wisdomchicken

joined 2 years ago
 

On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience 'place' at the federation level.

 

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

 

Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.

 

On Mastodon's new Share button, and protocol ownership.

 

A big grab bag of news, that ties into the question of 'Where Does Community Live?'

 

Fediverse search engine Holos Discover shut down this week, showing structural issues how to distinguish between individual and community consent.

 

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

 

With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.

 

On the tension in the DSA, that needs Big Tech platforms to exist so it can regulate them, while the fediverse does away with large platforms altogether.

 

The conditions that made 'leaving Twitter' a meaningful part of the open social web's identity don't exist for TikTok. What happens when people can't see each other leave?

 

Bluesky has verified the account of ICE, which was a step too far for many in the fediverse, wanting to disconnect from the bridge between the networks

The presence itself of ICE on Bluesky is a form of harm, and Bluesky is not well equipped to deal with this new challenge. Making things worse, their verification system is set up to delegate responsibility, but instead they made no use of it

 

ActivityPub is getting its first formal update path since 2018. I wrote about why this matters, how this leads to some strange and funny power dynamics, and about who actually participate

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago

i thought you made a fair point, and you were right to be confused, so figured id just address it directly

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 5 points 6 months ago (6 children)

i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.

activitypub scaling is a very real issue

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 4 points 7 months ago

open social web is used here as a descriptive term, to mean the collection of networks that includes activitypub, atproto, nostr (and potentially more like matrix and farcaster, depending on your inclination).

whether open social web is the correct term or not does not really matter, because if it was not than i would simply have to replace it with another term that describes the exact same thing

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 1 points 7 months ago

yeah, there are two aspects to this: what do you think is beneficial for the ecosystem, and what do people do in practice. And those are largely different things, turns out.

I think you can make a pretty good case why it would be beneficial for ecosystem development to have protocols more standardised. But that also kinda doesnt matter much, because in an open network you dont have control over what other people are doing.

Bluesky has a much more structured protocol, and much more control over their protocol and anyone in the fediverse has over activitypub. Still, the first thing that people do is tweak the protocol. The three most successful other products on atproto (tangled, streamplace and roomy) all significantly modify the protocol to fit their own needs, theoretical arguments be damned

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 4 points 8 months ago

ohh indeed some interesting recommendation system in there, thanks!

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 8 months ago

ah great, thats exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

very curious what server you are on? im on a server with 1k active users, so not big by any measure, and manually counted the federated timeline just now, and it shows at least 50 new posts per minute. like how do you even use that? do you just watch it until an interesting account pops up on there? im very confused by this idea of using federated timeline to find people

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

i think the main takeaway is that the fediverse has hugely overindexed on relays being this big huge centralising force in the atproto network. And thats simply not true at all. The flipside of that is that relays also dont really matter much either. All they do is simply aggregating from a distributed network of data storage into a single firehose. Its really cool that you can do that for super cheap. but its also just a small part of the entire network architecture. like, atproto relays are not CDNs, for example, and video CDNs are expensive to run.

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 10 months ago (5 children)

because hosting a full-network relay is super cheap, including bandwidth. there are multiple people who are running full-network relays (monitoring and relaying everything from every PDS) for less than 30USD per month

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/

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