So not fully familiar with Mastodon, are they basically saying, they will add a new NextCloud feature, which lets you turn your NextCloud server into just another Mastodon server. Which means you can join the Mastodon uh... 'universe' and your tweets would be under `youruser@yournextcloud.example.com` ?
I assume some kind of public presence would be required though, since a NextCloud server can run on an internal only space.
The protocol that allows to federate is called "Activity Pub". Mastodon is just an implementation of it that looks like twitter, similar like how peertube is an implementation that competes with youtube. And this NextCloud Social is another implementation of Activity Pub
Think of it exactly the same way as email. You have different servers with users on them, and they can all talk to each other using a common protocol called ActivityPub.
The really interesting part of all this is that different types of platforms can focus on different kinds of content while allowing users to talk across platforms. For example, Pixelfed is an Instagram clone, PeerTube aims to be a distributed YouTube, Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone, and so on.
Thanks to using a common protocol it's possible for users across these platforms to communicate with each other. It's possible to follow content, reshare it, leave comments, etc. So, instead of having a bunch of walled gardens you have an actual ecosystem of different platforms.
And I think that open source and non profit hosting is fundamental for this model to work. Commercial social media platforms have an incentive to prevent users from sharing content to other platforms because they're locked into a zero sum competition for users with them.
On the other hand, Fediverse is a positive sum game where more users on the network means more content for everybody. There is no incentive to keep users locked in on your particular platform.
This is a huge advantage from user perspective because you don't have to juggle a bunch of accounts on different social media sites just to follow content there.
> Thanks to using a common protocol it's possible for users across these platforms to communicate with each other. It's possible to follow content, reshare it, leave comments, etc. So, instead of having a bunch of walled gardens you have an actual ecosystem of different platforms.
I can understand why you believe this, because it's part of the ActivityPub marketing, but it simply isn't true. ActivityPub is extremely loosely defined, and the protocol it builds on, ActivityStreams, places no limitations on the type of data that is transferred.
What this means is that in practice you can only federate with other instances of the same software as your homeserver without degradation. It's very hit or miss. The best cross implementation communication comes between Mastodon and Pleroma, but Mastodon is more popular and implements a number of other protocols in addition to ActivityPub, so to keep up Pleroma actually matches their API, not the protocol.
The other implementations that you mentioned mostly federate among themselves.
Sadly this undoes many of the benefits you've listed. You do very much need a Lemmy server account, a Pixelfed server account, a Mastodon account, etc, if you want everything. And you have to pick a homeserver each time, and it isn't easy.
>I can understand why you believe this, because it's part of the ActivityPub marketing, but it simply isn't true. ActivityPub is extremely loosely defined, and the protocol it builds on, ActivityStreams, places no limitations on the type of data that is transferred.
I'm literally using ActivityPug this way right now. I follow Pixelfed and PeerTube accounts as well as Lemmy feeds using my Mastodon account right now. The developers of all these platforms are actively ensuring that they are interoperable.
I really have no idea what you're basing your claims on here. You can use your Mastodon account right now to follow my Pixelfed @yogthos@pixelfed.social and subscribe to my feed. You can even leave comments and I'll see them on my Pixelfed.
ActivityPub can in theory only federate with a whitelist of servers or remain entirely closed off. You don't need to make your account public, but I don't see the advantage of using ActivityPub if you're going to stay private.
Your activity would be posted under @username@nextcloudserver.com, yes. I believe Nextcloud has had ActivityPub features for collaboration for a while now, I suppose building in a social network interface is just the next step.
You can argue about about the exact contours of different markets if you like, but they're quite obviously pointing to FB and Twitter being controlled by two tech billionaires.
What "hatefulness", exactly? They're stating a fact. Many people take issue with individuals with mercurial opinions having that much control over everyone else's communication.
> Social media is for losers.
Thanks for sharing all the opinions. On a message board.
Frank Karlitschek also tweeted just two weeks ago: "Elon Musk just axed key Twitter teams. Sure. Who needs human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation. "
Not sure I fully understand the synthesis of "communication is too important to be controlled" and "firing the teams that controlled communication is bad".
Too important to be controlled by few. The guidance of teams with expertise in human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation (though I'm iffy on that one) is better than the whim of a rich egomaniac.
It's also arguable that having a billionaire who's put $44 billion of his money into a platform - under the public position of supporting freedom of speech, and being a good steward, governor of so - is a good ally to have, who will put whatever resources and time he can into securing Twitter as a platform (on top of the internet, that is more or less free depending on the country) for information to flow relatively freely without any one government (the majority of politicians often captured by one or more for-profit industrial complexes, rather than funded and influenced by their constituents - their country's population) influencing what narratives (whether true or not) are acceptable and which aren't.
