"Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy"
If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.
Relevant to this, I came across this excellent resource for helping people get onto Mastodon and find their community.
I am curious to find someone more knowledgeable than me to dive into the technological implementations of both fediverse and atprotocol infrastructure to understand the longterm prospects for both. My current (ill informed) belief is that fediverse has the better underlying protocol, but Bluesky has the easier onboarding which has given it the short term growth that makes it a more viable longterm option.
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This is a really good idea
This is a really good idea. Ensuring that if the mods somehow fall off an instance in the network, it switches to block new users to avoid being brigaded for spam purposes.
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I had an interesting observation of the Threads -> Mastodon pipeline that is built into Threads yesterday.
Posts on Threads which include hashtags have the octothorpe (#) removed, and are linked to that hashtag's page. Because of this, the octothorpe is missing when viewing a Threads post via Mastodon, meaning a "#programming" is simply included in the post as "programming" with no sign it was a hashtag.
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Hachyderm's server report says there are 36,143 peer instances for it on the Mastodon network. My blog runs a cron job which pings instances.social for the top 1000 instances by active users. I then capture any new ones from that list and add it to my list. As of tonight, my blog knows 2,417 of the instance domains. This represents just 6.7% of the network by instance quantity, but my estimate is that it is 90+% of the userbase.
This code enables my blog to automatically identify when I link to a post on Mastodon (admittedly, not something I'm doing a great deal of these days.) When it knows the link is for a Mastodon post, it can generate the code for embedding the post directly into the blog, rather than simply linking to it.
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Insight from a meeting with Meta about Threads & the Fediverse
Some interesting insights from a meeting with Meta in December about their plans with Threads and integrating with the Fediverse & Mastodon.
The timeline as outline from the blog entry:
December 2023 – A user will be able to opt in via the Threads app to have their posts visible to Mastodon clients. People would be able to reply and like those posts using their Mastodon clients, but those replies and likes would not be visible within the Threads application. Threads users would not be able to follow or see posts published across Mastodon servers, or reply to them or like then.
Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users
Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application
Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them
TBD – Full blended interoperability between Threads and Mastodon
Later in the entry, the author does note:
I have to tell you based on my limited knowledge at this point I think this roadmap is probably wildly optimistic. But I guess we’ll see.
I did find the write-up interesting and provided some insights into the plans, though there is still much to be seen for what the platform holds and if it will take more active usage in the future.
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Social media is all about moving goal posts
An excellent observation regarding the growth of new social media platforms. The goal posts will continue to move.
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"Mastodon Isn't Just A Replacement For Twitter"
Scalability explains a lot of what seems wrong with social media. Content moderation at scale needs to be semi-automated, which often means applying universal rules without context or nuance. And when abuse, harassment and misinformation drive engagement, the incentive is to address it in a way that doesn't threaten business. Lacking local knowledge in their users' languages and cultures, platform companies have aided political interference and even genocide.
But how can genuine community self-governance work at the scale of a global social network? We believe that it is time to embrace the old idea of subsidiarity, which dates back to early Calvinist theology and Catholic social teaching. The European Union's founding documents use the term, too. It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have the power to address their own problems. Some decisions are made at higher levels, but only when necessary. Subsidiarity is about achieving the right balance between local units and the larger systems.
But the fediverse is not a utopia — it's just software. Though it facilitates community self-governance, it does not guarantee it. Most of the people entering the fediverse right now are flocking to a small number of popular servers. In effect, they are repeating the logic of scalability, except this time without a company in charge able to spend millions of dollars on large-scale moderation. Currently, many servers appear to be run top-down by people who have the technical skills to set them up, but not necessarily with the social and economic capacity to foster and sustain community self-governance and address online harm.
Subsidiarity is not a word I knew previously, definitely going to dig in on it. Below is its relevant Merriam Webster definition, not pulled from the above article.
Subsidiarity - n. - a principle in social organization holding that functions which are performed effectively by subordinate or local organizations belong more properly to them than to a dominant central organization
Edit: I found this evening, the author's own post on Mastodon.
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Del.icio.us Again
I've wanted a social bookmarking tool / solution for a while. And after playing and learning more about Fediverse & ActivityPub, I wonder if perhaps that is the way forward for it (at least partially.) A way to interconnect link blogs and social accounts.
