Mike commends Rachel and Peter and other Meta people reaching out to the community and listening to concerns and feedback, such as at #fediforum:
I would agree with that. It's unusual for a large company to do this kind of thing, but absolutely the right and necessary thing to do when engaging with the Fediverse.
Since #FediForum, the demo of Emissary has been wiggling around in my brain. This article from @deadsuperhero of @hello walks through the process of using the framework to create just about any federated object you can imagine. 😱
Today’s exhibit: people on #Threads complain that it’s not good for news, example yesterday. We know that, because Meta has said over and over they de-emphasize news.
But that’s what the #fediverse is for! Somebody will build the worlds best news feed and you can subscribe right there from Threads (once they are done with their ActivityPub implementation) and any other fediverse application.
At #FediForum, @n00q discussed a Federated music service for #BandCamp refugees. After a few days of drawing up requirements and specs, and a couple days of code, something interesting is taking shape.
Here's a too-fast-tour of a hypothetical album page built with #Emissary. Custom skins, uploads, and transcoding music is still TBD, but so far this feels like magic.
Bands' profiles will be native citizens of the Fediverse to like, share, and comment. Excited yet?
I had to have surgery the morning of the second day of #FediForum so I’m still catching up with all of the demos and session notes, but I was so impressed with quality of discussions and how much exciting stuff is being built! After 5+ years hanging out on the fediverse, I feel like it’s finally happening!
If anybody ever asks you: why should anybody care about a decentralized Twitter? Point them to these videos, because there's so much innovation there that goes miles beyond just microblogging, and it's still early days.
Thanks to all the innovators out there, and thanks to the developers who came to FediForum to show off their creations in these demos.
If anybody ever asks you: why should anybody care about a decentralized Twitter? Point them to these videos, because there's so much innovation there that goes miles beyond just microblogging, and it's still early days.
Thanks to all the innovators out there, and thanks to the developers who came to FediForum to show off their creations in these demos.
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation
OK, let's say you are right (you have a few replies that don't say so), my point remains the same:
this is the fault of the SocialCG volunteers that hadn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards.
And to be honest, 6 years for people to collaborate on a protocol is a lot of time. If the people haven't been able to collaborate to add simple things like WebFinger into the standards, even with things like #fediforum, maybe we need a reorganization of how things work.
I’m ready for a new Mastodon client, one that lets me select topics I'm not interested in at the moment, then filters those from my timeline. Not by hashtag or regex, but by LLM etc. “Hide everything related to sports/ US pol/ Markus Söder/ whatever”. On-device filtering welcome.
I suspect it may be a good idea to start defining a "fediverse test net”, whereby we produce a list of servers that are explicitly for testing purposes and allow people to block the test net servers from interacting with their production servers?
Since moving off Twitter/X/whatever to (mostly) here, I have about 1/3 the followers, but roughly the same level of engagement. Also, twice the scolding. But roughly 0% of the Nazis. That last bit is what keeps me here.
how do we lessen the scolding? there was some discussion of that at #FediForum. I think some people are calling that harassment, which it is, but I think needs to be called something different to focus our attention correctly.