History will show most recently that pharmaceutical industrial complex captured the U.S. government and health institutions, along with MSM-legacy media, including influencing/manipulating what narratives/talking points were allowed to flow on Twitter/Facebook et al.
Only if you naively believe that Musk's definition of "freedom of speech" has anything to with the concept of freedom of speech.
Much more likely, he is referring to the same concept that many right-wing pundits use, that essentially means "freedom to say bigoted things, preferably at the people you hate, while also being outraged at what others are allowed to say". You'll find many people who decry the decline of freedom of speech online, and who are then outraged that two male characters in a Disney movie kissed, or who will ban children's books that present two female bears as lovers.
Or, to bring this closer to Musk, he will happily ban anyone who dares to question him.
So is what you're saying is your concept of freedom of speech is the correct version?
You've also not backed up anything as to support your "much more likely" claim.
Are people not allowed to be upset if a brand starts introducing content they don't want their children to be exposed to, whether you agree with that or not? They had a certain expectation or assumption, based on history, of a certain governance - and then that relatively quickly changed. I'm not saying it's rational, but they're trying to warn their herd of like-minded people - whether it is cultural or religious groups - that don't believe it is either healthy or safe to expose highly impressionable, easily manipulated minds, at such a young age - say before they develop critical thinking and enough of an identity on their own without undue external influence.
Do you support influencing, manipulation, of children and young teenagers towards permanently physically altering their body - like cutting off their breasts?
Elon so far only ban people who: 1) impersonated him without stating they are a parody account (Kathy Griffin was reinstated along with Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee yesterday), or 2) who broke company policy - arguably by publicly stating their qualm of him rather than directly going to him to try to settle it privately.
Perhaps your argument or stance is that he, as the lead, should continue to employ those who don't fall enough in-line, aligned enough with his order - his orders of how and where to steer the private ship called Twitter? That sounds like a very poorly operating ship that certainly would sink to a ship who's crew listen to a competent captain that they trust enough to work for; this isn't a situation where the employees at Twitter are employed there because of no other options - so can't argue for exploitation or abuse - undue stress.
Perhaps your level of distaste for Elon, perhaps it's envy, is that you're misinterpreting the situation as him dictating what's allowed on the neutral platform called the internet?
Thankfully, thank God, at least for now - and with much higher odds now that Elon owns Twitter, along with his Starlink constellation - the U.S. is a place that people can still communicate - even though there is a trend toward government with fascist policies to control information and the narrative. Thankfully anyone who disagrees with Elon - with the relatively free market capitalism in North America - can start their own competing platform to Twitter - assuming they are competent and sophisticated enough to have or garner the resources, including people necessary to rally, to support such an effort.
> So is what you're saying is your concept of freedom of speech is the correct version? You've also not backed up anything as to support your "much more likely" claim.
First of all, Elon has always said that he intends to practice "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach" - which he explains to mean "we won't ban your account, we will just stop showing your tweets to everyone if it's not the right kind of speech". So already this idea that he believes in absolute freedom of speech is obviously wrong.
Secondly, he has a long history of seeking to silence his critics. Firing employees that publicly contradict him is mostly understandable; but accusing the rescue diver that said his ideas were stupid of pedophilia, and hiring PIs to try to "prove" it, is certainly not.
Thirdly, freedom of speech is a relatively simple idea - it means that you believe people should be free to make their opinions known without being silenced or unduly punished for opinions. There are various complex issues related to the details of what it means to silence or unduly punish, and to cases where the freedom of speech of two individuals can come in conflict. But it is very clear that someone who supports freedom to express certain legal opinions and NOT other legal opinions is not in fact advocating for freedom of speech.
> Are people not allowed to be upset if a brand starts introducing content they don't want their children to be exposed to, whether you agree with that or not?
They are allowed, but they are not allowed to then also claim that they are pro free speech.
> Do you support influencing, manipulation, of children and young teenagers towards permanently physically altering their body - like cutting off their breasts?
No, and neither does anyone else beyond some demented extremists. I do support children and teenagers getting access to medicine that allows them to live the best life they can, and if their doctor and parents agree that involves puberty blockers, I support them having access to that.
My point was that Elon's notion of separating "freedom of speech" from "freedom of reach" is already counter to the basic ideal of freedom of speech. By this same standard, the US government could claim that a law preventing sales of a particular book would not put them in breach of the 1st amendment, as they are still allowing the book to exist.
You're conflating the government with a private citizen's private enterprise. The U.S. government can't block the sale of a book AFAIK - unless perhaps it's things like "how to build a nuclear bomb."
Elon's Twitter is his house - his house, his rules. If someone's going to be racist in his house and he doesn't want racist/immature narratives being propagated - then he has the power to limit that; we don't know what limiting the reach means either, perhaps depending on the severity it means that only your specific followers see it - and that it isn't shown to random people.
Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. If you think that the US government isn't legally allowed to limit speech in a certain way because of the 1st amendment, than any private entity who is limitting speech in that way can't claim they support free speech.
Of course, private entities, unlike the government, have every right to limit freedom of speech on their own property. But they can't then claim they are supporters of freedom of speech on their platform.
>I'd rather not use any of these apps, not twitter, not mastodon, none of it. Social media is for losers.
Part of the difficulty is that, if you include reading social media as using it, it can actually be quite difficult to avoid, particularly in the case of Twitter and the public sector in a number of countries. For some reason, many politicians and public services have chosen to use Twitter as their primary, if not only, method for official public announcements, especially ones that are quotidian but relevant, like unexpected service delays and changes. In many cases, not reading Twitter means not getting information that you may need. This is unacceptable, especially when Twitter has required logins to read tweets. It's also something that is entirely the fault of the agencies and politicians who make this choice and the governments that allow it, rather than Twitter or Musk. But it is the current situation.
As a practical example: there are a number of train and public transport services that appear, in practice, to announce most unexpected delays primarily on Twitter, no longer even bothering to update their status displays in train stations or their own apps and websites. These are major rail services in developed countries. My reluctance to check Twitter has resulted, in just the last three weeks, in at least two instances where I went to a train station in Dublin, and to a platform listing a train as departing on time, for a train that, had I checked Irish Rail's official Twitter account, I would have known in advance was not going to be departing at all. Had I checked Twitter (or at least a Nitter instance), I could have taken an alternate route to begin with. On Amtrak in California, it appears that official Amtrak Twitter accounts will give information on service delays that is not being provided to station staff. Meanwhile, in the UK, it appears that, in practice, most announcements by politicians are made primarily via Twitter, then elsewhere.
This has, in the past, also been the case with many businesses and Facebook, where Facebook may be their only online presence, even for basic contact information and hours, but it matters significantly more for the public sector, where one doesn't necessarily have a choice in what services to use.
I honestly wonder if these various social networks / Twitter clones are solutions in search of a problem. Do most people really care to comunícate with each other in this manner any more? What’s the point?
It seems to me (anecdotal, so I’m interested in your views) that the use-case for reasoned argument has moved to podcasts and substack and the use-case for group comms has moved to discord. Meanwhile, feed-style networks, which were always junk food disguised as nutrition, have been displaced by TikTok, which is more like digital crack.
I agree in the decentralization mantra (though cryptocurrencies have not been a good public representative of the concept thus far), but this is the exact opposite of what you want to do to attract people to your cause.
"What are you doing here, believing in centralization, on a centralized news site?"
I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.
Twitter links out to content all the time - is that decentralized? Where's the line?
- It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc)
- It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point)
- Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized)
- It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns
Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.
HN isn't just links. It's also discussion threads.
It is centralized in that these links and discussions don't happen in some abstract cloud that's not strictly limited to this instance managed by our BDFL
Right, I mean more that it’s not actively trying to keep people on-site by eg hosting the content, it’s a jumping off point to the rest of the decentralized internet. But it’s not a federated service, its hosting is centralized. Two different aspects of centralization.
Aside from pushing the boundaries of the posting guidelines[0], you've perhaps inadvertently raised an important point.
OP's post is an observation of the real world: the inter-related evolution of technology and humanity's use of it. That use isn't primarily driven by system architecture. It's sociological, commercial, political, emotional.
The conception of the fediverse was itself a sociological and commercial response to social media power being vested in too few commercial entities. The distributed nature of it isn't cost free: there is no single "Mastodon" that everyone signs up to. It remains to be seen whether federation is a net winner, or whether the incremental usability friction prevents large scale adoption.
None of that is first-order technological. The underlying internet may well be federated, and it's eminently possible to create federated services on top of it. Email is perhaps the signiature example. But _just being_ federated is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful adoption. Witness the very centralisation that the fediverse is a response to.
Both social and technological aspects are ultimately intertwined. The way technology works necessarily shapes the way it's used, and users in turn shape the direction that technology evolves in. Fediverse architecture encourages different kind of usage from centralized platforms and it will evolve in a different way based on the direction the users take it in.
One difference we see already is that Mastodon has instances focused on specific topics. There are instances focusing on art, news, tech, functional programming, and so on. Federated approach is showing itself to be much more conducive towards smaller communities focused on niche interests.
Meanwhile, I contest the claim that Fediverse is being centralized. In fact, server admins actively ensure that this doesn't happen by closing registration when too many users end up flooding to a particular instance.
Furthermore, the fact that servers are maintained by volunteers via donations means that there is a limit on how many users each instance can support in terms of cost. Once again, this creates incentives towards further federation to amortize costs.
Finally, the terms of success need to be defined to talk about success in meaningful terms. I would argue that Fediverse is already successful because it has millions of users producing content, it has lots of developers working on the tech powering it, and a sustainable model for running servers.
