Fediverse

Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.

With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:

1. No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
2. Users can move between instances without penalty.
3. Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
4. People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
5. There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.

I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.

1/3

Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts.

What do you guys think about this? I don't really know much about Flipboard or its implications for the fediverse, so I'm curious what others think about the matter.

If you're interested, here are the accounts that have federated:
The Verge — @theverge
Fast Company — @FastCompany
Semafor — @semafor
SPIN — @SPINMag
News Literacy Project — @NewsLitProject
Medium — @Medium
Digiday — @Digiday
ScienceAlert — @ScienceAlert
Polygon — @polygon
Frommers — @FrommersMag
Kotaku — @Kotaku
The 74 — @The74
Pitchfork — @pitchfork
Refinery29 — @Refinery29
Mental Floss — @mental_floss
The Root — @TheRoot
Joysauce — @Joysauce
IndieWire — @IndieWire
LGBTQ Nation — @LGBTQNation
Smithsonian Magazine — @Smithsonianmag
AFAR Media — @AfarMedia
The Christian Science Monitor — @csmonitor
Erin Brockovich — @ErinBrockovich
Canada's National Observer — @NatObserver
The Conversation (US) — @ConversationUS

Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

Here's their rollout plan:

Federation in Three Phases

When and how is this going to happen? The process of opening Flipboard to the Fediverse is called “federation” and it will happen in three distinct phases between now and April:

• Phase 1 (Today): We are federating 25 publishers and creators so that we can test and gather feedback
• Phase 2 (January): We will enable anyone in the Fediverse to follow and engage with any public curator on Flipboard
• Phase 3 (April): We will enable anyone on Flipboard to follow and engage with any public account in the Fediverse

This is the list of publishers that are being federated today:
The Verge, Fast Company, Semafor, Spin, News Literacy Project, Medium, Digiday, Science Alert, Polygon, Frommers, Pitchfork, Refinery29, Mental Floss, The Root, Kotaku, The 74, Joy Sauce, Indie Wire, LGBTQ Nation, Smithsonian Magazine, AFAR, The Christian Science Monitor, Erin Brockovich, Canada's National Observer, The Conversation

Check this out. Remember that Facebook isn't just the place where moms and aunts swap recipes:
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/111585534320522781

TL;DR: The current Mastodon-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their Mastodon-journey. Instead, it should introduce them to decentrality on a lower scale, with a handful of handpicked servers to choose from, such that the decision makes sense to them and shows them the merits and fun of the concept instead of scaring them away. Ideal would be to give them a sense of agency. Then, chances are higher that they consider migrating again in the future and eventually internalize it as a permanent option of the digital world.

With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't think those are the main issues. Imo, Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.

Let's start with these three statements, which should hopefully seem pretty reasonable:

1. It's dangerous for one entity to dominate the activity pool. If, say, one person's instance contributes 95% of the content, then the rest of the fediverse becomes dependent on that instance. Should that instance defederate, everyone else will have to either live with 1/20 of the content or move to that instance, and good luck getting the fediverse to grow after that. By making everyone dependent on their instance for content, that one person gains the power to kill the fediverse by defederating.
2. Profit-driven media should not be the primary way people interact with the fediverse. Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances. Furthermore, lots of people went to the fediverse to avoid the influence of these large corporations on social media, and it should still uphold this purpose.
3. People should enter the fediverse with an idea of its purpose. If someone's on the fediverse, they should be aware of that fact and aware of the fediverse's goal of decentralized media. People should think of the fediverse as every instance contributing to a decentralized pool of content, not other instances tapping in to their instance as the main pool.

Now, let's apply these to federating with Threads:

1. This point alone is more than enough reason to defederate from Threads. Threads has millions more active users than all of the fediverse combined, and it's in much better of a position to grow its userbase due to its integration with Instagram. If we federate with Threads, it will dominate content. And that's not mentioning all of the company accounts on Threads that people have expressed an interest in following. While all of this new activity may seem like a good thing, it puts everyone in a position of dependence on Threads. People are going to get used to the massive increase in content from Threads, and if it ever defederates, tons of people on other instances are going to leave with it. Essentially, Zuckerberg will eventually be able to kill the fediverse's growth prospects when he wishes and nab a bunch of users in the process, both of which he has incentive to do.
2. If we federate with Threads, Threads is undoubtedly going to seem like the easiest way to access our pool of content (at least on the microblog side of things). Newcomers already get intimidated by having to choose a Mastodon instance; give them access via essentially just logging into their Instagram account, and they'll take that over the non-corporate alternatives. Federation with Threads means that most of the people who want to see the content we make are going to go to Threads, meaning platforms like Mastodon & Kbin will be less able to grow.
3. When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account. I'd bet that when Threads gets federation up and running, most people on Threads won't have a clue that they're on the fediverse. Those who do know will probably think of it as all of these small, niche platforms that are kinda offshoots of Threads. That's not the mentality that should pervade the fediverse.