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Behemoth
A few weeks ago, I began thinking about a tool that integrated all my various online feeds. At the time I was thinking about integrating:
- RSS
- Podcasts
- Reminders / Notifications
I've abandoned this idea for primarily two reasons.
- Writing my own RSS reader would be a big task. Thus the project's codename 'Behemoth.' Dave Winer's concept of RSS is great, but the realities of it is that there are a LOT of corner cases and things to take care of, etc. I read a blog entry about it a few months ago that cemented how much I was going to be facing and that really turned me off the idea.
- Twitter was going to absolutely dominate the feed. My Twitter account followed hundreds of people and it was really going to be a problem for this structure.
The first remains a massive project and undertaking. The second though has changed. I've been stepping back from Twitter. I'm not off it, but I am using it far less. And I think that the Fediverse would actually be a better usage here. The underlying nature and 'inefficiency' of it, the "content warnings" which are really subject lines, etc. This could really prove to be a better integration aspect.
Along with this idea, I am reminded of my custom Twitter client from back around 2007. I can't remember what I called it, but the defining feature I had come up with was that I hid any post a user made after their three most recent ones.
Back then we were pre-threads, and we were dealing with people going on massive tweet storms about topics. I got frustrated when they dominated my feed. So I decided to collapse any of these extra posts. You knew they were there, but it didn't fill your feed. I could see something similar here.
Ideally, another aspect of the Behemoth RSS portion would be combining RSS posts about similar topics. I subscribe to a number of feeds which overlap and so I can get a half-dozen entries on a news item. Having a system which groups based on topic and keywords would be a huge benefit.
So I guess saying I abandoned this idea isn't true. It continues to sit in the back of my mind as something I'm thinking about. But still, no immediate plans to work on it.
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Fediverse Block & Spam Reporting
I am now, fairly regularly, keeping an eye on my Fediverse's local timeline. I've taken it as a mission to report spammers I see in that timeline. I am primarily doing this on the desktop while working or relaxing. However, my frustration with their system is that in the neverending spam wars, the anti-spam tools need to be as optimized as possible. And the current process requires far too many clicks.
So, yesterday, I coded a bookmarklet. I tried embedding it, but the JS code doesn't play well with Markdown, so it just rendered the ugly text.
To use this, you just need to copy the below text and then create a bookmark in your browser, give it a name (I used 'Fed Spam') and then paste this code. I haven't done extensive testing, but it works in Firefox flawlessly.
javascript:var%20%24jscomp%3D%24jscomp%7C%7C%7B%7D%3B%24jscomp.scope%3D%7B%7D%3B%24jscomp.arrayIteratorImpl%3Dfunction(a)%7Bvar%20b%3D0%3Breturn%20function()%7Breturn%20b%3Ca.length%3F%7Bdone%3A!1%2Cvalue%3Aa%5Bb%2B%2B%5D%7D%3A%7Bdone%3A!0%7D%7D%7D%3B%24jscomp.arrayIterator%3Dfunction(a)%7Breturn%7Bnext%3A%24jscomp.arrayIteratorImpl(a)%7D%7D%3B%24jscomp.makeIterator%3Dfunction(a)%7Bvar%20b%3D%22undefined%22!%3Dtypeof%20Symbol%26%26Symbol.iterator%26%26a%5BSymbol.iterator%5D%3Breturn%20b%3Fb.call(a)%3A%24jscomp.arrayIterator(a)%7D%3Bdocument.getElementsByClassName(%22setting-text%22)%5B0%5D.value%3D%22spam%22%3Bfor(var%20boxes%3Ddocument.querySelectorAll(%22.status-check-box%20div.react-toggle%22)%2C%24jscomp%24iter%240%3D%24jscomp.makeIterator(boxes)%2C%24jscomp%24key%24box%3D%24jscomp%24iter%240.next()%3B!%24jscomp%24key%24box.done%3B%24jscomp%24key%24box%3D%24jscomp%24iter%240.next())box%3D%24jscomp%24key%24box.value%2Cbox.classList.add(%22react-toggle--checked%22)%3Bvoid+0The above bookmarklet fills out the "Block & Spam" report form on the Tweetdeck-esque interface for Mastodon. It writes 'Spam' in the message box, and then toggles next to every post. Because I'm reporting bot accounts which are just posting spam every time, I don't need to apply any mental effort of reviewing posts. I'm still clicking the submit button, I didn't add that to the automation (yet?) but it's definitely made it a farcry easier to fight spam on the server.
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