At this point the Fediverse has shown itself to be sustainable and will be around indefinitely. It will likely outlive every commercial social media platform that's around today.
I like Mastodon. Twitter is a black-hole of influencers and hot-stuff personalities trying to eke out a follower or advertising dime. Mastodon is more focused on enriching interaction (rather than infinite scrolling) and it achieves this with a chronological timeline by-default, with zero random 'recommended' content. It sucks all of the ego-driven nastiness out of the equation and lets you return to a comfortable feed.
For me twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff.
Twitter is my tool to do that. For example I follow a person that once a week write a post like “top 10 things that happened the week in china”. That is as much as I need to know about that. I follow 3-4 person that talk about the war in Ukraine. Sometime they post articles from MSM, sometimes translate stuff from telegram channels, sometimes they debunk some propaganda found online.
I wouldn’t be able to do all of this by myself.
This used to be the job of newspapers but it works only if the newspaper line is the one that you like
> twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff.
I wouldn’t say terrible. In some thing is worse in others much better. For a number of reasons it is easier to find new account to follow, follow them for a while and unfollow if necessary. This makes my twitter account much more “fluid” than goggle reader was, allowing me to keep it more up to date and interesting.
On the other side, twitter ha much more noise that you have to learn to ignore
I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed.
When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play.
You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time.
There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way.
In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy.
It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.
Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their halves of conversations they were having on Twitter.
Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up.
And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u".
Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.
Fair enough, and I’m glad you’re getting value out of the experience. But I’m talking about the broader culture. Where is it, and where is it going? It seems to me like it’s moved on, and that the things you like about Mastodon are niche. To put it another way, it seems like a lot of the energy being poured into decentralized alternatives are focused on the past.
How big will his market be? I theorize it will be the same population whom moved to Canada back when Trump was elected. Maybe smaller because of network effects.
I think you’re right that the market for this is probably pretty small. But more so because these federated solutions won’t replicate the addictiveness and vitality of Twitter.
I think the big thing that’s missing when comparing people leaving Twitter to people who said they’d move to Canada is switching costs. Like it is a heavy lift to move countries, much less so to stop using one platform and start using another.
I deactivated and deleted Twitter last week and added it to my filter list in ublock. Most of the accounts I was following already have a Mastodon presence, though YMMV depending on your personal interests.
> Communication is too important and sensitive to be controlled by a few.
Wasn't it controlled by a few even before Musk decided to buy it? Where I live, the supreme court controls all the content and user accounts from all major social networks, Twitter included. It takes literally 5 minutes to a single judge to suspend or cancel any user account and its contents.
- it's pretty much the absolute minimum you need on top of TCP to implement a chat, so extremely lightweight and a server can literally handle 10s of thousands of users
- anyone joins any server they want
- decentralized
- works over dial up
- mature ecosystem
- decades of time to work out kinks and issues
- 7000 engineers? I can set up a server in about an hour.
Has drawbacks but just saying, the future is in the past.
Exactly. And seeming different has a huge impact on how people interact with it. Behavioral response is one category where perception matters most. I don't see how Musk loses the chaos monger robber baron perception. He literally bought it.
It seems Mastodon and NextCloud don't seem to understand is that the only people still using Twitter are people who want to be outraged, and people who want to be outraged but claim they only follow people tailored to their interests ("I only follow tech people!")
On the contrary, the people I've recently seen leave Twitter were all waiting for the network effect to lessen. Switching communication stacks suck, especially if not everyone you want to follow is on your new stack.
I've set up my own BirdsiteLive instance that only my own Mastodon server can access, but it's slowly seeing less and less activity as people switch over to Mastodon or something I can't bridge.
Plenty of people are going to keep Twitter as their cesspool, but it'll be a while before everyone who wants to switch has switched. Musk's behaviour and the following downward trend for Twitter is still recent news, it's only been a few weeks.
There's still plenty of left-wing tech people on Twitter, althought they recently created their Mastodon account. I think they're waiting for the final nail in the coffin (a big outage ?), which may or may not come. And I'm on Twitter to follow them. Outrage is mainly not part of my feed unless those same tech people start ranting on Musk or what have you.
We've been told for ages, implicitly by FAANG algos and explicitly by people who misread research, that we prefer to be outraged.
Very Online (TM) people with large Twitter followings like Marcus Hutchins are coming to realise that it made Twitter a compulsion, and given an alternative are willing to ditch the Skinner button [0].
Compulsion and addiction is different from desire or pleasure. When we're offered meaningful alternatives, people often find more peace and happiness when they adopt them.
Since this is HN, if you have your own domain you should give the fediverse a try.
Try to set up an instance of mastodon, you don't need that much hardware if you are only setting it up for yourself. The official documentation is straightforward and easy to follow along.
