It's kinda depressing how tumblr is imploding now and I'm seeing half my follow list go "man, after seeing both twitter and tumblr do this, it's really showing how it's a bad idea for a social media network to be run by a company who can make arbitrary changes without user consent.
@foone fucking yes. I've been lobbying for the fediverse on Twitter for two years now, offering help and tech support and explanations to anyone wanting to migrate, I've been emphasiszing that there are software (softwares?) other than Mastodon and pointing out GoToSocial, PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.; I've been pointing out that Bluesky originated as a Dorsey-led Twitter spin-off, I've been highlighting Bluesky's tech and moderation failures, etc. etc.
...and I've gotten zero. Nothing. People either bring up superficial discourses like "but the admins read your DMs!", follow influencers who came to "Mastodon" and ragequit when their attempts to impose their Twitter habits on the network didn't work, or at best people signed up to mastodon.social, had bad experiences because it's mastodon.social, and quit.
But people hand out Bluesky invites left and right. Even people I know are on the fediverse and enjoy it here.
If a corporate platform restricts who can join, it's "exclusive", when they impose bad rules, it's "growing pains", when they have technical failures, it's "innovative".
When we do it, it's "elitist", "censorship", and "only for nerds".
@foone I've been extolling the virtues of community-run moderation, distributed administration, fewer single points of failure, and moderators you know and can talk to personally, and people have been very, very silent, but very vocal about "Bluesky is so cool please don't ask about how they handle reply guys hatespeech ornominally fine speech underpinned by nazi ideology or anything else just let me enjoy my corporate walled garden"
it's weird because it's not like bsky is any more tumblr-like than mastodon. and there are activitypub-based socials designed to work more like tumblr... but nope, mastodon is scary, so when tumblr dies, we'll go to bsky. what'll happen on bsky in a year or do? don't worry about it!
@foone But why even leave tumblr? Now that Twitter is collapsing, the cool stuff I see on corporate networks is increasingly coming from tumblr.
If I didn't have Fedi and was leaving Twitter, I'd be more likely to go to tumblr than to bsky, nostr or threads, just because tumblr has better and more trustworthy leadership and cooler members.
@foone I think your point is good but I want to note one special case: A lot of Japanese artists seem to be jumping to Bluesky right now, and I think the reason they're jumping to Bluesky right now instead of Mastodon is that on Mastodon you can get banned for being Japanese* and this is not true on Bluesky.
Read: "Banned for being federated with a particular large Japanese server". This was as far as I understand a very real problem at one time, I do not for a fact know whether it still is.
@mcc yeah. I joined some japanese-affiliated instance early on and then discovered that it was defederated from a bunch of instances because of the Japanese issue.
@mcc@foone There definitely seems to be a large population of people that can’t conceive of an internet that isn’t one gigantic walled garden. Thus finding mastodon/activitypub confusing and intimidating.[*]
Mix in the mastodon old guard being quite insular, and frankly wrongheaded about a lot of things. It’s not really much of a surprise.
I like decentralization a lot, but man. The amount of Drama™ the masto community insists on is making me get a repetitive stress injury in my eyes from rolling them so much.
[*] I stand by the idea instances actually don’t matter beyond the ability to peace out and move when whatever instance admin gets drunk with power. Old masto folks putting an emphasis on choosing an instance adds needless anxiety.
@foone How is “user consent” implemented in the Fediverse, or more specifically Mastodon? Anyone can run their own server and modify the code as they like (simple matter of programming) and block any other server they like?
@root@foone And still such a user can resist arbitrary changes decided by whoever implements the fediverse software they’re running? (Or, alternatively, stay in some old version that in some years will be a security liability.)
@tml@foone I mean if you're going that deep down with the argument the same can be said for just about every piece of computer software in existence
the important bit, as far as I can tell, is that the software isn't owned and controlled by a company trying to maximize profit at the expense of privacy and moderation
@filippo@foone bluesky is essentially centralised because all federated servers talk to a few big ones hosted by bluesky, and they're unreasonable to host by queers with thinkcentres since they use too much resources
@tauon@foone I mean, all small Mastodon instances also talk to a few big ones hosted by Mastodon gGmbH. And if you want a full view of the fedi network (including following hashtags and searching all public posts) you have to run relays that require too much resources (and don't even really exist).
@filippo@tauon@foone Relays aren’t particularly expensive to run - they’re just passing posts through, even if in high volumes. Of course storing all of those posts is expensive, so they tend to operate on a best effort basis with rather limited delivery retries.
@filippo We are applying to an EU grant to work on this (for the Fediverse, not specifically Mastodon). More details if we get selected and have the money :)
I hope my posts don't come across as dunking on your work. I am irked by the blind dunking on AT, but it's noticeably coming from the sidelines, all conversations with AP devs I've had have been nuanced and informative.
@filippo I do not think you read any dunking from the Mastodon project / team about Bluesky.
