.
The dashboard also has a section for following feeds. Basically, the WordPress.com reader, but ActivityPub-powered, and a standard part of WordPress.
So its done! I finally released a fairly easy to install (from scratch) Hugo based Static Site generator with full ActivityPub support.
It has step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for your own blog or static website.
One of the coolest features for me, other than having your static site blog posts show up as posts in the Fediverse is the support for interacting with those posts. Any replies you leave, likes, or boosts will show up in the "comments" section of the website on the page associated with the post. How cool is that!
@testing Not a bug.. i changed some things about how the site renders its pages so it broke old boosts knowingly.. but it continues to work properly.. thats just a "ghost"
So now I'm being told that a few people on a instance with 1000s of users who complain that you don't use CW or alt-text the way they want can result in your being blocked for the entire instance, even when you've never received any notification of this.
Sort of like how you'd get arrested in fascist countries and never told why. Kafka would recognize this for sure.
I would assert that this makes #Mastodon even more of a toy than I thought it was, and utterly unreliable for much beyond trading photos of kitties. Leela the Siamese Snowshoe approves of kitty photos of course, but beyond that anyone depending on #Mastodon might charitably be called "misguided" at best, if my understanding of the situation is correct.
And I feel that the public needs to understand that they're buying into this sort of nonsense if they're looking at #Mastodon as an alternative to Elon's #Twitter hellscape.
@lauren The culture here is weird and unpredictable in ways I still can't wrap my head around. I was reported, and blocked from a mid-sized instance, for being a "white supremacist" because I posted a thread about ways the DM mechanism here is broken and has non-intuitive semantics, and then reported (but not instance blocked, apparently) because I refused to edit my year-old blog post on Faraday cages to suit a stranger's preferences.
@steely_glint I'm frankly done with self-appointed morality police trying to guilt me into becoming a bland, insubstantial version of myself, especially when they do so by exaggerating the (legitimate) need to protect others from real harm.
Don't like politics? Fine. Don't follow people who post about it. But if some political discussion gets through, you'll probably survive.
I echo that worry - having to leave posts behind when migrating - and add to it another:
The situation where you click on a post and you don't see all the replies, unless you go to its original location on its original instance. Then of course you can't interact with it (or the new replies you've now found) from there.
Wenn ich wissen möchte, was im #Fediverse (und nicht nur auf meiner Instanz) zu einem bestimmten Thema geschrieben wird (z.B. dem Fortgang der Rettungsarbeiten am vor Ameland havarierten Schiff #FremantleHighway) – WIE GEHT DAS?? Wieso kann ich nicht suchen? Warum finde ich nix unter dem Hashtag? 😩😩
@janboehm@map es sind ein paar angefragt. Leider ist immer bisschen undurchsichtig, welche noch aktiv sind. Ggf. sollten wir einen eigenen Relais-Server einrichten. Ich schreibs mal auf die Liste.
As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.
@christian feel free to play with the term. I was just trying to document a thing I was seeing and give it a name. Not really that familiar with the Tor world