The fun part is once you set it up you can interact with other people on other nodes, the more people you discover the more things you suddenly start to discover, I was trying this out for the past few days and honestly it feels like discovering the web for the first time. So many interesting people so many interesting topics.
They're just dredging up old beef for some reason. Very, very early on Pleroma was popular with people who found the general anti-fascist stance of early Mastodon instances offensive and chose Pleroma, so it kind of became The Fascist Platform for a time until a wider range of people chose it for its lighter resource use. That post is from 2019. The poster later worked on Pleroma for a while, so it's safe to say things changed. Three years is a long time.
I did the same and am pretty happy with the end result, but be warned: the official guide requires you to install a full Ruby dev kit to run an instance, with Docker being available but poorly documented (as configuration requires running separate commands rather than just writing a file).
It's not hard, but if you're like me and you don't like polluting your server system with all kinds of dev tools in the global space, you may need somewhat of an understanding of Docker to get everything running smoothly.
One thing to note is that if you're going to be the only one using your server, you may want to enable single user mode. It's a mode for the Mastodon frontend that's optimized for deployments with a single user account.
For those considering the switch, I also recommend checking out https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive and setting up an instance. With your Twitter account you can register for an API key and then mirror all the Twitter users that aren't on the Fediverse yet! It's unidirectional but as most Twitter users seem rather passive anyway, this can make the transition rather easy.
To prevent others from using your keys and quota, you can safely limit ingress to BirdSiteLive to only your Mastodon server. You end up with proxied tweets only visible to users of your server.
I wished facebook death in 2014. It didn't happen, all my friends are still there. I don't want to socially isolate myself more, it's peaceful but at a significant cost. I become pessimistic about bad things will disappear.
Since this i s HN, I can be this boomer and say: We survived with blogs, forums and IRC. Without a problem.
Dear, friends, your "convenience" and "dopamine" habits created monopolies which normalized surveillance to the point of no return, and literally are giving away data and your future to the algorithm overlords.
The results of this immature behavior are the pillar on which WEF and other billionaires are building "the fourth industrial revolution" where you will have literally zero value in the production chain, you will eat whatever they tell you and play it "safe" in the name of your "positive" social score.
So I say it again: Find the way to decentralize, create new habits, throw away your phones and fancy toys and start working for humanity and against the dark patterns of today's pharaohs.
Outside the tech bubble, the real world is waiting patiently and asking for your help. Transhumanism is not the future of humankind.
As an existing NextCloud user, with plenty of personal data in my self hosted instance, this does absolutely NOTHING to inform me why the FLYING FUCK i want to risk exposing my NextCloud to the internet with these new social media related features, no discussion of how important security is, no emphasis on how I can trust NextCloud with being a public web accessible server the public can access and simultaneously trust my most personal of self hosted data to the same server.
I want things like this to help people control their own data, it’s important for these projects to exist lest the future be ruled by or entirely dependent on big corporations… but when your existing business is building the tool(s) I trust with the data I trust no one else with… do a fucking better job not making me dismiss shit like this as “crap I’d have to run a second server to be able to use”
Because my life is busy enough I barely have the time to manage my one self hosted NextCloud at home… if you make this one micron harder I’m just going to say “Fuck it“ and use a different isolated tool for running my own fediverse server. And I say this as someone building my own personal social site aggregator based tool. Do. Not. Make. It. Hard. To. Trust. You.
I agree this feature isn't really wished by the userbase, and they could spend development resources better, but like everything in Nextcloud this will be just an app that you can disable with a click, so no reason to rage about it.
Nobody is telling you to make your server public. Configure it the way you want. Naturally you won't be able to use features like this if you don't make it publicly accessible.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadI assume some kind of public presence would be required though, since a NextCloud server can run on an internal only space.
The really interesting part of all this is that different types of platforms can focus on different kinds of content while allowing users to talk across platforms. For example, Pixelfed is an Instagram clone, PeerTube aims to be a distributed YouTube, Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone, and so on.
Thanks to using a common protocol it's possible for users across these platforms to communicate with each other. It's possible to follow content, reshare it, leave comments, etc. So, instead of having a bunch of walled gardens you have an actual ecosystem of different platforms.
And I think that open source and non profit hosting is fundamental for this model to work. Commercial social media platforms have an incentive to prevent users from sharing content to other platforms because they're locked into a zero sum competition for users with them.
On the other hand, Fediverse is a positive sum game where more users on the network means more content for everybody. There is no incentive to keep users locked in on your particular platform.
This is a huge advantage from user perspective because you don't have to juggle a bunch of accounts on different social media sites just to follow content there.
I can understand why you believe this, because it's part of the ActivityPub marketing, but it simply isn't true. ActivityPub is extremely loosely defined, and the protocol it builds on, ActivityStreams, places no limitations on the type of data that is transferred.