We would prefer they chose an existing standard and focused their work on improving it, but they chose otherwise, that's all.
Also they have 10x more money than anything that Mastodon ever got, so I guess it is expected they move much quicker. I hope we will be able to get more resources, until then we do our best to keep up with the critical stuff and some improvements. @tauon@foone
@renchap (It would be lovely to talk about this at some point; it seems like there are some interesting things we could do like relays which only receive hashtagged posts / specifically following hashtags from hashtag aware relays when a user follows one from the FE)
@erincandescent Sure, I dont intend this to be done in secrecy, but publishing anything needs time as you know, especially if you do not want it to be picked and dunked upon because you did not clearly cover everything.
The gist of it is have a (admin-friendly) way to configure “discovery providers" on your instance, that act as relays for ingesting data + activity, and provide APIs for your instance to use to improve search/trends/recs/… @filippo@tauon@foone
@erincandescent With some ways for admins to choose which provider they want to use for each feature, have providers only offering some of it (a dedicaced recommendation +trends provider with human editors), and clearly showing to user where their data is send and processed @filippo@tauon@foone
@filippo@foone Mastodon gGmbH has no control over the protocol and the fediverse at large. It just develops the Mastodon software.
Bluesky is not decentralized like the fediverse and people should stop calling it that. All communication still goes through their centralized servers.
Yesterday they released the software to allow you to selfhost your data, but what does that even do if all still goes through their servers? There is no federation on Bluesky.
@SuperDicq@foone@filippo
>Mastodon gGmbH has no control over the protocol and the fediverse at large. It just develops the Mastodon software.
Mastodon doesn't have control over the ActivityPub protocol itself, however Mastodon/Gargron has control over how the Fediverse functions as a whole. This has been demonstrated many times before. Either by sabotaging proposals (FEPs), disregarding proposals, ignoring ActivityPub specifications, ignoring how everybody else does things and instead doing it completely differently.
The summary part of the object used for post titles was used like that before Mastodon was a thing and Gargron reused it for content warning, forcing other servers to adapt to this stupidity. When Mastodon adopts quote replies or emoji reacts, it's pretty much guaranteed that they will do it differently than everybody else.
The nature of the ActivityPub specifications also doesn't help at all. It forces developers to make things up, or lie about certain things. It's very much a non-specification.
You can see the effects of this when you listen to normies/media. For them Fediverse isn't a thing. It's called the Mastodon network. It's Gargron's network and we are just living on it.
@filippo@foone Also if you want to know the difference between PBC and gGmbH it is that a PBC is a for-profit company whose interest is not "increasing shareholder value" whatever that means.
a gGmbH (note the little "g" in front, that's the important one) is a real non-profit organization.
@VD15@mischievoustomato If Bluesky actually federated it would take approx. 30 minutes before one of us nerds builds a bridge with ActivityPub and you could still just stay here and talk with Bluesky people no problems.
@SuperDicq@VD15@mischievoustomato
>a bridge with ActivityPub
already done and bridged to the main bsky instance by https://fed.brid.gy/ , mastodongers lost their shit and bullied the dude into making it opt-in lmao
@affine@VD15@mischievoustomato Does this so called bridge only allow you to follow bluesky people or does it actually allow bluesky users to interact with fediverse like they are on bluesky?
@SuperDicq@VD15@mischievoustomato No idea, didn't try. But a better bridge would probably cause even more drama with the "muh nonconsensual copying muh gdpr" crowd.
@mischievoustomato Cookie banners are stupid and 99% of websites that have cookie banners are not interpreting the cookie law right.
You're only required to use a cookie banner asking for permission to place tracking cookies.
If you own a website and you only use functional cookies you do not have to use a banner. But many websites ask users for permission to place these as well, completely unnecessary.
Don't want to implement a cookie banner on your website? Just don't use tracking cookies...
@mischievoustomato The stupid thing about this law in my opinion is that they didn't look for a technical solution.
Instead of making every website that wants to use tracking cookies implement their own custom banner why is it not a standardized browser popup like those notification popups and such?
That would mean the banners wouldn't be so annoying and you could also setup your browser to auto deny all of them without really complicated addons like we have now.
@mischievoustomato Yes this is the most misunderstood law in tech history and nearly every website gets it wrong because there are corpo boomer shitbrains behind it.
@mischievoustomato Also what's even worse about the cookie banners is that the reason companies put them on their website is simply because illusion of choice is good for marketing reasons.
More often than not it doesn't matter if you click "allow" or "deny" and the website places tracking cookies anyway. Because why would they actually care for real?
According to Dutch research 65% of websites still place tracking cookies anyway without permission.
@filippo At the very least, they are in control of both the protocol and its (for now) only implementation. There may be some other more complicated detail I'm not aware of.
ActivityPub exists as a standard independent of "Mastodon" or any of its other implementations, so a single person/company cannot change how the entire network works.
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