Every morning, an instance administrator wakes up knowing they need to keep the infrastructure running smoothly for their users, ensuring a good and free social experience.
Every morning, a Fediverse user wakes up knowing they will find many people eager to socialize and interact, who strive to keep the Internet a place for the free exchange of ideas and opinions, away from the dynamics of closed protocols and Big Tech monetization.
It doesn't matter if you are a server administrator or a Fediverse user, thank you for being here and for contributing every day with your efforts to keep the Internet a free place.
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
Groups of people just coming up with new ideas, new designs, new innovations.
Not Google vs Apple vs Facebook and no one else.
This is pretty amazing. This list has grown tremendously since I started checking out the #Fediverse in I think like 2017. This just blows me away and makes me excited again for the internet.
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#WebScraping#Discord: "An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
The news is not only a brazen abuse of Discord’s platform, but also highlights that Discord messages may be more susceptible to monitoring than ordinary users assume. Typically, a Discord user’s activity is spread across disparate servers, with no one entity, except Discord itself, able to see what messages someone has sent across the platform more broadly. With Spy Pet, third-parties including stalkers or potentially police can look up specific users and see what messages they’ve posted on various servers at once.
“Have you ever wondered where your friend hangs out on Discord? Tired of basic search tools like Discord.id? Look no further!” Spy Pet’s website reads. It claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages." https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/
One of the most frustrating things in modern technology is the effort spent trying to artificially restrict abundance. Take, for example, this tale from museum-worker Aaron Cope: I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one […]
I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one for each object in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection”. My friend looked at me for a moment, laughed, and then simply said: No.
In that blog post, Aaron reveals that the San Francisco International Airport Museum is using ActivityPub to create automated social-media bot accounts for all its exhibits and, possibly, every object it hold.
And why not! That would be close to impossible to do on a centralised service. But on a decentralised service under your own control, it is relatively simple. Perhaps I only want to follow the museum's canteen, or I just want to engage with a specific artefact. The Fediverse makes that possible.
This reminds me of the Melbourne "treemail" phenomenon. Every tree in the city had an email address, ostensibly so residents could email maintenance issues for a specific tree. Instead, people started interacting with the trees and sending them little love notes!
Dearest Golden Elm Tree, I finally found you! As in I see you everyday on my way to uni, but I had no idea of what kind of tree you are. You are the most beautiful tree in the city and I love you
A few weeks ago, I read about Ben Smith inventing Tweeting trains. With a bit of code, every train line in the UK was suddenly represented on the web in a convenient format. Well… Convenient if you were on Twitter.
Museums, trees, and trains naturally brings me on to the Internet of Things. I think it is fair to say that IoT is in a bit of an odd place right now. Matter is a confusing mishmash of standards. Security and privacy issues dog the simplest devices. Many people don't even want their toaster online!
For the majority of domestic uses, people want an Intranet of Things. There's little need to have your light-bulbs controlled when you're outside of WiFi range. Similarly, it is probably a really bad idea to have your hydroelectric dam connected to the Internet.
Which brings me back to the Fediverse.
On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to follow @Yellow_Line@Transit_Authority.gov - or even @Bus_Stop_1234@bus_company.biz - that would allow for hyperfocused data getting to the right people. It seems feasible that every civic object could have a Fediverse account. From the individual streetlights to the municipal sewerage system. Perhaps people won't send love letters to overflowing drains - but a social-dashboard of your civic environment could be both practical and delightful.
And, as for your domestic gadgets? Why not give every room, or every light-bulb, in your home a private Fediverse account? You could send a message like:
Hey @thermostat, please set the temperature to 19°C. Thanks!
That might be a bit much! But I like the idea of a private social network which consists of all my IoT gadgets talking to me and each other.
Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub: This could change the Fediverse forever
Years before there was Mastodon and even ActivityPub, there was Mike Macgirvin who created the Zot protocol, which Hubzilla runs on. One of Hubzilla’s most amazing features (apart from also integrating with Activity and the Fediverse, and having cha ...continues
The Myth: Is the Fediverse Really That Complicated?
Let me start out by saying how I think this myth became the reality for many… Obviously, a few journalists declared the Fediverse to be complicated, and this got picked up quickly by those who were considering whether to open accounts in the Fediverse (I’m no ...continues
I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
I just did my little to include more organizations in the Fediverse proposing the use of Wordpress ActivityPub plugin. Let's see if they consider it and start using it and drop all the other social networks icons. #Fediverse#ActivityPub#Wordpress#SocialNetworks
"As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress."
Red line: Estimated average number of daily active users on Twitter in 2013.
Green line: About the time Twitter introduced the algorithmically sorted home timeline that users where up in arms against.
People today: Social media without algorithms just doesn't work! We have to let the ruling class control what information we receive, there's just no other choice. Deciding for ourselves, hah, so naïve!
I’m always very surprised to see that #academics, who are at the main actors of #research and #innovation, are so far behind when it comes to use “new” technologies like #socialNetworks ...
The researchers found that individuals who are willing to cooperate prefer the company of other cooperative people and that free riders tend to stick to their own kind as well.
"These networks of primitive cultures are not that different from the kinds of networks that exist in modern society," said Stanley Wasserman, a statistician at Indiana University who was not involved in the study.
A few days ago, I expressed a new interest in 3D printing. Many have reached out with comments and offered help in selecting the right printer and software.
This is one of the aspects I love about the Fediverse: people are here for genuine interest and passion, not just for trends. It feels like a throwback to the internet of twenty years ago.
Meta claims that Threads will eventually become federated, meaning that it, too, will allow you to take your followers and port them elsewhere, and that it will possibly become interoperable with Mastodon at some point. There are reasons to be skeptical of this actually happening, which have been explained much better by other people but largely have to do with the fact that Facebook likes to monetize its users and strives for social media monopolization. I believe it would be very good for the internet if Threads were to earnestly and actually federate itself, but, for now, I will just point out that Threads is still not interoperable with the continent of Europe for reasons of “it’s illegal there because of Facebook’s privacy practices” and thus I’m not holding my breath.
If you are at all worried about how complicated Mastodon is or can be, you can ignore this part, join Mastodon.Social, and never think about the rest of this article. Anyways, portability is good and important because, let’s say that hypothetically Mastodon.Social were to be taken over by some maniac billionaire. I could choose to take my account and port it somewhere else, and bring my followers with me. What a concept!" https://www.404media.co/mastodon-is-the-good-one/
Journalists are realising Mastodon and the Fediverse is not so complicated to use after all
As Notopoulos writes, the Fediverse is a better, more user-centric social media concept than the one we currently have, where you amass followers on a single platform then lose them if that platform dies or becomes bad and you decide to quit. Federated social ...continues