What this means is that in practice you can only federate with other instances of the same software as your homeserver without degradation. It's very hit or miss. The best cross implementation communication comes between Mastodon and Pleroma, but Mastodon is more popular and implements a number of other protocols in addition to ActivityPub, so to keep up Pleroma actually matches their API, not the protocol.
The other implementations that you mentioned mostly federate among themselves.
Sadly this undoes many of the benefits you've listed. You do very much need a Lemmy server account, a Pixelfed server account, a Mastodon account, etc, if you want everything. And you have to pick a homeserver each time, and it isn't easy.
I'm literally using ActivityPug this way right now. I follow Pixelfed and PeerTube accounts as well as Lemmy feeds using my Mastodon account right now. The developers of all these platforms are actively ensuring that they are interoperable.
I really have no idea what you're basing your claims on here. You can use your Mastodon account right now to follow my Pixelfed @yogthos@pixelfed.social and subscribe to my feed. You can even leave comments and I'll see them on my Pixelfed.
Your activity would be posted under @username@nextcloudserver.com, yes. I believe Nextcloud has had ActivityPub features for collaboration for a while now, I suppose building in a social network interface is just the next step.
You can argue about about the exact contours of different markets if you like, but they're quite obviously pointing to FB and Twitter being controlled by two tech billionaires.
What "hatefulness", exactly? They're stating a fact. Many people take issue with individuals with mercurial opinions having that much control over everyone else's communication.
> Social media is for losers.
Thanks for sharing all the opinions. On a message board.
It is for users*. It has a lot of issues, but it has its use cases.
Before you judge the post's tone, watch yours, and stop generalizing all social media users as losers.
Not sure I fully understand the synthesis of "communication is too important to be controlled" and "firing the teams that controlled communication is bad".
https://twitter.com/fkarlitschek/status/1588865171900203008
History will show most recently that pharmaceutical industrial complex captured the U.S. government and health institutions, along with MSM-legacy media, including influencing/manipulating what narratives/talking points were allowed to flow on Twitter/Facebook et al.
Much more likely, he is referring to the same concept that many right-wing pundits use, that essentially means "freedom to say bigoted things, preferably at the people you hate, while also being outraged at what others are allowed to say". You'll find many people who decry the decline of freedom of speech online, and who are then outraged that two male characters in a Disney movie kissed, or who will ban children's books that present two female bears as lovers.
Or, to bring this closer to Musk, he will happily ban anyone who dares to question him.
You've also not backed up anything as to support your "much more likely" claim.
Are people not allowed to be upset if a brand starts introducing content they don't want their children to be exposed to, whether you agree with that or not? They had a certain expectation or assumption, based on history, of a certain governance - and then that relatively quickly changed. I'm not saying it's rational, but they're trying to warn their herd of like-minded people - whether it is cultural or religious groups - that don't believe it is either healthy or safe to expose highly impressionable, easily manipulated minds, at such a young age - say before they develop critical thinking and enough of an identity on their own without undue external influence.
Do you support influencing, manipulation, of children and young teenagers towards permanently physically altering their body - like cutting off their breasts?
Elon so far only ban people who: 1) impersonated him without stating they are a parody account (Kathy Griffin was reinstated along with Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee yesterday), or 2) who broke company policy - arguably by publicly stating their qualm of him rather than directly going to him to try to settle it privately.
Perhaps your argument or stance is that he, as the lead, should continue to employ those who don't fall enough in-line, aligned enough with his order - his orders of how and where to steer the private ship called Twitter? That sounds like a very poorly operating ship that certainly would sink to a ship who's crew listen to a competent captain that they trust enough to work for; this isn't a situation where the employees at Twitter are employed there because of no other options - so can't argue for exploitation or abuse - undue stress.
Perhaps your level of distaste for Elon, perhaps it's envy, is that you're misinterpreting the situation as him dictating what's allowed on the neutral platform called the internet?
Thankfully, thank God, at least for now - and with much higher odds now that Elon owns Twitter, along with his Starlink constellation - the U.S. is a place that people can still communicate - even though there is a trend toward government with fascist policies to control information and the narrative. Thankfully anyone who disagrees with Elon - with the relatively free market capitalism in North America - can start their own competing platform to Twitter - assuming they are competent and sophisticated enough to have or garner the resources, including people necessary to rally, to support such an effort.
First of all, Elon has always said that he intends to practice "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach" - which he explains to mean "we won't ban your account, we will just stop showing your tweets to everyone if it's not the right kind of speech". So already this idea that he believes in absolute freedom of speech is obviously wrong.
Secondly, he has a long history of seeking to silence his critics. Firing employees that publicly contradict him is mostly understandable; but accusing the rescue diver that said his ideas were stupid of pedophilia, and hiring PIs to try to "prove" it, is certainly not.