I think that all of this is makes defederating from Threads a no-brainer. If we don't, we'll depend on Meta for activity, platforms that aren't Threads won't grow, and the fediverse will be primarily composed of people who don't have even a vague idea of the purpose behind it. I want more activity as much as the next guy, but that activity being beholden to the corporations most of us want to avoid seems like the worst-case scenario.

"But why not defederate later?"

If we don't defederate now, I don't think we're ever going to defederate. Once the fediverse becomes dependent on Threads for most of its content, there's no going back. If anything, it'd get worse as Threads outpaces the rest of the fediverse in growth and thus makes up a larger and larger share of activity. Look at how desperate everyone is for activity — even if it means the fediverse being carried by Meta — right now, when we're not used to it. Trying to get instances to defederate later will be nigh impossible.

"Why not just block Threads yourself?"

Even if that were a feature, it completely ignores the problem. I don't dislike the people on Threads, and I don't think their content will necessarily be horrendous. The threat is people on non-corporate fediverse platforms becoming dependent on Daddy Zuck for content, and that's something that can only be fought with defederation.

To close, imagine if Steve Huffman said that Reddit was going to implement ActivityPub and federate with Lemmy & Kbin. Would you want the fediverse to be dependent on Reddit for activity? Would you trust Huffman, who has all the incentive in the world to pull the plug on federation once everyone on Lemmy & Kbin is hooked to Reddit content? This is the situation we're in, just with a different untrustworthy corporation. The fediverse should not be at the mercy of Threads, Reddit, The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, or any other corporate platform. It's better to grow slowly but surely than to put what we have in the hands of these people.

Attaché : 1 image The recent excitement surrounding Thread's arrival on the Fediverse is concerning. To understand why this is not a good idea, consider their economic interest in harvesting data, their poor moderation, and their manipulations. Nothing good can come from their federation. Don't roll out the red carpet for them. #Threads #Mastodon #Krita #MastoArt #Meta

tornado_selfie.jpg

#fediverse

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads that the platform is beginning to test making Threads posts available on Mastodon and other ActivityPub-supporting services. Zuckerberg wrote that making Threads work with the interoperable standard “will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people.”

Despite delays, the plan to connect Tumblr's blogging site to the wider world of decentralized social media, also known as the "fediverse," is still on.

Now, CEO Matt Mullenweg is clearing up the status of Tumblr’s fediverse ambitions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) shared on his own Tumblr blog. In response to a question from TechCrunch, Mullenweg explained that despite the re-org, which will see many Tumblr employees move to other projects at the end of the year, Automattic did switch someone over to Tumblr to work on the fediverse integration, which will continue in the new year.

Still, Mullenweg cautioned that, so far, Automattic hadn’t yet seen outsized user demand for federated social media.

“The Activity Pub and Friends plugins for WordPress are both from Automatticians, and have allowed us space to play in this space and understand the community and protocols, and also gauge user demand,” Mullenweg wrote. “Right now both have under ten thousand users, so there hasn’t been a big user push for this yet,” he noted.

But he said that folks will “dig into Tumblr’s codebase” to see what it can do about moving forward with federation.

Matt Mullenweg's Tumblr post

5 years of Mobilizon, new update for Mammoth, bridges, and more!

After a long silence from the developer, project moderators stepped down. The mobile app for Kbin appears to have closed its doors.

With a new release under its belt, Mobilizon's developer Framasoft is stepping back from the project.

@gmph postanowił zintegrować Mastodona jako system do skomentowania jego wpisu. Widzę, że komentarze wyświetlają się tylko chronologicznie - bez wątkowania w szeroko omawianym artykule, takim jak ten, gwarantuje to nieczytelny bałagan.

A, i testuję, czy wpis z /kbin pojawi się pod artykułem

https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments

#fediverse

5 years after its announcement, Mobilizon, our free, federated alternative to Facebook groups and events, is reaching maturity. We take this opportunity to look back on its history and future. 🦆 VS 😈: Let's take back some ground from the tech giants! Thanks to your donations to our not-for-profit, Framasoft is taking action to advance...

I've been thinking a bit about this post regarding #Mastodon's responsibility to be compatible with the #threadiverse (#ActivityPub thread aggregators like #Lemmy & #Kbin). Right now, a thread from Lemmy or Kbin usually federates to Mastodon with truncated text and a link to the actual thread. However, many want Mastodon to be more compatible with threads so that the people over on Mastodon interact with the threadiverse more.

I was initially in agreement as a Kbin user. But having given it some thought, I think this is an unwise approach that'll only serve to overcomplicate platforms on the #fediverse. Yes, people on Mastodon should promote other parts of the fediverse (and vice versa), but complete interoperability shouldn't be expected of every platform.

