Chris TrottierA few Twitter migrants have told me, "I don't care about all this Fediverse technology, I just want to remake Twitter."
You can't remake Twitter. It's impossible. An understanding of the technology will demonstrate why it's impossible.
The reason why the Fediverse cannot be Twitter is because they're trying to solve different problems.
Twitter: To collect and publish data through a centralized service, for one corporation to exclusively monetize it
Fediverse: To disseminate data through a decentralized protocol(s), allowing *anyone* to build with it
Why won't the Fediverse suggest people for you to follow? That's not the Fediverse's job.
Why can't you see a curated home feed built around your customized interests? That's not the Fediverse's job.
Why isn't there a universal archive of status updates available through search? That's not the Fediverse's job.
To give a weird analogy:
Twitter is a newspaper delivery boy. All he sends you is a carefully curated selection of news, editorials, and ads.
The Fediverse is your postwoman. She sends many letters and packages -- of varying content and sizes. She doesn't editorialize your mail. She doesn't even know what's being delivered to you. If she picked and chose which and what to send and receive, she'd be fired.
One more reason why it's good to know why understanding how the Fediverse's technology is important.
This is so important.
I talk about it so much that I'm almost sick of hearing myself harp on about it.
The Fediverse can't be owned by a billionaire -- it's literally impossible.
In theory, Elon Musk could buy mastodon.social. He could employ all the developers who work on the Fediverse. He might even trademark Fediverse Corporation™.
But he can't own the Fediverse because the technology makes it impossible.
To those who say, "The technology isn't important, I just want to remake the Twitter that existed before Elon Musk bought it" -- Twitter is what it is now because its technology made it possible for a billionaire to acquire it.
Don't want social media to be acquired by the likes of Elon Musk?
Use the Fediverse, a collection of technologies for which that's impossible to happen.
Steve Riggins@atomicpoet one issue I am struggling with is my history. I posted a bunch of vacation stuff to a different instance and it shut down. I saved it all but the history is gone online. I can’t repost it anywhere with the same time stamps, at least that I can see.
@steveriggins Nomadic identity is still an emergent technology on the Fediverse.
One app that does this better than others is Hubzilla. They've basically made it so that when you move from one instance to another, virtually all your content is preserved.
The way they do this is through a protocol called Zot6.
Unfortunately, Hubzilla isn't so user friendly and it's kind of ugly -- and thus hasn't taken off.
@atomicpoet yeah I think this can all be solved over time. Maybe with cryptography, too, validating posts or something. Not blockchain per we, but simply verifying that “this post happened on this server on this day” Shrug, when I retire I am going to dig into all of this.
Sean@steveriggins @atomicpoet You might want to take a look at scuttlebutt. It's fully decentralized, using a store-and-forward protocol where messages are cryptographically signed. The fully decentralized bit has its good and bad points, but I think a similar protocol could work in a federated environment as well. It's roughly how usenet (nntp) worked, back in the day.
Chris Abraham@atomicpoet and unless you're cross tooting this from Twitter, we've already done that!
@chrisa I actually deleted my Twitter account 😂
That said, I'm bringing this all up due detraction that been expressed here. I don't think everyone who's using Mastodon is necessarily going to stay here.
@chrisa Also, my posts often end up on Twitter due to other people crossposting them. Here's an example.
@atomicpoet that's just another toot.
@chrisa Yeah, a toot reposted on Twitter by someone else (not me).
@atomicpoet that's totally Mastodon can be very raw. Twitter and Facebook have thousands of humans and AIs actively censoring crazy but Masto has both an anything goes mentality and also lots of outages. It's a very human, flawed, system, more like a BBS.
Tap@atomicpoet @chrisa Me too, as soon as I saw a reason to do so. It felt like I couldn't get rid of it soon enough.
Terry Hancock@atomicpoet
This notion of something being unbuyable-because-not-ownable is very hard for some people to grasp.
People trying to understand postcapitalist phenomena within a capitalist model are like people with only one word for "plant " trying to comprehend a botanical garden.
