All this conversation about #Meta on #Fedi feels like the worst parts of geek culture. So technical, without understanding context or what strikes can actually do. My thoughts:
Meta will make a great app for Fedi because it has more money to throw at the task. People will start using that because it's better. It will have QTs and an algorithm. People they want to follow will be there.
@ana It's interesting to think about how things might have played out if GMail et al had been met with strong resistance. As it is, the email market's now so firmly centralized at this point (95% of people use Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Yahoo) that it's not realistic. That said, I'd certainly consider subscribing to an email provider that guaranteed my email didn't go to those destinations -- and I do use encrypted email, which limits their access.
All this talk of Facebook/Meta joining the fediverse seems very similar to the paradox of tolerance. I think it's mostly agreed that you can be intolerant to protect yourself from intolerance.
So the only questions are: What damage can they do and to what extent can they be trusted not to inflict it.
Someone recently asked me why my handle is "Anathema"
It started as a goof. Before I came out as being a member of the trans family, my handle was Womantichrist and I had a laugh because anaTHEMa is a pretty little joke.
But on a more serious note, it comes from the Greek, Anatithenai: "to dedicate", used biblically to refer to something set aside or set apart as a sacrificial offering. Sacrifice, as in "to make sacred or holy"
Why would Meta implement ActivityPub? 1½ reasons are compelling, another frequently mentioned one is not.
Blogged yesterday. So far, a bunch of nodding, no real disagreements. Still want your thoughts, particularly if you disagree or have something to add I missed.
@J12t Another possibility: #Meta has good business reasons for doing a decentralized network (which I think is clearly the case), and ActivityPub is one of the best-known decentralized protocols , so it's a good PR/marketing approach to say they're starting there.
Either they make it work with proprietary extensions, or they say "we tried it but it didn't work out, and our approach is better because ..."
@J12t "Decentralized" doesn't necessarily mean "everybody can install it and run it themselves." I can certainly see them offering something that orgs with IT staffs can host on their own for their communities. For individuals, I can see them partnering with approved hosting vendors -- in fact one way to think about their outreach to instance admins is as an experiment, a proof point if it succeeds or something that can be easily discarded and blamed on others if it doesn't.
would it be so terrible if a server had a 'most followed accounts' section for new users, and it showed like the top 100 accounts being followed by other users on the server?
@smitten it would be better for white people and guys than trying to find accounts on their own, it would be worse for women and people of color and especially women of color. So white guys are more likely to say "cool, this is a place for me" and others are more likely to leave. "Rich get richer" algorithms like this tend to magnifiy existing inequities.
To get a diverse list, most if not all servers would need to manually curate recommendations.
@smitten Totally agree that people need a better foothold when they first join, it's an area where the feidverse really needs to make progress.
And you may well be right about how the gender aspects would work out on snowdin, I was over-generalizing. It's hard to know though; even if snowdin is mostly women, dynamics of the overall fediverse could still skew most-followed to men.
@corbden still, despite the challenges, I think encouraging people to take that approach -- and making it easier -- is likely to work out better in terms of diversity and equity than other approaches. Even a curated list has its limits; there's no way a single list can handle all the diverse interests and demographics of people coming here.
@corbden good suggestions, and yes there are lots of ways to make progress on it. It just hasn't been a priority. We'll se how things change in response to the Metapocalypse @smitten
Another day, another tech publication who entirely misses the point of the #Fediverse while being incredibly insensitive to the many #Women and #lgbtqia folks on this platform and overall protocol who are putting in work to make sure this is a safe place.
The original video also highlights how these tech publications just make so much space for #capitalism to run amok while dismissing those of us who are fighting back against it.
@majorlinux great video."Highly dismissive" is a perfect description of the Verge's discussion, both in terms of all the other fediverse implementations besides Mastodon and the ridiculous framing. I'm pretty confident that none of the queer and trans women I cited in "We're here, we're queer, we're federated" queer influences are "scared of girls"!
In my lifetime, we went from a president so squeaky clean that his opponents tried to make fist bumping his wife a scandal, to multiple Supreme Court justices mansplaining to us that just because they accept gifts from billionaires doesn’t make them corrupt.
@carnage4life when all the spotlight on the scandals started up I was thining about Abe Fortas, which which the previous big scandal in the late 60s/early 70s. Fortas had a retainer from soebody whose cases where before the Court, which was indeed pretty bad -- and apparently he wasn't the only one. But stuff that's come out about today's justices is arguably worse.
Fortas would have been impeached, so wound up resigning, but alas the political dynamics are different these days.