Nostr, and quite likely Blue Sky wants to make it impossible to ban or remove a users access for violating server or network policies. This is a recipe for rampant hate and bigotry, along with harassment and hate speech. Something twitter seemed designed to encourage from the very start.
@atomicpoet it’s really just sunk cost fallacy. He invested in #BlueSky if he switches teams and starts investing in #ActivityPub projects like Mastodon then his first investment might appear to be wasted.
The most important distinction between #Bluesky and #Mastodon is how someone blocked from accessing their home server can migrate with little disruption.
Of course, this could include unsavory characters, but it also covers journalists and advocacy groups speaking truth to power.
If #ActivityPub adds support for seamless migration of blocked accounts, it will address a key advantage of Bluesky.
We have the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process, the #FEP where ever more protocol-level mechanisms and #ActivityPub extensions are defined. The process is open to anyone, and proposals are then discussed in the #SocialHub developer community.
> Almost exactly six months after #Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
tl;dr:
#BlueSky seems designed to get secondarily centralized in the "reach" layer (as they call it)
Poked my head into Mastodon quickly, still people ranting about Bluesky.
Again: if you want to make Mastodon more welcome to people and have everyone here, it needs to get easier to use and add features people need (working replies, working search, quote posts, better discoverability of interesting posts).
I was thinking earlier that it would be pretty cool to have an #ActivityPub-powered app that uses something like the old #WordPress#PostFormats feature that, in turn, supports post formats that other #Fediverse services use.
For example, the app can post regular posts like this one, structured link posts that work with services like #Lemmy, galleries through @pixelfed and videos through #Peertube.
Unless #ActivityPub automatically reformats posts based on what they contain when a user of services like these receives them in their feeds? I'm not sure how this works under the metaphorical hood. 🤔
I recently thought about how to encode the graph transformations #ActivityPub defines (aka "activities") in the graph/schema itself, to make it extensible. Something like ScrapScript could help.
Implementations could not only define new object types, but also define how their types are handled when acted upon.
(Yes, smart contracts on the Fediverse, even, if you want)
I don't know anything about internet protocols other than that they exist and somehow enable this beautiful mess -- could I realistically read and understand something like the ActivityPub protocol? Is there a lay translation of it?
@mjc well, it isn't actually really non-technical, but the #ActivityStreams-Vocabulary spec mentions just ontology with textual explanation and JSON(-LD) samples.
When it comes to extending #ActivityPub - adding a vocabulary/ontology that supports body temperature or RBI - then doing so according to best-practices is still a bit tricky but can be done.
I’m experimenting with the #ActivityPub plug-in in my #Wordpress blog, which allows anyone interested in following my blog posts, to do it directly by following its own Mastodon account. I think of it as an alternate means to using RSS feeds (which the blog also has available).
Keep in mind what I post here at @daniel is different from what I post in my blog.
So, #BlueSky 's main selling point over #ActivityPub is its data portability guarantee in case of a server shutdown. But according to the docs, this is based on a recovery key that only works within a 72-hour window, generated by the server and backed up to your devices.
Wouldn't this mean a BlueSky account would often have less than a 3 day notice to move to a new instance when a server shutdown occurs, or else loose the account? :blobfoxshocked:
Common sense/medium rare take: treating people like traitors for signing up for Blue Sky will drive folks away from the forms of online community you're advancing. I won't be signing up to #BlueSky because its obviously going to be a milquetoast website — at best Twitter 2, the persistence of an idea beyond its very real & clear death — a literal zombie community that preys on the minds of the living for our lack of ability to imagine, organize and build a true alternative that can appeal to the masses while upholding the principals of #SoftwareFreedom. But lashing out at people for their lack of loyalty to a platform only signals that yours in decay.
#Mastodon is not the end all/be all, as I'm sure most of my mutuals agree. That its had a hard time appealing to folks beyond hacker scenes is both a sign of its weakness and its strength. Its strength is that we have probably the most exciting space of discourse among hackers since #usenet, along with a reasonably generic protocol to build on, #activitypub. But I'm sure we all want it to grow, including a wide range of voices from all walks of life & cultures. So we all have to be thinking about how to work together and try new things in order to grow, and I'm not convinced affirming loyalty to a platform is conducive to that sort of growth.
As I’m observing conversations and efforts to build tomorrow’s technology related to #activitypub and #atprotocol, I have concerns regarding how many non-white folx from marginalized and vulnerable communities will show up and for those who do, will they be welcomed?
Because tech development has a long history of the most privileged making decisions that maintain the status quo while inflicting harm on “others”
Giving #calckey a try. Very interesting to see other implementations based on #ActivityPub. I definitely think it will be the key for going where your friends are without missing anything. Also a very interesting protocol to build products dedicated for specific use and information propagation (emergency services who relied on Twitter or Facebook for example). Commercial offering for professional maintenance and hosting of instances is also necessary. I can also imagine pop-up instances.
Thanks to @mmasnick for the clear and cogent explanations in this article about what's happening with various decentralized protocols llike #ActivityPub, #nostr as well as #Bluesky. I think clearing up some of the concerns and the fudd was needed. I wish people would wait a little and listen.
The web-exclusionarism of new social protocols is quite revealing.
