maegul

maegul, 1 day ago

@miriamrobern @DivineKestrel

I think they missed Scorpius no?

maegul, 2 days ago

@gisiger

Yea, it’s time to call time on microblogging, at least as a central focus for social media.

I’m also thinking of just deleting my account and walking to give myself time for other things.

maegul, 2 days ago

@Trainguyrom

Ha
AFAIU, two platforms other than mastodon (lemmy and discourse) have issues federating because at least one of them is trying federate well with mastodon (for obvious reasons). The mastodon quirk causing issues is, AFAIU, the way it kinda mangles articles and pages (long form formats in ActivityPub), which are appropriate for forums and link-aggregators like lemmy and discourse. So someone hints been done to work well with mastodon’s mangling, which hurts lemmy-discourse interop

maegul, 2 days ago

@p03locke

Yep, yep and ... yep!

maegul, 3 days ago

@molly0xfff

Just found a great article on it: https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

It was more like a forest. Wild. Chaotic. And surprising. Requiring exploration and delighting when you found a new village.

Now it’s more like a city. Busy, noisy, full of adds and well trodden streets.

As a result, a muscle I’ve lost is how to find villages of people that care about a specific thing. I don’t know how to join a new forum and start talking. It’s like I’m on a street with everyone passing each other by.

maegul, 4 days ago

So the basic story would be that mastodon's dominance is pretty entrenched and the "migration" event is mostly "over" (whatever other "events" are on their way)

But I wonder about the details of the firefish moment

I think it revealed that there are/were plenty interested in novel & different platforms. We're novelty seekers after all right. Generally, I'd wager any new platform needs some degree of novelty to "make it".

Further, its collapse showed how hard creating a new platform is.

2/

maegul, 4 days ago

Firefish did well at presenting itself as "professional", capable and rich. But these were over-promises, and despite a number of people being involved or contributing, a good deal of user enthusiasm, the whole thing fell into a heap.

And that's the bit that concerns me. How many people/teams are there both capable and willing to put up a good, successful and sustainable platform?

The #firefish lesson may be that the fediverse just hasn't attracted a healthy building culture/personnel.
3/3

maegul, 4 days ago

@ajsadauskas

Another platform that some people got excited for about 1yr ago. It was obviously not a direct clone of twitter in the same way mastodon is, but based on a japanese platform (misskey) and so just came from a different place with a whole bunch of features quite separate from the "mere microblogging" of mastodon.

It had flaws, sure, but there was genuine hope it'd become "the other platform".

But it was run like crap and fell apart and its flagship server is dead.

maegul, 4 days ago

@0xtero

Yea I stuffed up the rest of the thread by not tagging the lemmy community (which was provided automatically but I was trying to save on characters).

Otherwise, no need for congrats/condolences ... it just struck me that there may be a wider implication in an otherwise small moment.

maegul, 4 days ago

@julian

Lol re "nodeBB".

AFAICT (where some rumours likely to have truth to them are behind this) the essential failure was a flawed lead dev and an excessive tolerance of their BDFL approach by fellow contributors and "backers".

When those flaws become critical there was no governance/org to compensate. That dev was making weird decisions on the fly that were ruining the platform. Then they walked and nothing was left. And so all the promise of being big/serious was facade/hype.

maegul, 4 days ago

@julian

The only meaningful lesson, I think, is if you're aiming to substantially grow and attract users and admins, you need to organise a team and users and contributors and backers need to have and expect norms around team work for buying in.

Otherwise, my "fedi-antenna" thinks the same energy wouldn't happen now, that a moment has passed.

But that's on the microblogging side. We're you're at with the thrediverse/forums and maybe better blog interop is new and exciting ground IMO!!

maegul, 4 days ago

@GeekinKorea
> By the time it rebranded to firefish it was down so frequently I gave up and ended up happily on a stable Mastodon server.

Yea that's the story in a nut shell. The lead dev wasn't fit for the role and ruined the whole thing.

What interests me though is that others were involved and that an unhealthy "team" or lack of a team may be indicative of the fediverse's ability to bring people together to build sustainable and stable projects.

maegul, 4 days ago

@julian

I hear you. IMO it was more than bluster.

Here's the homepage of the platform, which strikes me as relatively "serious/big" for something run by a dev who didn't really know how to manage a database: https://joinfirefish.org/

I'm pretty sure there were "backers" trying to make it a thing and the "vibe" was very much "invite everyone, LFG!!". They even had a total rebrand (name and logo) in the middle of the "moment" with multiple posts hyping it up ahead of time.

maegul, 4 days ago

@ajsadauskas

And to get a sense of what it looked like: https://calckey.world/@kiko@calckey.social

All those of emojis are native, as is the animation you'll see if you press "play" (some of which glitch because this is a different instance/version).

You could add as much visual sugar to your posts as you wanted and it was so much more fun.

maegul, 4 days ago

@andy @ajsadauskas

Yep ... but interests me is that there were people around them, including us users. What culture did we all bring to the table that enabled it to grow and die like that with such a lead dev?

maegul, 3 days ago

@deadsuperhero

I'm not trying to blame anyone or anything. I'm implicitly asking what, if any lessons could be taken away from it.

But really, apart from causes, I'm wondering why the "team"/project couldn't handle the issues.

And more broadly, I'm wondering if there's something telling about the fedi that it was such a team that inherited such a moment.

The backdrop for me is all the talk on the need for alternatives to mastodon and seemingly little progress on that.

maegul, 3 days ago

@deadsuperhero

Yes this.

Which implies, AFAICT, a winner-take-all dynamic regarding platform dominance.

Which then means, if true, that all of those aiming for getting another platform up there with mastodon may not realise the hill they’re trying to climb (thus my take that if you care about competing with masto you should be working together with everyone else that also cares).

For microblogging, I think it’s now too late. Mastodon is the fediverse (for microblogging at least).

maegul, 3 days ago

@Uraael @GeekinKorea

You're probably very right about all of that. (Would you mind letting me know who that "spider" was, as I mostly didn't pay attentioon to that episode)

In the end though, AFAIU, as a lead dev they were very happy to hold onto their role as BDFL. Which, if you're up for it, great, sometimes that's necessary to make things happen. But if you're not and then become the vulnerability, then that's a bad call and the buck has to stop with you for it.

maegul, 3 days ago

@Uraael @GeekinKorea

Nonetheless, I'm more interested in the general dynamics of the whole thing, not blaming or even thinking about any one individual. The "spider" and the episode they created, for example.

On a personal level, I wish all the best for the lead dev and hope that they are proud of what they did because they deserve it.

I do not think though that the fediverse can be proud and happy about what happened and should probably question itself (incl us users TBH). That's my point.

maegul, 5 days ago

...

• What if an OS were designed and built by communities for their own needs

• What if complexity wasn't swept under the rug

• What if we could build and understand complex systems together (IE, not just with email and slack channels)

And what struck me was that even for something like social media (surely simpler than general computation?) ... we're likely quite far off in general and even here on the fedi that embraces (relatively) interoperation and distribution.

2/

maegul, 5 days ago

Realistically, platforms on the fedi are much closer in design to their commercial conterparts than one would hope for if your goal was community building and situating the process of digital/online community building within the community themselves.

Just as some are embracing federation with Threads ... I'm thinking that the second wave of fedi platforms (eg bonfire?) in which the big-social paradigms are undone couldn't come soon enough.

3/3

maegul, 6 days ago

@jack

BTW, Bret's here (and active): @bret