I mean it CAN be shoehorned into their terms, but it's not a good fit.
@TerryHancock And yet what everyone needs to know is that the Internet can't even be built without open protocols and FLOSS software!
Pelle S Christensen@TerryHancock @atomicpoet I woke up this morning realizing that streaming content is another way of control. What happens to the generations who didn't have CD/DVD's or book? Corporations will soon have made Fahrenheit 451 a reality and we steered right into it with our eyes open because of the covenience. My kids hardly own any books (my fault btw)
teledyn 𓂀@TerryHancock @atomicpoet this same could be said for the Linux kernel, yet today, it's everywhere.
xs4me2@atomicpoet Social media belong in the regulated public domain. Its as simple as that.
Anne-Marie de Jong@xs4me2 @atomicpoet
Dat is helemaal niet zo’n revolutionair idee.
Sociale media (SM) functioneren ondertussen als een soort Nutsvoorziening.
Velen met mij zijn van mening dat de grenzeloze privatisering op zijn minst deels zou moeten worden teruggedraaid. Met name #Nutsvoorzieningen .
Waarom SM niet meenemen in die beweging?
Minstens een discussie waard.
Dat is helemaal niet zo’n revolutionair idee.
Sociale media (SM) functioneren ondertussen als een soort Nutsvoorziening.
Velen met mij zijn van mening dat de grenzeloze privatisering op zijn minst deels zou moeten worden teruggedraaid. Met name #Nutsvoorzieningen .
Waarom SM niet meenemen in die beweging?
Minstens een discussie waard.
@ABtj60 @atomicpoet Geheel mee eens uiteraard!
Coach Pāṇini ®@atomicpoet Technology that is likely to start failing by end of this year, beginning of next
PJ "Vote Green" Coffey@paninid @atomicpoet I, personally, would not have an F1 race force all cars to use one common pit crew but I'm not a billionaire so what do I know?
Wes Holley@atomicpoet EXACTLY!!! "Free Speech!!!"... as our moderation is dictated by advertisers/funding sources. The only moderation guideline is determined by A: Does this satiate my ego?; and B: Does this generate some ads?!
@atomicpoet Musk is fucked
Reina 
@atomicpoet Even if he bought Mastodon, someone could just fork it and no one would use his version of it. Mastodon has an AGPL-3.0 license, so it is and will always be #FOSS.
@Reina ⬆ This person gets it.
OpenDNA⚙️@atomicpoet If Musk would like to buy every Mastodon instance, I welcome his efforts.
My willingness to create instances for him to buy is greater than his credit line.
Aaron McLeran@atomicpoet your post led me to this nice explainer article.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-earth-fediverse
This is all new to me and quite fascinating. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
Chris Carnahan@atomicpoet Helpful analogy. Thank you. My first day impression is that this platform and these communities feels like a collaborations and bird world feels more like a gladiatorial competition.
Gareth Kitchen@atomicpoet That is weird.
@gruff Yeah, like all analogies, not perfect.
Strobe@atomicpoet that’s cool!
Liz Ellis She/Her🌳@atomicpoet I mean, you say that, but as a twitter migrant my masto feed is already looking a lot like my twitter feed, which is comforting in a way, but personally, I really want to move away from the addictive toxicity of twitter.
That said, I think some twitter migrants are often following familiar migrant accounts because the local and federated feeds are super-fast or jammed to the last 3 mins (probably because of all the new accounts?)
Toast Conger@LizEllisPhD @atomicpoet Some of that comes from which server you choose, right? And some how many people you follow. I started following just about dang near everyone and then it slowly dawned on me that I didn't need to. My instance is functionally NZ Twitter. I honestly can see all NZ Twitter without following them.
@toastfloats @atomicpoet yeah I think so. Being a greedy cow I picked the biggest server and I will migrate I think to somewhere less frantic! I'm looking to make conncetions outside of my twitter account because I think it's like shifting into a new language. Or something. getting overwhelmed by brain fog right now!
