We can now connect to #BlueSky accounts from here, but both sides need to enable it.
We're supposed to be opt-out folks, but too many "safety" advocates are stopping the #SocialWeb from ever becoming ubiquitous. Imagine being so scared of "bad" speech that you demand users and server admins add each other's domain to their settings before they could communicate or even browse to those sites. We'd all still be on AOL.
If every article, podcast episode and video was natively an #ActivityPub post, we'd need quote posts but want them to operate differently. They should count as a boost but with a clear indication that the person you are following also wants you to see their comment. How should that look? Maybe they wouldn't themselves be boostable... #SocialWeb
At Newsmast we believe the future of the social web is in the hands of journalists.
If trusted news sources make the bold decision to leave platforms like Musk’s Twitter, we stand a chance at creating a better democratic social media which serves all.
@FreddieJ went for a trip to Perugia, Italy to meet with some of the journalists at the International Journalism Festival and talk about how we can support the shift away from Big Tech.
Can #podcasting be made to work with #ActivityPub as well as #RSS? Then podcatchers could work like a #Mastodon client, allowing us to interact directly via comments, favorites and spreading around the best episodes via boosts. #podcasts
update: it exists but no podcatcher fully supports it yet.
imo the magic here is that we can make everything natively able to go viral. there aren't separate episodes, articles and videos we link to from here, but the item itself is an #ActivityPub post. creators stay in control. that's our killer app and how we sell creators on the #SocialWeb.
I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining steam, Fedi has arrived.
Since most users wouldn't understand what ActivityPub / Fediverse is, it is likely there will be far less than 40% or 30% (guesstimate) of their userbase who will appear in the Fediverse network.
It will highly depend on how they will explain the benefits of enabling ActivityPub in their accounts.
If you haven't heard, sadly, #ChirpSocial, one of the popular #ActivityPub “groups” platform, is shutting down “probably” on February 29th.
In an email they sent to admins, the owner and developer can no longer support https://chirp.social financially as they failed to find a new job after they were laid off by #Google last year.
This reminds us the importance of having a built-in groups feature, and one where the groups feature actually federates.
Back in 2008, when the #Fediverse was born, we did have a built-in federated groups in #Laconica / #StatusNet (today known as #GNUsocial). We used bang (!) instead of at (@). A built-in groups feature is more stable as established instances can host them.
Today, we have #Friendica and #Hubzilla (as well as #Streams-based instances) to fill in that, as groups is a built-in feature in those software products. It's just a matter of finding an instance that's open to hosting groups for any topic for the ActivityPub protocol.
That said, any Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams-based instances you suggest for groups?
“Social-media companies are embracing this new type of push because people are posting and interacting less publicly on social media. They are also pushing more overall. While the number of #notifications on any given app fluctuates over time, they have risen on nearly every major social-media app since July 2023, according to data from the app-analytics firm Measure Protocol.”
We have talked a lot about the positive sides of the Fediverse, but not as much about the downsides. For me the top negative things of this free and healthier social web are:
People are patronizing. This happens a lot more than in other places. I mostly mean the unsolicited advice: Alt text, don’t post this or that, avoid commercialism, other social medias and use content warnings for everything. While many mean good, it has been often very aggressive. This happened a lot in 2022. For a while it made the bar to post much higher because I was afraid to make a mistake. Today I don’t care as much.
Nitpicking. Comments are nice, but not when people are overly criticising about what you do or concentrating in irrelevancies. Whataboutism is the worst side effect.
Everyone has their own rules and they are often contradicting each other. Some are extreme and block every other instance, some more allowing. You might accidentally break many rules around the Fediverse without even noticing it (some servers don’t allow posts about meat or alcohol for example).
Politically too left. It seems it is not allowed to be very conservative here. People are anti-commercialism, anti-capitalist, anti-anything.
While saying this, I do not stumble upon these downsides very often since I am quite a chill of a guy and have my own server. I feel like I can post whatever the fuck I want.
However, I do wonder if these things are the ones that make the Fediverse less approachable by new users. On the other hand I believe the new open social web will transform the way we see the social media in general and soon it does not matter, we don’t have to think what is ”here” when the big players like Threads and Tumblr adapt ActivityPub.
It’s funny to me that some people on Threads are saying Mastodon (mistakenly thinking it’s a one service) will always be ”small” and ”closed”. Well, soon we’ll be in the same crowd with the Threads people, perhaps with others like Tumblr too.
The Fediverse can expand unlike the other truly closed social networks. This is exactly like talking about the Internet in the 80s, ”it will be a small thing for the nerds, and always will be so”.