Thinking about the #Tumblr engineer who said they believe interoperability with the social web would just be a cost center and wouldn’t bring any profits. The point is not how interoperability affects the bottom line, the point is that it allows your platform to survive in an ever changing social media landscape and have a bottom line at all. If #Pebble was part of the social web, they would have had a network of 1.8M active users, not 1,000, and perhaps wouldn’t have had to shut down.
@Gargron So true. I hope Tumblr ultimately sticks with the plan to federate.
FTR Flipboard is now approx 70% completed with our federation work and honestly I think it will be great for our users, the broader #fediverse and our business.
@Gargron It is incredible if it is obvious the benefits of the net effects. Tumblr could adopt the WordPress model of having most of the software free and Open Source for anyone to host their own instance, or offer a paid hosting service that handles all updates and maintenance. Generating revenue from 5% of 3 million is better than 100% of 100k.
"WordPress now powers 43.3% of websites, with a 65.1% share in the CMS market.”
@Gargron I'm an ex-tumblr engineer and I 100% agree with you... Now, I think Cyle post needs to be contextualized with Tumblr's situation: it wasn't so much about not seeing the value, but about tumblr being in a dire position, with very limited resources, and having to focus the few devs it still has on things that stops it from losing money.
@Gargron (Tumblr loses above 30 million USD per year, the CEO has been very explicit about that situation not being sustainable even in the short term, and the team is under a lot of pressure to make changes that makes the parent company stop losing money just by keeping tumblr open... Sadly, federating Tumblr is not seen as a potential way to achieve that)
@Gargron At this stage, the fediverse's audience is too small to attract established social networks, especially when, like #tumblr, they don't distribute much real-time news.
The #fediverse will take off thanks to the publishers and curators who see #ActivityPub as an "interactive RSS feed" that liberates them from platforms. WordPress and Flipboard can play a key role in this.
@pfefferle@lbdx@Gargron if someone can make it happen, that's you, so I'm skeptical about the feasibility (of convincing the key people), but I'm rooting for you!
@Gargron Pebble case is interesting.
Even in the end, they could have turned on a mastodon server, copy their user social relationships from the previous system and gave people one month to migrate wherever they wanted, saving their network
Hah! Interoperability is one of the core ideals of the Internet, or rather ICANN :ICANN:. Imagine they would've thought about turning a profit when designing the very structure of digital communication in the 21st century.
@Gargron I'm really sorry to see #Pebble go. They had a lot of really good ideas, and not enough people to get critical mass. They should just move the domain and user accounts to a Mastodon server and let the community figure out next steps.
@Gargron you're preaching the ideals that lead Tim Berners-Lee to create the Web. Thanks for doing what you do!
At some point, we will hopefully find some way to integrate the fediverse into the wider economy without creating yet another surveillance capitalism. That's at least my hope.
@Gargron@marino I still have a tumblr blog Harps Eclectica but it got ruined when yahoo took them over then saved by Automatic but it never truly got back to itself again I still use the blog also.
Many people don't seem to fully grasp just how the fediverse is different from everything that came before it. A question I get frustratingly often is "does Smithereen compete with Mastodon?".
@Gargron thought about this too. Pebble believed trust & safety is too difficult on distributed networks, so made an intentional choice to be a centralized network. That was part of their value prop, but it didn't end up working out for them
@Gargron Part of the problem is the words "engineer" and "profit" being so close together. We all love to diss MBAs, but a good business program really can teach people expertise that engineers generally think they have (but don't).
@Gargron et au moins grâce à l'interreaupérabilité des utilisateurs d'autres plateformes peuvent voir ce qu'il s'y passe mais après je me demande comment cela évoluera dans le futur à mon avis Internet sera fragmenté une partie sera interopérable et décentralisée et une autre sera totalement fermée un peu comme mastodonte d'un côté et x.com de l'autre
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