Thirdly, freedom of speech is a relatively simple idea - it means that you believe people should be free to make their opinions known without being silenced or unduly punished for opinions. There are various complex issues related to the details of what it means to silence or unduly punish, and to cases where the freedom of speech of two individuals can come in conflict. But it is very clear that someone who supports freedom to express certain legal opinions and NOT other legal opinions is not in fact advocating for freedom of speech.
> Are people not allowed to be upset if a brand starts introducing content they don't want their children to be exposed to, whether you agree with that or not?
They are allowed, but they are not allowed to then also claim that they are pro free speech.
> Do you support influencing, manipulation, of children and young teenagers towards permanently physically altering their body - like cutting off their breasts?
No, and neither does anyone else beyond some demented extremists. I do support children and teenagers getting access to medicine that allows them to live the best life they can, and if their doctor and parents agree that involves puberty blockers, I support them having access to that.
First sentence and you already moved goalpost.
Elon's Twitter is his house - his house, his rules. If someone's going to be racist in his house and he doesn't want racist/immature narratives being propagated - then he has the power to limit that; we don't know what limiting the reach means either, perhaps depending on the severity it means that only your specific followers see it - and that it isn't shown to random people.
Of course, private entities, unlike the government, have every right to limit freedom of speech on their own property. But they can't then claim they are supporters of freedom of speech on their platform.
Part of the difficulty is that, if you include reading social media as using it, it can actually be quite difficult to avoid, particularly in the case of Twitter and the public sector in a number of countries. For some reason, many politicians and public services have chosen to use Twitter as their primary, if not only, method for official public announcements, especially ones that are quotidian but relevant, like unexpected service delays and changes. In many cases, not reading Twitter means not getting information that you may need. This is unacceptable, especially when Twitter has required logins to read tweets. It's also something that is entirely the fault of the agencies and politicians who make this choice and the governments that allow it, rather than Twitter or Musk. But it is the current situation.
As a practical example: there are a number of train and public transport services that appear, in practice, to announce most unexpected delays primarily on Twitter, no longer even bothering to update their status displays in train stations or their own apps and websites. These are major rail services in developed countries. My reluctance to check Twitter has resulted, in just the last three weeks, in at least two instances where I went to a train station in Dublin, and to a platform listing a train as departing on time, for a train that, had I checked Irish Rail's official Twitter account, I would have known in advance was not going to be departing at all. Had I checked Twitter (or at least a Nitter instance), I could have taken an alternate route to begin with. On Amtrak in California, it appears that official Amtrak Twitter accounts will give information on service delays that is not being provided to station staff. Meanwhile, in the UK, it appears that, in practice, most announcements by politicians are made primarily via Twitter, then elsewhere.
This has, in the past, also been the case with many businesses and Facebook, where Facebook may be their only online presence, even for basic contact information and hours, but it matters significantly more for the public sector, where one doesn't necessarily have a choice in what services to use.
It seems to me (anecdotal, so I’m interested in your views) that the use-case for reasoned argument has moved to podcasts and substack and the use-case for group comms has moved to discord. Meanwhile, feed-style networks, which were always junk food disguised as nutrition, have been displaced by TikTok, which is more like digital crack.
"What are you doing here, believing in centralization, on a centralized news site?"
- It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc)
- It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point)
- Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized)
- It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns
Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.
OP's post is an observation of the real world: the inter-related evolution of technology and humanity's use of it. That use isn't primarily driven by system architecture. It's sociological, commercial, political, emotional.
The conception of the fediverse was itself a sociological and commercial response to social media power being vested in too few commercial entities. The distributed nature of it isn't cost free: there is no single "Mastodon" that everyone signs up to. It remains to be seen whether federation is a net winner, or whether the incremental usability friction prevents large scale adoption.
None of that is first-order technological. The underlying internet may well be federated, and it's eminently possible to create federated services on top of it. Email is perhaps the signiature example. But _just being_ federated is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful adoption. Witness the very centralisation that the fediverse is a response to.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One difference we see already is that Mastodon has instances focused on specific topics. There are instances focusing on art, news, tech, functional programming, and so on. Federated approach is showing itself to be much more conducive towards smaller communities focused on niche interests.
Meanwhile, I contest the claim that Fediverse is being centralized. In fact, server admins actively ensure that this doesn't happen by closing registration when too many users end up flooding to a particular instance.
Furthermore, the fact that servers are maintained by volunteers via donations means that there is a limit on how many users each instance can support in terms of cost. Once again, this creates incentives towards further federation to amortize costs.
Finally, the terms of success need to be defined to talk about success in meaningful terms. I would argue that Fediverse is already successful because it has millions of users producing content, it has lots of developers working on the tech powering it, and a sustainable model for running servers.
At this point the Fediverse has shown itself to be sustainable and will be around indefinitely. It will likely outlive every commercial social media platform that's around today.
