Jason Parker-Burlingham
Command Line MagicI think the shift by the general public to Mastodon may be historically significant beyond just social media because it's a shift away from centralization and back towards distributed services. I'm hoping this trend continues in general for Internet services.
Shawn Hooper (he/him)@climagic Agreed. Since joining Mastodon, I've also migrated my Goodreads to Bookwrym. Next will be Instragram -> Pixelfed.
Davis@climagic back to the day of web rings!
Ed Rivas@climagic I'm afraid this advantage is perceived only by a small group of people (techies). Most "normal" users see it as an annoyance 😕 I do hope that perception changes somehow
Seth Deckard@jerivas The advantage of the Internet was only perceived by a small group of techies for some time.
Artur Neumann@climagic so far it looks to me that 🐘 did not yet become an alternative to 🐦, but just an additional network. All popular accounts that I follow here are still posting on 🐦 and copy content over to here. Who can afford to loose their audience?
@arturN So instead they act like cowards and become part of the problem. If it's that hard to move away then it only shows how dependent they are and tightens Elon's grip and gives him more power to do worse. It may be hard to start over but it's something you can feel good about and are taking control of your life again.
@climagic The other doubt I have is this old blog post by Moxie Marlinspike the 'inventor' of @signalapp : https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
I was always pro federation, but moxie argues that in a fed. env. it's much harder to innovate because the protocol has to change and that takes a lot of time. Innovating a ecosystem that you control is much easier and users go where there is innovation.
I'm still a fan of decentralised services but Moxie has some good points.
What are your thoughts on that?
I was always pro federation, but moxie argues that in a fed. env. it's much harder to innovate because the protocol has to change and that takes a lot of time. Innovating a ecosystem that you control is much easier and users go where there is innovation.
I'm still a fan of decentralised services but Moxie has some good points.
What are your thoughts on that?
Reflections: The ecosystem is moving
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
okapi@arturN @climagic @signalapp It is true that innovation needing protocol level change is hard but competition in the client and server space allows more things to be tried. The article gives examples of protocols like IP that have been static but there are others like HTML which have grown many extensions. Even things like SMTP have not really stood still. In my view the freedoms offered by federation are so valuable it outweighs all other features.
@okapi @climagic @signalapp
Agree! The question for 🐘 Vs 🐦will be if enough (influential) people value that freedom the same way as you. If not this here will stay a geek space (what is maybe also not a bad thing).
In my experience most people value functions/their contacts over freedom/privacy. E.g. getting people to use Signal was/is very hard because
- all my contacts are on WA
- it does not have function XYZ
Most don't care about the privacy features or freedom
Agree! The question for 🐘 Vs 🐦will be if enough (influential) people value that freedom the same way as you. If not this here will stay a geek space (what is maybe also not a bad thing).
In my experience most people value functions/their contacts over freedom/privacy. E.g. getting people to use Signal was/is very hard because
- all my contacts are on WA
- it does not have function XYZ
Most don't care about the privacy features or freedom
@okapi @climagic @signalapp Fun fact: the same person who made a lot of us come here also made the Signal Messenger popular by tweeting that everyone should use it.
So maybe I have to add that, people care about their
- social network/status in that network
- functionality
- and what Elon says ;-)
So maybe I have to add that, people care about their
- social network/status in that network
- functionality
- and what Elon says ;-)
@okapi @arturN @signalapp Yes exactly, it seemed like HTML5 was taking forever, but now it's 10 years in the past. Things eventually happen we just need to be more patient and have more faith that it will work out and put the work in to make it happen.
@climagic @okapi @signalapp Depends who is "we". Building a geeky federated bubble is one thing, much harder is it to make it accessible for the general public. The general public will always move to where the new fancy feature is, where there social network is and where the algorithm makes them addicted to the system
https://mastodon.world/@arturN/109392085366365990
https://mastodon.world/@arturN/109392085366365990
Artur Neumann (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] @signalapp Agree! The question for 🐘 Vs 🐦will be if enough (influential) people value that freedom the same way as you. If not this here will stay a geek space (what is maybe also not a bad thing). In my experience most people value functions/their contacts over freedom/privacy. E.g. getting people to use Signal was/is very hard because - all my contacts are on WA - it does not have function XYZ Most don't care about the privacy features or freedom
@climagic @okapi @signalapp I hope that there is a way to iterate fast enough on a fed. system. So far #mastodon positively surprised me, very easy to use, not a geek app. I didn't feel the urge to setup my own server, just used an existing one.
I should look into it more how they define & reiterate on their protocols & features.
@arturN @signalapp That seems like a good argument on the surface but it sounds more like Moxie felt burnt out and like giving up. We have plenty of federation in the world that works fine and allows innovation. Cars can innovate, houses, phones, films, even governments, etc. All those exist within a "federated" system and the system can change too, we've just become impatient and try to move too fast because we've made it a habit to move to fast.
@climagic @signalapp the "protocol" over that cars interact with each other are roads and those didn't change significantly much for a long time. Houses don't really interact with each other. Phones yes, there have been huge protocol changes over the decades. Films "interact" over a very flexible/loose protocol (human language & visual). And I will not say anything about governments interacting, because I don't understand how that works.
Matt@climagic I looked at federated stuff a couple years ago, thinking early diaspora or something that predated it. I've had a mastodon account at SDF for a few years, but didn't really mess with it very much. Tonight I spun up my own mastodon instance to see what that is like, if things go well, and storage doesn't get to be nuts, I'll probably host some friends on it as well.
#selfhosted
#selfhosted
@greppy Good for you, good luck on that.
ocdtrekkie@climagic I read a fantastic new book called Cloud Empires basically about how we got to centralization... and the author actually contends we can't go the other way. He told me if this sticks it'll probably require he write another book. 😂
Stefano Marinelli@climagic I hope it will happen for e-mail hosting, too. And for centralised services like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and SPOF like Cloudflare, etc. Let's go back to connected islands!
Mark Gardner@mjgardner @stefano I think what he is saying though is that in the last decade or two (or really since the net became popular in the 90s) there have been strong pushes to centralize it and they have been mostly successful. Setting up your own server these days is quite challenging due to the external rules you must follow and know about beyond just the config.
@mjgardner @climagic I know. But there are a lot of problems managing emails as the “big ones” are the ones who play the game. Quite a challenge in the last years. Many of my historical mail servers are working fine, but as soon as you start with a new one you must be prepared to be spam marked by the big ones like Microsoft and (but less) Google and for a long time, even it you set everything following their standards
@stefano @mjgardner I just dealt with that problem today for someone else's important email as they moved accounts and found out the hard way.
@stefano @climagic It’s only a matter of time before similar #spam mitigation techniques will need to be bolted onto #ActivityPub as spammers, scammers, and malware developers discover the #fediverse. If I’m reading things right, the spec just punts things to HTTP Signatures and Linked Data Signatures with #Mastodon adding some unique properties and behavior. I’m skeptical about that remaining sufficient.
@mjgardner @climagic I see a lot of toots about it. More users -> more attention -> more nasty people trying to do nasty things
@stefano @climagic Yep, I have also seen peanut-gallery comments from #InfoSec and #NetworkOperations people saying this was entirely predictable with well-known mitigations, but #Mastodon admins and developers seem to be trying to reinvent them from first principles