ElisaNov 13, 2022
Here's a half-baked thought about the twitter migration that I've been ruminating these past days:

It's become very clear that basic concepts of FOSS and federation, or even interoperability, are completely alien to most people. And I don't blame them.
Most of us were trained to think in brand silos, where platforms quietly define what we can or cannot do. The app stores limit which software we can run on our own frikkin devices, or who we can talk with.
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022
Our whole digital experience is appified: The sentiment "I'm not online, I'm just on Facebook" that emerged in the late 2000s leads directly to today, where we sort our digital social interactions in the logic of tech companies. "What's your whatsapp" or imessage or whatever is now synonymous with our phone numbers or email addresses. We're used to being limited by our tech choices in every respect. If those limits are suddenly lifted, it's disorienting.
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022

That's a very valid feeling. But do we address it apart from more or less helpful "instance federation ActivityPub" technobabble?

I'm afraid that we have done a really bad job of making things easy and fun to understand and engage with(and if you have the urge to reply "well actually, it's FLOSS" or F/OSS, don't fight it - you're proving my point, thank you very much).

Show threadElisa

To me it's incredibly ironic that people leaving the birdsite expected instances to be silos. The fediverse. Silos. I mean.

But the real irony is that even though we've done such a bad job explaining how things really work, people are *still* coming.

I'm grateful for that, because it's a huge chance to revisit a broader debate about tech and digital public spaces we want. I had given up on that. to be honest.

Nov 13, 2022 at 4:32pmWeb
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022

tl;dr: be excellent to each other, let's get better at naming things so that they can be understood without a handbook, let's create nice stuff, and f̶u̶c̶k̶ tax billionaires.

~~ fin ~~

Show threadBodoNov 13, 2022
@eliza but does it matter for people what is below this? Should it matter for them? And why?
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022

@bitboxer

Yes you're right, I was super unspecific there: I meant let's revisit what we expect from these spaces, what we want them to be, not how they function. That would be an exchange worth having, not "well actually you should use an instance that..." a gazillion times over

Show threadJürgen HaasNov 13, 2022
@eliza
Very true, but I'm uncertain if it's a naming or explanation issue. To me, the global society is confronted with decentralzation everywhere - and that's frightning because we grew up with monopolies that do things for us. This is e.g. similar to the new energy market, where also the future will be many many small units, adding up to a much better solution. To me, this is just the same "struggle" for a lot of people.