"Facebook was better in the Platform era (2007-2011), when third-party developers could add widgets to profile pages, and in-stream interactive experiences."
This was interesting. I remember this time as being wildly creative, exponentially viral, and voraciously capitalistic. I'd love to recapture that energy and growth on the fediverse, without the predatory client add-ons. I'm not sure it's possible, though.
@evan Talk to FBers and their internal story is that it was essentially impossible to do this in a way that complied with their own sense of impending EU privacy rules. I’m not sure that was their primary motivation, but Cambridge Analytica really was an abuse of this vector so it isn’t completely implausible.
@luis_in_brief really? I had assumed it was just generally clawing back control of the user experience, which we saw happen on Twitter's platform, too. The platform providers benefited from third-party apps to help with growth, and when they hit saturation rates, they got more value from owning the full experience.
@luis_in_brief I should probably read up and get better info. The Chirp Conference in 2010 felt like a real watershed point for Twitter as a developer platform. I'm not sure if the principals involved have written about their experiences and how it affected social software.
@evan Yeah. I’m sure the “we and only we can monetize” played a role too (especially at the exec level), but many rank and file genuinely believe a story that goes something like: 3rd-party extensions require data access; data access to FB-like data (more sensitive than Twitter!) at FB-like scale means some 3rd-party will inevitably abuse; FB will inevitably get blamed for that abuse no matter what safeguards were in place; so the risk is too high. And that is hard to argue with!
@luis_in_brief I wonder how this maps to the fediverse. I'm honestly not sure why Mastodon doesn't have a plug-in architecture, either for server behaviour or client experience. I haven't seen other fediverse servers that allow a Facebook-Platform-like Web experience.
@evan The other interesting question about how it maps to fediverse is who gets blamed for privacy problems more generally. We all know email is a privacy mess but no one blames “the email company”; when Fedi inevitably has problems, will people blame ActivityPub, Eugen, Zuck, …?
@luis_in_brief my primary villain in this situation is our terrible system for choosing instances. A network run mostly by individual volunteer admins for people they don't know or care about is a recipe for trouble. We should have a lot more affinity between users and their servers, but right now it's like "I live in this area, kind of" or "I am interested in this hobby". We need more businesses providing instances for their teams, universities for their students, cities for their residents.
@evan To be fair, that’s partially because the software’s experience of your local network is terrible. For something that purports to provide “community”, a default UX of “here’s just another stream of text with no distinction from any other stream of text except that we call it ‘this server’” is an utter fail.
(Ironically, local community, exactly because it is uncuratable by individual users—either someone is on your server or not—is where algorithms would be most valuable.)
@luis_in_brief@evan agreed. The number of times I've intentionally looked at my local feed is zero. It's absolutely irrelevant to how I want to use social media.
@funnelfiasco@evan I want to love my local feeds (I follow sfba.social as well as my own) but again, terrible terminology like “feed” and “server” mean no one will see it as a community on day one, and lack of curation means it’s just an endless stream of not-quite-randos.
@evan@luis_in_brief I'd personally want much better support for migrating accounts between instances before leaning too hard on university/employer-run hosts
I need to be able to migrate my post history, not just my followers
I also have trouble with the fact that I'm interested in a LOT of different things, so picking a host that aligns with just one aspect of my personality feels limiting
@luis_in_brief@simon also, it's by far better than any other social network. It's better than changing email addresses, better than moving from one web host to another. I think the only experience better that I can think of is moving a WordPress blog from one platform to another. It's a good benchmark to shoot for.
"Content like images, videos, text, audio that are created in the old account is not moved to the new account. If the old server goes down, all that content is lost."
@simon@luis_in_brief also, again, "is there a rationale for that" is kind of an unfair question. Almost no other Internet service has this. The rationale is "it's hard to do well in all cases and we haven't gotten to it yet."
@evan@luis_in_brief that's a great rationale, thanks! I was hoping it wasn't going to be "we have decided to never implement this due to reasons X, Y and Z"
@simon@evan@luis_in_brief the other part of it is that a 301 redirect model doesn't fit with the half-assed signing model for posts. We have a way to redirect sites and archives, and followings, with a modest amount of overlap of both sites being up, and it was baked into feeds and WebSub at the http layer, but the "spray the new, ignore the old" model didn't map as well.
We had a mechanism for this in OStatus that worked by delegating to the http and dns stacks. AP half bought into the dns is bad, keys are good worldview so to migrate you need a separate protocol to do a key handover and follower migration to the new instance. However historic posts are stuck on the old instance because it can't 301 them to the new one because signing posts is bound to the user, not the domain.
@evan I may have lost the particular point of argument in that thread.
