Vor zwei Jahren wollte Twitter in das „Dezentrale Netzwerke“-Business einsteigen und gründete eigens dafür das Projekt Bluesky. In den folgenden zwei Jahren wurde viel evaluiert und diskutiert, was wohl die beste Lösung für Twitter sei und wir alle fieberten mit ob es nun ActivityPub oder doch Matrix werden würde…
Das AT Protocol, kurz für Authenticated Transfer Protocol!
Ich hab mir die FAQ mal angeschaut und dort steht warum Bluesky sich gegen ActivityPub entschieden hat:
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user’s previous data.
Das erinnert mich ein bisschen an die Subline von meinem OpenWeb-Icons Font:
Why OpenWeb Icons? Because Font Awesome had no RSS-icon […]
Weil ActivityPub keine perfekte Lösung für „Account portability“ hat, bauen sie ein komplett neues Protokoll?
ActivityPub ist sicherlich nicht „feature complete“, aber ein guter erster Wurf, was das Fediverse erfolgreich bewiesen hat! Warum arbeitet Twitter also lieber an einem eigen Format anstatt mit dem W3C zusammen an ActivityPub v2?
Warum macht sich das W3C überhaupt noch die Mühe „Standards“ zu definieren?
Wegen der Interoperabilität!
Würde Twitter mit HTTP(S), HTML oder CSS ähnlich umgehen, würde der Browser einfach leer bleiben, weil das &$%§& Internet nur mit einheitlichen Standards funktioniert!
Und das gleiche gilt auch für dezentralte Netze, zumindest wenn sie erfolgreich sein wollen! Darüber hab ich tragischerweise schon vor 10 Jahren geschrieben!
Diaspora* wurde kaum für „tot“ erklärt und schon steht das nächste Projekt in den Startlöchern! Tent.io soll ein protocol for distributed social networking and personal data storage werden. Alles neu, alles anders, alles besser als OStatus, DiSo oder Diaspora*. Aber mal ganz ehrlich… was haben die Diasporas & Co. bisher geschaffen? Ziel war es Facebooks „Walled Gardens“ aufzubrechen und was kam wirklich dabei rum? Eine ganze Reihe an dezentralen „Walled Gardens“. Na danke!
Das fediverse hat (wie schon erwähnt) bisher einen großartigen Job gemacht und verschiedenste Netzwerke mit den verschiedensten Ausprägungen vernetzt! Ich glaube bin der festen Überzeugung, dass sich diesmal wirklich das offene Format (ActivityPub) durchsetzen wird und Blueskys Authenticated Transfer Protocol auch in ein paar Monaten oder Jahren keine Rolle spielen wird!
Ben Werdmuller hat eine gesunde Einstellung zu dem Thema:
I’m so burned out by open source social, but I’m glad to see people throw energy at the problem, even if it’s not how I would have gone about it.
Mehr hab ich dazu eigentlich nicht zu sagen, außer dass wir in der aktuellen Folge des neunetzcasts sehr ausgiebig über genau dieses Problem gesprochen haben!
The thing about Twitter is that it really lacks a lot of the features you'd expect from a true Mastodon replacement.
For example, there's no way to edit your toots (which they, confusingly call "tweets"—let's face it, it's a bit of a silly name that's difficult to take seriously).
"Tweets" can't be covered by a content warning. There's no way to let the poster know you like their tweet without also sharing it, and no bookmark feature.
There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content.
It also doesn't Integrate with other fediverse platforms, and I couldn't find the option to turn the ads off.
Really, Twitter has made a good start, but it will need to add a lot of additional features before it gets to the point where it becomes a true Mastodon replacement for most users.
@ajsadauskas - I get this is supposed to be cheeky, and we're all dunking on the bird app but...
-Tweets can have content warnings
-You can Like tweets
-There are bookmarks, and with Twitter Blue there are bookmark folders
-You can't set up an instance, but you can launch a Twitter Community
-Twitter Communities have moderators you can reach out to and Community-specific rules
-Communities can be invite-only; not the same as defederation, but it makes them somewhat exclusive
@davidihewlett ...yes! #Twitter had been my "home" as well. #Mastadon is not THAT difficult to understand once you grok "federated" #SocialMedia. There's a learning curve with everything, but this wasn't terribly steep. If anything, I'm hoping that the attention paid to it will only further improve the experience for everybody. I'm leaning in, learning, and sharing discoveries as best I can.
Twitter is like a top of the range Lamborghini but you’re trapped in the boot full of broken bottles and it’s being driven over a cliff by a madman.
Mastodon is like sitting in the back of a dilapidated VW camper van, with knackered suspension, no air conditioning, but lots of nice passengers having a sing-song and there’s a dog called Mr. Snuffles.
Sorry for all the #elon & #twitter posts to those who are getting annoyed but it... But gosh-darn-it, the whole thing is just so annoyingly entertaining...
I’m a #cataloging and #TechnicalServices librarian at a small #LiberalArts#college in #Louisiana. I am married to a now retired USAF guy and have two teen daughters who are pretty terrific (if I do say so myself). Also residing in the house are 3 cats who are usually plotting the demise of my dog.
I say hi to all my new followers with this amazing shot I captured in January this year in Hekelingen (NL). Smashing colors, just love it. Don't forget to boost if you love this picture 🙏 :mastodon:
Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this:
Launch a product to great fanfare
Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨
Stop answering emails and pull requests
If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it.
Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The value-proposition is simple.
It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data from a complex web page.
Therefore, let's encourage websites to include metadata which tells our services what they should look at!
OGP works pretty well! When you share a link on Facebook, or Twitter, or Telegram - those services load the website in the background, look for OGP metadata, and display a friendly snippet.
Facebook Meta were the driving force behind OGP - and have now left it to fester.
And, that might be fine. Facebook Meta are a small company with limited resources. They can't afford to fund standards work indefinitely. And, anyway, OGP is complete, right? It has all the tags that anyone could ever possibly want. Why does it need any improving?
This is annoying for developers. Now we have to write multiple different bits of metadata if we want our links to be supported on all platforms.
Standards work is never "finished". Developers want to add new features. Users want to interact with new forms of content.
Tomorrow someone is going to invent a way to share smells over the Internet. How does that get represented in an Open Graph Protocol compliant manner?
<meta property="twitter:olfactory" content="C₃H₆S"> or <meta property="facebook:nose" content="InChIKey/MWOOGOJBHIARFG-UHFFFAOYSA-N"> or <meta property="og:smell" content="pumpkin spice"> or...
We know from bitter experience that having several mutually incompatible ways to implement something is a nightmare for developers and provides a poor user-experience.
So we create standards bodies. They're not perfect, but a group of interested folks can do the hard work to try and satisfy oppositional stakeholders.
This is my plea to Facebook Meta. If you're no longer interested in improving OGP, OK. You do you. But hand it over to people who want to keep this going. Maybe it's the W3C, or IndieWeb, or Schema.org or someone. Hell, I'm not busy, I'll take it on.
I keep hearing that #Mastodon is not likely to replace #Twitter. To that I say: so what?
I've been contributing to the #Linux desktop for the last 15 years not because it's likely to replace #Windows, but because providing people with free desktop is the right thing to do.
I use and support Mastodon not because it's likely to replace Twitter, but because it's a social network done right.
Elon Musk is threatening to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information about its spam bot accounts.