For all the infuriating difficulty they endured while producing it, Guy, Prodromou, Lemmer-Webber, Tallon and Shephard’s ActivityPub protocol has helped bring about such a transition....
Federated social media is a radical departure from corporate social media. While big companies like Google and Microsoft produce email servers that can intercommunicate with hundreds of other providers, in the world of social media, cross-company communication is largely unheard of....
Mastodon is alternative social media – indeed, it is the most important example of this type of media I have found in my research career. As I have shown elsewhere, alternative social media are built in relation to corporate social media in a process of critical reverse engineering. Mastodon is no different....
With the conflict between the different working group factions seemingly resolved due to the decision to produce as many standards as possible, there should have been a clear path for what would become ActivityPub, the federated social media standard....
Here is yet another facet of the “alternative” in “alternative social media”: alternative economies that eschew surveillance capitalism....
But from the perspective of the digital covenant, defederation is entirely justifiable because it protects the integrity of instances-as-communities. There’s no reason an instance must federate with another if they are both ethically incompatible....
ActivityPub (and all the other standards created by the SocialWG) had zero input from social media corporations. This is extremely non-standard practice. On the Internet, standards are fundamentally important. Every connection between a computer and the vast network of billions of computers on the Internet is governed by standards. Email is governed by SMTP....
Robert W. Gehl
boosted
oh, a new book arrived. thanks to @rwg for writing it. the next days will be busy, but the hour of reading it will come 🎄
the first cover page of the book "Move Slowly and Build Bridges" better readable because black on white. on the bottom you can read "oxford" because its from oxford press.
the book cover of "Move Slowly and Build Bridges"
Above all, the biggest contrasts the 2022 Twitter wave revealed between Mastodon and Twitter/X are the contrasts between individualism versus social groups and centralization versus noncentralization. This chapter began with a common approach to talking about social media: focus on central sites, or better yet, central figures....
oh, a new book arrived. thanks to @rwg for writing it. the next days will be busy, but the hour of reading it will come 🎄
the first cover page of the book "Move Slowly and Build Bridges" better readable because black on white. on the bottom you can read "oxford" because its from oxford press.
the book cover of "Move Slowly and Build Bridges"
Hometown isn’t the only Mastodon fork. There are others, such as Glitch, which includes experimental features. Forks are a major part of FOSS development. Sometimes, features implemented on forks are integrated back into the mainline Mastodon code....
Denying the Dogmas of Free Speech Absolutism and Individualism...
Above all, however, I agree with the observations of the Systerserver collective, a group that operates on the fediverse: the covenantal fediverse is comprised of instances-as-communities that “depend on each other, sharing their tools while fostering webs of commitment, responsibility and care.” The covenantal fediverse runs on care....
The adoption of codes of conduct not only differentiated Mastodon from corporate social media sites, such as Twitter, but also from pre-existing, FOSS-based, federated social media systems, most notably GNU social. Started in 2010, GNU social had been the flagship FOSS alternative to Twitter....
At first glance, “code of conduct” might sound like another way of saying “terms of service” – the sort of document Twitter and Facebook use. All social media users are familiar with terms of service agreements – long documents people quickly click through to get to the pleasures of social networking. But codes of conduct are not the same thing....
If Meta’s adoption of ActivityPub has done anything, it has revealed, a fundamental fault line of the fediverse – and who is on what side of the line. As Bad Space admin Ro said to me, “I appreciate people showing their hand.” On one side are the champions of openness....
The answer is yes, but artists are also hedging their bets....
Fourth, and most relevant here, the fediverse’s use of cloud services simply replicates the same problem posed by server farms in general: their environmental impact is tremendous. If the fediverse merely repeats the corporate social media server farm structure, it could amplify the ecological problems wrought by corporate social media....
Surveillance capitalism is lucrative. I recall the awe in 2006 when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion USD. Much has changed since then. Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion dollars. Even accounting for inflation, that’s 17 times more than what YouTube sold for....