Robert W. GehlAs Guy recalls, the problem was that “the goalposts kept moving. Other specs were getting wrapped up, but there was always a new requirement for ActivityPub that seemed to come out of the blue from one of the chairs of the group....
Even though Mastodon was the first major project to implement ActivityPub, it’s an open protocol, meaning anyone with the technical ability can adopt it. Today, dozens of different projects rely on the ActivityPub protocol, including not only Mastodon microblogging but also PeerTube video, Pixelfed image sharing, and WriteFreely blogging....
WITH EVERY LIBRARY MY BOOK APPEARS IN I GROW STRONGER
The lack of profitability is only one part of the answer, however. The other part has to do with a spat between Facebook and Google over open technical protocols. In 2007, Google convened a group of Facebook competitors to create the OpenSocial Foundation....
DJ Sundog is a musician living in rural Georgia, USA. Sundog told me that the fediverse has helped change him. When he was growing up, he “had life on easy mode” because “I was a young white man who grew up in the church,” the son of a preacher....
Overall, 2017 was a heady time for Playvicious. Marcia was leading conversations into complex cultural topics. Ro remained positive about Mastodon and the fediverse. “I love the fediverse,” he wrote on Patreon that year....
The approach I took to the fediverse is similar to the approach I took to studying the dark web in a previous book. I relied on a mixture of participant observation, interviews, archival work, and software studies. Much of the work is thus anticipated by previous Internet studies scholarship....
Research confirms this observation. Technologists of color, for example, often face obstacles, including the brute obstacle of bigotry: white coders often question the qualifications of their Black peers. This is in part due to the fact that Black contributions to science and technology have repeatedly been overlooked....
The admin of the Mastodon instance Fosstodon.org, Kev Quirk, notes that the anti-Meta folks are saying Meta isn’t welcome on the fediverse. But, he notes, “no single person/entity owns the fediverse. So who are you to say who’s welcome and who isn’t?” The fediverse is based on an open technical protocol that anyone can use....
As I write this in March, 2024, Mastodon just celebrated its 8th birthday. Eugen Rochko started it in 2016 as a hobby project, looking to build a better alternative microblogging system than GNU social, but by 2024, Mastodon has become more than that....