@mike asks @evan: why is social software important?
Evan: it's not just Twitter and Facebook etc. Social connections are the very heart of our lives: how we connect with friends, find jobs, interact with others and many others. He says he tried to walk away from social software multiple times in his life, but somehow always returns to it because it's so important.
@evan the most surprising thing that happened in social software in the last 12 months was the launch of #Threads and the promised support of #ActivityPub.
@mike makes the parallel of how Bill Gates one day in 1995 (?) declared that everything Microsoft was going to do in the future was going to be on the internet. It feels like social software is rapidly approaching this point.
@evan: once the dominos start falling, the start falling fast. The organizations that were ready at that time benefited greatly.
Interoperability always provides benefits. Makes example of SMS messaging:.if I can text 1 billion people, that's much better than if I can only text to 10 million people. Same for the #fediverse.
@evan focuses in on the benefits for creators to have with a 1-to-1 relationship and connection with their followers that does not go through some third party like a centralized walled garden.
@evan: The relationship between people is important, not the app, and we have been trained the exact opposite way.
With an open standards approach, Metcalfe's law does not get in the way of innovation. Innovators do not need to start from zero, and they don't need to build what they otherwise would need to build because it exists already.
@mike: you don't need to build your own social network, it exists already.
@evan : a large social network cannot afford to build or maintain functionality only used by 100,000 users if it has billions of users total. That's different in the fediverse: many projects can focus on and optimize for smaller audiences.
@mike most of what we have seen so far in the #fediverse appears replicas of walled gardens.But it's early days. Are you seeing innovations that don't exist in a centralized model?
@evan: it's beginning. Has (unnamed) examples from 3D, metaverse, LLM applications.
I'm surprised quite by the discussion: it came across to me as if they thought advertising of some (perhaps better) kind is not just around the corner but inevitable. They did not discuss alternate funding models, like how the fediverse is funded today (largely by donations), subscription models (like Medium's) or novel coop structures like CoSocial that @evan even co-founded and has his primary account with.
@mike: how should developers think of building social software today?
@evan: lots of ActivityPub resources and libraries in lots of languages available. As developer, you can gradually implement it, no need to do all of it. #ActivityPub is a relatively small specification.
relationship building today on the web is really broken. Establishing this relationship and maintaining it on top of an open standard is one of the most exciting things that happened in technology for a long time.
@J12t@mike so, I appreciate the question! I like having the choice of how I pay for my services. I think some people would rather make the tradeoff of not paying directly, but seeing ads. It think if they have a choice to opt in or out of that structure, it's fine. I don't actually think there's a way for us to stop it! My guess is that server choice will make advertisements have to be much more useful and informative. If they're too intrusive, people will bail out.
@evan Yep, that's more the answer I would give, too: the #fediverse is all about choice: which instance to join or whether to self-host, which app to use, which people to connect with and not and who to ban, and a choice of funding/business model for the products and services we use.
@J12t@evan Yes. In order for the fediverse to scale significantly it will have to be subsidized one way or another. There are multiple models to choose from. Smaller services can be 100% non profit. For larger services that provide significant value, some people will want to make donations or pay subscriptions rather than see ads. Others will prefer ads instead of subscriptions as long as the ads are respectful re: privacy and attention. There could also be hybrid models via tokenization.
What we discovered is that the fediverse is an enabler for some quite radical unique opportunities that never existed before. When you add federated single sign-on to the mix, the entire decentralised space becomes one "user table" with self-sovereign identities. Shops can selectively offer promotions to their customers. You can share private media of your kids with your mom. And every site has control at the instance level over what they share with anybody in the federated space. And none of this is controlled by Microsoft or Google or Facebook or needs to pass through their servers. You don't need an account on my server. You only need an account on your server. I can share protected code snippets with you from my development repository, knowing nothing more than your fediverse handle. I've got a trivial python script that turns cooperating fediverse cloud storage instances into a single file system (sort of like the Andrew File System of the 90s). I've been trying to tell people that this represents an enabler for killer apps that change the entire web forever (in a good way), but I'm just a developer on a fediverse repository that nobody has ever heard of - so my words mean nothing. As an identity person, I'm thinking/hoping maybe you'll be able to see the bigger picture because I've died on this hill so many times I've simply given up.
Add comment