Twitter is my tool to do that. For example I follow a person that once a week write a post like “top 10 things that happened the week in china”. That is as much as I need to know about that. I follow 3-4 person that talk about the war in Ukraine. Sometime they post articles from MSM, sometimes translate stuff from telegram channels, sometimes they debunk some propaganda found online.
I wouldn’t be able to do all of this by myself.
This used to be the job of newspapers but it works only if the newspaper line is the one that you like
It's a terrible substitute for Google Reader.
On the other side, twitter ha much more noise that you have to learn to ignore
When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play.
You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time.
There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way.
In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy.
It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.
Researchers, CEOs, diplomats and some people with relevant information basically emit relevant information.
That's quite a different use case then most that are offered.
Twitter is not a P2P thing, it's a 1-N thing and many of those '1s' need the blue checkmark.
In order for another network to gain value, they need to bring over a critical mass of popular voices.
Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up.
And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u".
Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.
I think the big thing that’s missing when comparing people leaving Twitter to people who said they’d move to Canada is switching costs. Like it is a heavy lift to move countries, much less so to stop using one platform and start using another.
Wasn't it controlled by a few even before Musk decided to buy it? Where I live, the supreme court controls all the content and user accounts from all major social networks, Twitter included. It takes literally 5 minutes to a single judge to suspend or cancel any user account and its contents.
- anyone could spin up a server
- servers can link together, scalable
- it's pretty much the absolute minimum you need on top of TCP to implement a chat, so extremely lightweight and a server can literally handle 10s of thousands of users
- anyone joins any server they want
- decentralized
- works over dial up
- mature ecosystem
- decades of time to work out kinks and issues
- 7000 engineers? I can set up a server in about an hour.
Has drawbacks but just saying, the future is in the past.
Where on earth do you live?
I've set up my own BirdsiteLive instance that only my own Mastodon server can access, but it's slowly seeing less and less activity as people switch over to Mastodon or something I can't bridge.
Plenty of people are going to keep Twitter as their cesspool, but it'll be a while before everyone who wants to switch has switched. Musk's behaviour and the following downward trend for Twitter is still recent news, it's only been a few weeks.
Very Online (TM) people with large Twitter followings like Marcus Hutchins are coming to realise that it made Twitter a compulsion, and given an alternative are willing to ditch the Skinner button [0].
Compulsion and addiction is different from desire or pleasure. When we're offered meaningful alternatives, people often find more peace and happiness when they adopt them.
[0] https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/109368403091846997
Try to set up an instance of mastodon, you don't need that much hardware if you are only setting it up for yourself. The official documentation is straightforward and easy to follow along.
The fun part is once you set it up you can interact with other people on other nodes, the more people you discover the more things you suddenly start to discover, I was trying this out for the past few days and honestly it feels like discovering the web for the first time. So many interesting people so many interesting topics.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708
It's not hard, but if you're like me and you don't like polluting your server system with all kinds of dev tools in the global space, you may need somewhat of an understanding of Docker to get everything running smoothly.
One thing to note is that if you're going to be the only one using your server, you may want to enable single user mode. It's a mode for the Mastodon frontend that's optimized for deployments with a single user account.
For those considering the switch, I also recommend checking out https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive and setting up an instance. With your Twitter account you can register for an API key and then mirror all the Twitter users that aren't on the Fediverse yet! It's unidirectional but as most Twitter users seem rather passive anyway, this can make the transition rather easy.
To prevent others from using your keys and quota, you can safely limit ingress to BirdSiteLive to only your Mastodon server. You end up with proxied tweets only visible to users of your server.
Dear, friends, your "convenience" and "dopamine" habits created monopolies which normalized surveillance to the point of no return, and literally are giving away data and your future to the algorithm overlords.
The results of this immature behavior are the pillar on which WEF and other billionaires are building "the fourth industrial revolution" where you will have literally zero value in the production chain, you will eat whatever they tell you and play it "safe" in the name of your "positive" social score.
So I say it again: Find the way to decentralize, create new habits, throw away your phones and fancy toys and start working for humanity and against the dark patterns of today's pharaohs.
Outside the tech bubble, the real world is waiting patiently and asking for your help. Transhumanism is not the future of humankind.
I want things like this to help people control their own data, it’s important for these projects to exist lest the future be ruled by or entirely dependent on big corporations… but when your existing business is building the tool(s) I trust with the data I trust no one else with… do a fucking better job not making me dismiss shit like this as “crap I’d have to run a second server to be able to use”
Because my life is busy enough I barely have the time to manage my one self hosted NextCloud at home… if you make this one micron harder I’m just going to say “Fuck it“ and use a different isolated tool for running my own fediverse server. And I say this as someone building my own personal social site aggregator based tool. Do. Not. Make. It. Hard. To. Trust. You.