#ActivityPub was developed by a working group of web professionals and defined actors (ie, people) as Uniform Resource Indicators, ignoring that people may want to move inbox domains while retaining identity.
#Bluesky AT protocol was developed by a closed group of web professionals who recognized that people move, but defined their human-readable identities as Internet domain names, assuming everyone has their own.
Welcome to another episode of the roundup. There is lots of discourse currently happening on the fediverse feeds, about bluesky, moderation drama, centralization worries, issues that Black users face with regards to racism, and so much more. I’m doing a bigger writeup of this soon, as it feels like fediverse culture is changing as we spead.
For now, I’ve started giving more context and opinion to the newsitems, to help you better understand all the links and things that are happening. This means a large list, so let’s dive right in!
The links
Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses). Here is a work in progress (and another demo) of using your Bluesky in Mastodon clients, and there is also a group network starting up that is dedicated to working on bridges. This is one of the key stories of the fediverse at the moment, with massive implications down the line. Bluesky has a lot of energy and interest behind it currently, and being able to interoperate with the rest of the fediverse would be of great benefit to all parties.
The website for Calckey got a new update. Visually it looks great, and really helps sell the appeal of Calckey.
The opt-in account database at fediverse.info that helps you find interesting accounts to follow is live with a new update. The visual update looks great, and it can be helpful to find people, especially with some more niche hashtags. The popular hashtags feature so many accounts that it can be hard to know which accounts to follow.
The fedidb.org dashboard that gives an overview of statistics about the fediverse is officially launched as a 2.0 update. As I talked about earlier, there are multiple competing dashboards and API that all measure statistics on the fediverse. As fedidb.org is maintained by @dansup, creator of PixelFed, fedidb.org has the potential become the new standard in a set of conflicting standards, as the methodology is clearer, there is an API, and it comes from a trusted source.
Jointhefediverse.net is a new website that helps new users get a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how they can be onboarded. This is a great project to see, and the fediverse needs a lot more. Explaining federation and decentralization is hard, and this is a good approach.
Calckey has been getting a lot more attention recently. Community manager Panos Damelos is working on gathering this energy into more collaborative development work. Like Panos mentioned, Calckey started as a personal project, and the earlier choice to get a community manager on board early in the process is a great step to scale the project.
Mike Masnick wrote a new article ‘Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options’ that is worth reading. It is an indepth look at the different networks and protocols, and has a good explanation of Bluesky as well. Its good to see that the fediverse gets stressed more, by not only mentioning Mastodon, but also giving attention to Calckey.
Flipboard interviews ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou. One of the things Evan is asked about is best practices and rules of engagements for creators. The fediverse, especially Mastodon, is quite notorious for having specific cultural standards that are not written down. Being put in writing about what people deem acceptable and not is important.
The admin of the hachyderm.io server steps down after conflicts with other server admins. @maegul has an excellent writeup of the entire situation. It is a sad situation, Krís Nova was an excellent admin and great contribution to the fediverse. @maegul has an good take on the situation, questioning the use of defederation as a weapon. I agree with them, and I feel this situation could have been avoided by having the other admins be more accepting of a slower decision making process, instead of immediately going for defederation. The best summary: “Once tens of thousands of people are affected, decision speed ought to slow down.” That this was not taken into account by other folks is painful and damaging.
The server mastodon.online, which is hosted by the Mastodon organisation, is switching to a nightly build. This means that all the latest updates will always be immediately available on this server. Here is a showcase of some of the updates that will be coming to the rest of Mastodon soon.
The Vergecast, the flagship podcast by The Verge, interviews Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about ActivityPub. Great episode to listen to, both hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce have been explicit about the value of ActivityPub (and thus, the fediverse), and its great to see this theme being continued. Worth a listen.
Micro.blog will support the Twitter API until July 15th, but now also supports crossposting to Bluesky. Micro.blog is one of the fediverse projects that often flies under the radar. It is a great product, that features a unique combination of both full blogs and microblogs.
FediMoviesRock is a new fediverse project for movies. Alpha announcement here. It allows you to tag pretty much any movie in the format @{TileOfTheMoviePascalCase}_{YEAR}@alpha.fedimovies.rocks to your posts. You can follow accounts to get all the posts about the movie. The difference with using a simple hashtag is that this comes back to a managed page which is both more visually pleasing and easy to understand, such as in this example. There is a lot of potential in projects like this. For now it is a fun toy that is helpful, but there is a lot more that can be build on top of it.
Audon.space is a great audio tool, pretty much exactly like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse. I’m impressed by how easy to use it is, and how well it incorporates your social graph. The developer quickly responding to extra requests from the blind community is great to see as well. Personally, I see a great potential for tools like this for the fediverse. So often the discussion is framed in context of microblogging (hello bluesky!), but this seems like such an interesting direction. A standalone tool that uses your fediverse social graph in order to increase the value of said tool. I foresee a future where lots more tools will start doing this.
The poll
Did you enjoy this roundup of last week’s news? You can subscribe to my newsletter at fediversereport.com to get this every Sunday right in your mailbox. Thanks for reading!
View the survey results from the W3C SWICG about topics to address for future versions of the #Fediverse-related open standards #ActivityPub / #ActivityStreams and related technology.