If Mastodon is Twitter, Friendica is Facebook, and Lemmy is Reddit, but they're all communicating together, is there any real need to make different accounts unless we want to try out different features?
As I have said before, I am waiting for Calckey with editing to be released, shortly It's already in testing. Then begins the first big push to promote #Calckey as a fully compatible Mastodon alternative. Since we all share ActivityPub at our core, it's all good. The competition will move both platforms along much faster. I want to build a test drive site where anyone check out the many features and widgets already in Calckey, with many more planned.
Having second thoughts about my self-hosted #Mastodon instance, it’s just too much of a resource hog for a single user / small instance on a 4 core / 4G vServer if you want to run other stuff (#writefreely is live, #pixelfed to be installed!) as well. On the other hand it is very nice that the software is stable, reliable and well designed. So either I need to move to a bigger server or decommission my self-hosted profile and look into other options for micro / macro blogging self-hosting again. I did like #gotosocial but the current version doesn’t install on my #yunohost properly. Tried #Akkoma and #Pleroma - weren’t my thing, can’t get over the design. I do like #Friendica and its possibilities but it is a bit clunky at times and I have some doubts if protocols other than the quasi standard #ActivityPub have much of a main stream future which kinda could make the additional Friendica features a little islandish. Same applies to #Hubzilla which I only start testing. Leaves #Misskey and #Calckey which could be good options but not sure about the reliability and gameplan there, I don’t want to tinker every night on my server so #Calckey probably need to become a little more stable first, #Misskey seems to have no current version on YunoHost, so need to explore other install options… Any thoughts very welcome! @fediversenews@fediversede
It seems like some people come to Calckey and immediately begin whining and complaining and I'm totally okay with muting that noise.
I'm not talking about asking questions about the features. There's a lot to learn about Calckey and myself and others are happy to answer questions when we can.
I'm talking about non-stop whining that it's not like another server and why can't it be a different way now, now now?
It feels like they came here to "explore" and just complain about it and not really engage about anything else.
Many people are asking me, "How will #ActivityPub ultimately be #Meta's own undoing?"
Meta's current business model is not built for an open protocol like ActivityPub. It's very much dependent on them owning and controlling the network effect of services like Facebook and Instagram.
Not only does Meta want to collect all your personal data -- they want to control it too. They enforce this control through proprietary APIs. In this sense, they're not different from Twitter and Reddit.
The point of ActivityPub is that services, such as #Mastodon, #Kbin, and #Calckey, can depend on an open protocol instead of a proprietary API.
What if I, the admin of calckey.social, don't like what a dev is doing? Well, too bad. The protocol is open. I might be able to twiddle with my own server, but I can't do jack with anyone else's.
And what if I'm a greedy asshole who wants to monetize the user data on my server? Too bad for me, everyone on my server can migrate elsewhere.
This is not how Meta does business. In almost all ways, ActivityPub is counter to their business. Yet, here they are -- wanting to join the Fediverse.
The tech industry is awash in stories of big corporations that own proprietary tech that become undone by open standards.
Remember IBM's dominance of PCs? It was undone by the EISA standard.
Remember Novell's dominance of networking? It was undone by the bundling of TCP/IP in operating systems.
Remember AOL's dominance of online services? It was undone by the World Wide Web.
ActivityPub is yet another standard that pierces the opaque walled gardens that largely depend on proprietary technology owned by one company. And Meta happens to be one company that owns an opaque walled garden.
If history is to be repeated -- and usually it's worth learning from history -- then Meta opening the door to ActivityPub is company suicide. It's the first domino to fall before everything else in their catalogue of walled gardens also falls. Contrary to popular opinion, creating an ActivityPub enabled social network does not "kill" ActivityPub -- it validates it.
As it happens, I've known quite a few people who work at Meta. I have a little insight into what they're thinking.
Most folks at Meta know very well that Facebook will eventually die. But not just Facebook, Instagram too. Social networks, by their nature, are generational and transient. They have a shelf life.
Meta very much wants to build the app that kills Facebook and Instagram.
They have to build it because they can't acquire competition. That will raise the ire of regulators.
Likewise, Meta have already tried to leverage their own proprietary APIs to build compelling platforms. We've already seen this with the likes of Portal and Oculus.
What's apparent is that, even for a Big Social company like Meta, it is extremely hard to build a network effect from scratch. Sure, billions of people use Facebook and Instagram, but it was a whole lot of work for Meta to do that themselves.
And what was the end result of building Facebook and Instagram's network effect? More regulation by governments.
Thus, ActivityPub gives Meta two things it craves: the ability to piggyback on the network effect of an open protocol, and the ability to head off regulators by saying, "Hey, we don't own this protocol -- we're no different from Mastodon and Calckey."
Again, open protocols usually mean the demise of big corporations who leverage success through proprietary APIs. And ActivityPub will be no different.
Meta joining the Fediverse means that Automattic was right to build ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. It also means competitors, such as Apple and Microsoft, should probably start investing in ActivityPub.
What else does it mean? That small developers should start building apps that appeal to people who use Meta services. They should build these apps based on garden-variety ActivityPub -- because Meta can't own or control ActivityPub.
Fun little interoperability problem I've discovered today: #CalcKey and #Mastodon have different max-length's on their Moderation Report comment fields.
CalcKey's report comments can be up to 2048 characters. Mastodon has a maximum of 1000 characters.
Currently if a CalcKey report with a >1000 character comment was to be sent to Mastodon, Mastodon would fail to receive it.
There might be other interoperability issues here too!
Maybe it’s due to being autistic but I have no idea how others perceive me.
For three years of my life on the Fediverse, I pretty much just talked to myself and was content with that. I would say whatever and it wouldn’t matter because nobody was reading anything anyway.
When someone responded to one of my posts, it was usually spam. When it was actually someone real talking to me, it was like speaking to a unicorn.
Then one day, people started talking back. And what’s more they gave a damn about my opinions. For what reason, I don’t know. They just did.
Because some people talked to me, more people started talking to me. And everything started carrying more weight.
The moment I realized that I crossed the precipice of influence was when, one day, I typed some Unicode into a post.
This got lots of accessibility advocates angry. They were specifically angry because I was deemed an “influential” account. So I cut it out and haven’t posted any Unicode that way ever since.
Because of this, I have become more and more careful about what I post on this account. For example, I used to talk about my personal life. Things that I thought were innocuous upset people. One particular time, I said that my daughter and I listen to vinyl every day. That post got lots of blowback, and so I’ve stopped sharing stuff like that.
Sometimes people assign motivations where there is none. Recently, people have suddenly assumed I have something against #FediPact. This is not the case, and though I have not joined FediPact, I sympathize—and have even set up notmeta.social as a #Calckey server that pre-emptively defederates Meta.
Constantly, I get messages asking if I have something against this person or that service. And almost always, it’s never. If you think I do, talk to me directly, and I’m happy to iron out any misunderstandings.
In my actual life, I do my best to avoid conflict—to the point it annoys people. If I genuinely don’t like someone, I don’t argue with them. I make it impossible for them to contact me.
If you can contact me, it means that I probably like you.
Just reading an announcement that the home.social instance (the instance I use) will most likely be closing later this year. This has been such a nice place to be within the fediverse, so I hate to hear this.