wisdomchicken

joined 2 years ago
[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 4 days 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

 

On Discourse and Decentralisation

The Community Group for #ActivityPub is drafting an open letter calling for respect and collaboration between the people working on the different protocols in the open social web.

I'm signing the letter, and with it, I have some thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why I think this space matters.

 

this week's #fediverse news:

  • Government of Nepal shuts down virtually all social media over the weekend, including Mastodon
  • An open letter calling for a cooling down of discourse and increased respect regarding debates between #activitypub and #atproto about decentralisation
  • the a.gup.pe system, which added group support for microblogging, shuts down after the domain hijacked.
 
  • Next Sosyal is a new social media platform with close ties to the Turkish ruling party, that is based on Mastodon but does not federate
  • A shuffle in the places, forums and sites to talk about #activitypub, with new owners for forum SocialHub, the activitypub.rocks website now managed by the W3C SocialCG, and the new activitypub.space forum
[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks 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

 

a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks

 

This week's #fediverse news - Fediverse Report #131

  • How age verification laws impact the fediverse, both how we understand the network as well as the impact on server admins
  • CrowdBucks is a new crowdfunding platform for the fediverse
  • Google's Play Store requirements for clients result in @apps creating different versions for their app on FDroid
 
  • The SocialHub ActivityPub forum might shut down: the current admin is looking for another team to take over the operation, and it is currently unclear if this will happen
  • Meta is likely scraping many fediverse servers, a leaked document alleges
  • Mastodon is working on adding Starter Packs
 
  • Ghost has officially launched their fediverse integration for all users with Ghost 6.0
  • @fedicon happened this week!
  • A follow-up to last week's overview of fediverse clients, with some more interesting clients to pay attention to
[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago

ohh indeed some interesting recommendation system in there, thanks!

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

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

 

An overview of the fediverse clients I'm paying the most attention to.

For the Threadiverse readers, I'd love to hear more about what I've missed for threadiverse clients. Ill admit that I've paid less attention to those, so tell me what I've missed!

 
  • Music sharing platform Bandwagon adds the ability for artists to sell albums, create paid channels for exclusive content, and announces upcoming premium subscription tier for artists
  • @Bonfire Social is getting close to release, and team already working on other features as well
  • some good articles on what its like to be a moderator, and the impact of LLMs on small communities on the fediverse
 
  • Mastodon's 4.4 update brings more customisation, as well as the option to set referral headers to show that people indeed click on links
  • Continued uncertainty around the UK's Online Safety Act, with Mastodon.social saying they "are still aligning on a way forward for people in the UK"
  • new features and updates for PieFed
  • fedicon will be August 1-2 in Vancouver!
 

Communities on alternative social media platforms like the fediverse and Bluesky tend to create narratives about how their networks grow. For both networks the narrative is fairly similar: Big Tech platforms and their leaders behave badly, which in turn causes users to search for more ethical alternatives. This narrative is visible in the fediverse’s understanding of the 2022 Twitter Migration and Bluesky’s explosive growth in 2024. But what happens when these migration waves disappear, even though the conditions for them do not? Musk’s continuous egregious actions have not led to new growth for the fediverse and Bluesky, indicating that our narratives of growth need updating. Meanwhile, the continuous growth of Threads shows that cultural impact might just matter more than user counts.

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 2 points 2 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 3 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 3 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/

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Loops is not open source lmao, its just Dansup promising that he'll opensource it in an eventual future.

Saying "this platform is not actually open because the people running it are bad, come to these actually open platforms", and then proceed to list a closed-source platform is incredibly funny

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I've seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month

https://bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/post/3lfdtegyzs22i

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

do you have a link by any change to where the dev is saying that? it seems very likely considering the lack of activity, but cant find anything on his profile or blog

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

PieFed represent! Highly recommended, the 'Topics' feature that aggregates multiple community is super valuable to me

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