As much as many would like it, you can't have long-form video from PeerTube, images from Pixelfed, threads from Kbin, blogs from Writefreely, etc. all neatly fit in a microblog feed. These are different formats made for different platforms, and the people making them are expecting them to be interacted with in completely different ways. When someone makes a thread in a Lemmy community, they're probably expecting that the people who are going to see and interact with the thread are people that want to see threads and are thus on a Lemmy instance (or another thread aggregator). If someone from Mastodon were to interact with it as if it were a microblog post, there'd be a big mismatch. People interact with microblogs differently than they do with threads — that's why they're separate to begin with. You don't see everyone on Twitter also wanting to use to Reddit because people who want microblogs don't necessarily want Reddit-style threads, and vice versa.

The other option, then, is to separate these different formats into different feeds or otherwise make them clearly distinct from one another. Kbin does this by separating threads and microblog posts into two tabs. While you can view both in the "All Content" tab if you'd like, they're styled differently enough that it's very clear when you're looking at a thread and when you're looking at a microblog post. This distinction lets users treat threads like threads and microblog posts like microblog posts, which is really helpful since the two formats serve different purposes and have different audiences. This option — clear distinction — is a great way to solve the conundrum I've been talking about… if your platform is meant for viewing all these different kinds of content to begin with.

And that's what it really comes down to imo. Mastodon is a platform for microblogging. Most people go to Mastodon because they want a Twitter alternative, not a Twitter alternative that's also an Instagram alternative and a Reddit alternative and a YouTube alternative. Even if you put these different content types in separate tabs, it would inevitably make things seem more confusing and thus raise the barrier of entry. Add a Videos tab to Mastodon to view stuff on PeerTube, and people are inevitably going to go, "Wait, what's this? Is this like YouTube? I thought this was just a Twitter alternative! This all seems too complicated," even if you tell them to ignore it.

It's probably best to leave Mastodon as it is: a microblogging platform that has some limited federation with other formats. The way Kbin threads currently display on Mastodon is fine. In fact, when I post a Kbin thread, I'm expecting it to be viewed via a thread aggregator. If people on Mastodon were part of the target audience, I would've made a microblog post.

Now, if you want to make something that lets you view everything on the fediverse via different tabs, feel free. As aforementioned, Kbin supports both threads and microblogs, though it comes with some challenges (e.g., trying to fit magazine-less microblog posts into Kbin's magazine system). However, this doesn't mean every platform on the fediverse needs to seamlessly incorporate everything else. I'd love people on Mastodon to promote and even try out Lemmy & Kbin more, but that doesn't mean Mastodon needs to also become a thread aggregator.

Hey :) @Piko and I are trying out #kbin as part of #fedivoyage!

#fediverse

The EU's Next Generation Internet grant continues to support innovation in the Fediverse, funding the social platform of the future.

Flat earth real life testimony 6/7

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj-2dvjjVCY

You can visit and watch the whole 7.
Joyful Christmas in advance! 😀
Joyful Mysteries... 😇

#fediverse

Mastodon, we wrote this because we love you and care about you. People have been saying a lot of things, and we need to get the facts right.

Hi! I’m Ryan. I’ve been building social network bridges and related tools for over 12 years, including Bridgy, which connects personal web sites and blogs to centralized social networks…

The original mastodon thread with some conversation on the replies.

Summary written with claude.ai:

The article argues that as social media platforms like Mastodon grow, they will face two major challenges:

• Scale has social effects - As more people join, behaviors change. People act differently if they think they might encounter their boss, mother, neighbors etc. on the platform. This reduces the initial social homogeneity of early adopters.
• Founding filters fall away - Early adopters tend to have similar backgrounds/cultures. But as the platform grows, it includes more diverse users with different norms. This leads to more conflict - the article gives the example of English-speaking vs Russian-speaking communities on LiveJournal having very different cultures and priorities.

The article warns against complacency - assuming problems are solved just because they haven't arisen yet on a small platform. More rigor, curiosity and learning from past mistakes is needed.

It advocates consciously "engineering" online societies, drawing on expertise like social sciences. Users should engage thoughtfully, asking questions rather than just demanding solutions. The goal should be spurring interest in the engineering of social spaces, not just implementing quick fixes.

I've noticed that a lot of people on the #fediverse aren't particularly welcoming to those who don't initially get it or have trouble with it. You'd think that if multiple people say they have trouble picking an instance, it might be a genuine barrier to entry that we need to consider when introducing them to the fediverse. But no, instead of suggesting an instance to get rid of that barrier everyone gives unhelpful advice like "just pick one" or "it's not that hard." We'd have a much easier time getting people on the fediverse if there weren't so many people with this attitude of "the fediverse is simple, and the people who don't get it are lazy and should try harder."