The deeper idea is that follow your nose discovery naturally enables individual profile pages on a domain to redirect to external urls, whereas webfinger bakes in domain centralism by default, and requires a specific implementation goal to allow for out of site connections.
@KevinMarks oh, you said, "the other part of it is that a 301 redirect model doesn't fit with the half-assed signing model for posts." I don't think that's true. Also, I think you're onto a good point; Webfinger provides a nice way to redirect without a redirect.
@evan@luis_in_brief here's a 4th option I used on my blog ages ago: host on the new URL with a tiny bit of text that says "previously hosted at old URL" - that way search engines have a chance of helping people find the new location
@simon@luis_in_brief oh, another issue that is raised a lot is that your old server and your new server might have very different content rules. If you move from an NSFW server to one that's not open to that, what happens to your nudes?
@simon@luis_in_brief if you post on your work account, that would belong to the company, like the email you post from the company's email address, or the posts you make on the company blog. It's rare to take it with you.
So, no, I won't wait for content migration to encourage businesses to provide fediverse accounts for their staff.
@luis_in_brief I think I avoided your q about privacy. Here are some thoughts: one privacy issue may be aggregation/learning from your public posts. That is mostly the fault of the aggregator, somewhat a problem of the user (especially if different privacy options are available), and somewhat a problem of the software vendor (did not give affordances to default to followers-only, e.g.).
@luis_in_brief for privacy violations from server access to your data (they sold your data to Cambridge Analytics), that is almost entirely on the admin, with some small amount of blame on the protocol (we don't have great support for using a platform with an untrusted admin) and the user (don't put your personal info into a platform run by a pseudonymous stranger with an anime avatar).
@evan I don’t mean blame in a “who is at fault in a proper root cause analysis” sense (though that is also important) but in a “who will the press, government, and broader zeitgeist blame” sense.
@luis_in_brief my more nuanced answer is, not sure. I think one reason we have this opportunity is that Zuck is tired of having to go to DC twice a year to get harangued by (R) congressional representatives about their favourite antivax influencer getting deplatformed. Federation lets him say, they can go somewhere else in the fediverse, even if there's no place for them here.
@luis_in_brief If he has to do the same thing next year, but it's about why Threads connects to a server that doxxes its own users or something, well, we might see some pullback on federation.
@evan i think in a free market, we would be allowed to choose a social media experience that is not likely to be spoiled by advertisers (posing as non advertisers trying to sell us stuff when we thought we were there to make friends or talk to people for the sake of itself). good social nets will be those that can be reserved for real, private people. I'm curious what you think about the enshitification of software as Cory doctorow describes it
@RedtheBean you lost me. If you can have an account on a Mastodon server that you own or that you know the owner of, and that you share values with, you should be able to decide what you see, what you don't see, who can see you, whatever. Nobody can ever show you ads you don't want, unless you agreed to it with your admin.
@RedtheBean I didn't make this world. But I think it would be a better place if more people had access to the fediverse. Right now, most people have most of their accounts on huge services. If we make it so tiny servers can talk on the same network as the big ones, we can start shifting people more easily from the voraciously capitalistic services to cooperative, family run, or civic servers. We need federation to let those people move.
@RedtheBean I just realized which post you're responding to; I had a different post I thought this was about. No, I don't want the predatory style of Facebook Platform apps. I said that way up-thread.
"I'd love to recapture that energy and growth on the fediverse, without the predatory client add-ons."
@RedtheBean I should explain: if you want to have a p2p fediverse network, you need to get a domain (like through DynDNS), set up a server, and run it. You can do this pretty easily on a RasPi, cloud hosting, or an old laptop. There has been some interesting discussion about running a server on a phone or running computer, but I haven't seen it done yet. With dynamic DNS, a permissive ISP, and the right software, it's possible, at least.
@evan so github... but activitypub...
ok wait... do you know where I can find reliable data on the numbers of users of different software and hardware?
@evan I feel like if I wasn't there I'd say that sounded rad, but (and maybe this is because I was a teenager) the apps people would put on their page were so awful lol.
It was like it took the worst parts of MySpace's customizability (which was very cool but for the exploits), where pages weren't really quirky self-expression but a wall of the same gimmicky, scammy joke widgets
Again, might be I just had friends with bad tastes in wall apps :P
@evan As somebody who built handfuls of different types of widgets, “Facebook apps”, and liberal use of the Facebook API for a living, at the time it felt “better”, but in many ways it was actually worse because we weren’t looking at it with a critical lens. There was a time where I was sending every kind of OpenGraph-compatible action to Facebook for aggregation purposes (Gabe listened to N songs using X, Mary played Y game Z times). Meaning the shady stuff Facebook does now to collect data they didn’t have to do back then. I happily volunteered that data for free.
Add comment