Ulf J. Froitzheim@toastfloats @LizEllisPhD @atomicpoet Nevertheless you are crossing my way although i live on the opposite side of earth.
@UJF @LizEllisPhD @atomicpoet presumably because in this thread are lot of .social one of whom I opted in to follow. Thus far my experience is the whole this is far less of a firehouse as long as I am selective about who I follow.
Except New Zealand. As usual NZ Twits (now NZToots?) are absolute chatterboxes.
Except New Zealand. As usual NZ Twits (now NZToots?) are absolute chatterboxes.
@atomicpoet This analogy isn’t just weird, it’s plain wrong. No one knows better than the postwoman who sends me letters, invoices, packages. The newspaper boy just knows that I still read the local paper. He doesn’t know or even care whether i’m interested in politics, sports, economy or culture.
Reido@atomicpoet Better yet, you get to fire her and find a better one.
Kenny Bell 
@atomicpoet what's the fediverse job?
@lgom @atomicpoet Go back to the post office analogy because really this is a lot like SMTP (the protocol that let's you get email). It's primary job is just to get your wee little toots to the people who want to listen to you. As a protocol, it's agonistic what's in the toot packages. It's merely the infrastructure to move them.
@toastfloats @atomicpoet thanks!!!
Robin Shipton@lgom @atomicpoet Do you remember RSS feeds and blogs, where you plugged your regular reads into a newsreader to have them all in one spot?
The #Fediverse is posting and RSS and a reader all rolled into a social media ball. It does the same job as RSS + a newsreader, but for social media interaction. It's in your hands instead of an algorithm, like RSS was.
But also not just "tweet"-like microblogging. There are youtube and insta and bandcamp social media equivalents rolled into this ball too.
@robinshipton @atomicpoet muchas gracias!
simple@atomicpoet Mastodon does actually have a suggested following feature. And a curated home feed is possible through following users & on the newest RC following hashtags. But yeah, the archive thing is true unless you set content archive super high.
@simple Mastodon is not the Fediverse.
Your individual instance may have a few interesting features. But again, Mastodon is not the Fediverse.
@atomicpoet Yes, I know that. But it's certainly a part of the Fediverse, and is one of the first ways many people will experience being in the Fediverse. Of course there are other components, like PeerTube, Funkwhale, Friendica, etc, etc. But speaking strictly about Mastodon, since that's where we're talking, it does have many of those features. Not sure who else you would be talking about if not the many newbies joining Mastodon very recently. But, yes, overall, we're agreed.
@simple I talk about all this because people (expecially noobs) mistake the Fediverse for Mastodon -- almost use it synonymously.
When I talk generally about the Fediverse, the rejoinder amongst a few Twitter Migrants is, "But I just want to re-make Twitter."
Well, not only is the Fediverse bigger than Mastodon, but Mastodon can't implement quite a few features because it's part of the Fediverse.
Once again, people need to know this stuff.
@atomicpoet Alright, sure, fair enough. Maybe there could be a way to teach people about this built into the different softwares. That might be kind of cool.
SigmundFrood@atomicpoet one of the best things about this place is being able to build my own feed from scratch.
Creatrix Tiara@atomicpoet I don't know if this is an instance specific thing but I have an Explore tab on my instance that suggests people and tags to follow
@creatrixtiara That's something available with some Mastodon instances. It's not a Fediverse feature.
Mastodon is part of the Fediverse but it is not the Fediverse.
Darien Graham-Smith@atomicpoet Are these things truly impossible, or have they just been deemed out of scope?
@DarienGS Considering the core decentralized Fediverse technology, it is impossible. For example, can you build good content discovery for your local instance? Sure. But not for content discovery that crawls the entire Fediverse.
@atomicpoet It may not be feasible to scrape every reachable server, but Mastodon could certainly suggest posts, accounts and hashtags to follow based on the activity of people you follow (and the people they follow, and so on to whatever degree seems useful).
bangwin 
@atomicpoet True...!