Nico Japas
David PierceI wrote about ActivityPub, and why Elon Musk might have saved social networks by buying Twitter — just not at all in the way he meant to https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network
Adam Ierymenko@pierce I've definitely wondered if he might have been "chaotic good" in buying Twitter. The status quo certainly was not great, and it's shaken things up a lot and helped launch renewed interest in decentralized networks like this, Nostr, etc.
Aaron@adamierymenko @pierce Accidental positive outcomes don't count as being good. From his perspective I'm sure this is a bad thing.
@hosford42 @pierce I thought that was what "chaotic good" was, or maybe my terminology is messed up. In any case I think it would be great if he bought TikTok and Meta next. Engagement-maximizing social media is cancer.
Rev. Lunar 🜏Ⓐ🖤@adamierymenko with chaotic good characters the motivations are good but the implementation is a bit random. Elon would probably be best classed as incompetent evil.
@hosford42 @pierce
@hosford42 @pierce
Jeff MoeWow, what a great article. So much more understanding of what is going on than the junk from The Guardian the other day.
Excellent! :)
Maxi 12x 💉
ben@pierce the all elusive activitypub article!
jaranmiller@pierce Good work. I appreciate this article.
praccu@pierce worth remembering what happened to Jabber.
Nick @ The Linux Experiment@pierce Thanks for including my video in the article :)
Celia Valdeolmillos@pierce very good article!!
Pusher Of Pixels (old account)@pierce wow, FABULOUS article! Very much appreciated for the level headed and informed take. And written for lay people to understand.
Well done!
bettybarcode (she/her) 🚲@pierce
One little detail jumped out at me: is NPR actually on Mastodon?
One little detail jumped out at me: is NPR actually on Mastodon?
Justin Garrison@pierce Great article but there was a lot of confusion about decentralized vs interoperable.
Email messages are interoperable and decentralized but contacts are over-the-top services that are neither decentralized or interoperable without special export/import features
There's nothing about ActivityPub that says my toots will be able to show up in tumbler. The data models may be incompatible. ActivityPub is the protocol for how data should be shared, not the structure/content of the data.
David Kullander@pierce Sometimes I think Elon really will save humanity. First electric cars & space rockets and then destroying the worst social media on the planet. Maybe it was his plan all along? Maybe he will buy Fox next?
tutormentor1I have 1000-5000 followers on each of these platforms - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook - and a lower number on many other platforms, including Mastodon.
If someone figures a way for me to reaching all of them via one post, or hearing from each of them, from where ever they post, I'd be delighted.
Without paying for advertising I don't think many of my followers ever see my posts on Facebook or LinkedIn. That shouldn't happen in a future planform. People should see what they want to see.
koee@pierce just finished reading this! Such a great job! Thank you for taking the time to write this and get insights for some prominent people!
Kingsley Uyi IdehenYep!
Elon has inadvertently saved #SocialMedia and #SocialNetworking from vendor colonization and #Surveillance #Capitalism based value extraction (aka. #Privacy compromise).
In similar vein, Trump has inadvertently saved #Democracy in the U.S. from voter apathy.
What a wonderful world of irony and unintended consequences 😀
Steve@pierce “Musk thought he could save Twitter, but it turns out he may have saved the idea of an open social internet instead. When Musk spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter and then systematically destroyed everything people loved about the platform, users went looking for something better.”
Tim Chambers@pierce This was pretty great! one of the best articles in recent memory on this moment. Technically precise, but deeply readable and gave the perfect snapshot of this opportunity and the effort build on ActivityPub.
Mike McCue@tchambers @pierce Hear! Hear!
lucie digitální"Can you imagine if you needed an Outlook address for your Outlook-using colleagues and a Gmail address for your Gmail-using friends, and then a Hotmail account just to talk to your aunt Gertrude? Well, that’s currently how social works now."
Al Downunder@luciedigitalni @mike @tchambers @pierce read that earlier. No better way to explain the concept to the masses!
Helle, Queen of Dissociation 
@luciedigitalni @mike @tchambers @pierce surprise this is also how e-mail works. Outlook/Hotmail especially reject all small mail servers without real recourse. Not just put them in a spam folder, reject.
debsGreat piece with this super important point.
“But of all the things left for the Fediverse to figure out, content moderation will be the thorniest: it’s an expensive, complicated thing to get right, and without good content moderation, social platforms simply don’t work. “
It doesn’t *have* to be expensive or complicated if we understand the role of humans to create culture vs moderate after the fact.
Olav@debs
@pierce if you have an open instance, moderation costs rise quickly. there will always be Adolfs and sympathizers. And they'll wreak havoc and gloat on 4chan when they get banned
300 users is fairly easy. 3k users is hard. 30k users it's a full-time job
I chunked my diaspora* instance because I got uncomfortable with lack of moderation tools at maybe 100 users. My friends that eventually chunked their 10k+ instance had a FBI agent phone number and some things a mod sees requires therapy
Bjorn Toft Madsen@pierce Great article but I would argue you’re wrong about finding out which NPR account is the right NPR account.
Running a mastodon server on your domain will be as normal as running an email server.
No one doubts that sending an email to [email protected] will land in the right place. So it will be with @[email protected]
Verification is only a problem when you don’t run a server. Big orgs will do exactly that.
seismographixGood point regarding content moderation.
Some will underestimate how much money and resources are needed to grow healthy social communities.
A standard moderation tool set with some automation would be nice.
Caroline Butler@pierce Great primer for those of us who are here (but don’t really know where we are!)
penarc
Sascha Pallenberg 🇹🇼 ♻️ ⚡@pierce definitely the "social media" article of the week. Thank you, David!
Hugh Young-Bish@pierce
"how foolish it can be to give your audience and content to a platform that could simply disappear"
As the Richard Dawkins community and the many IMDb communities did, with the loss of vast amounts of collective memory, when the operators of those sites grew tired of them.
"how foolish it can be to give your audience and content to a platform that could simply disappear"
As the Richard Dawkins community and the many IMDb communities did, with the loss of vast amounts of collective memory, when the operators of those sites grew tired of them.
Christian Grobmeier@pierce Great article
Carl Heath@pierce Great piece of writing! Thank you! I wrote a three piece text, trying to tell some of this story but from the perspective of society and public discourse. It seems this perspective might me more discussed in a European context, but that might also be my geopolitical bias. Id love to hear such perspectives connect to yours and see where that ends up. :)
1. https://carlheath.se/the-digital-public-space-the-era-of-platforms/
2. https://carlheath.se/shaping-digital-public-space/
3. https://carlheath.se/time-for-braces-and-belts-how-we-strengthen-public-discourse-together/
The Digital Public Space - the era of platforms
In recent years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the digitalisation of society and in what ways the digital places we find ourselves in affect the way we live our lives and shape our societies. My thoughts with this text are to briefly describe the last decade's
@pierce its like i have been waiting for this for my entire life. When will we get to see this..
whoami: I'm Norbert@pierce great article. Very interesting take on federated web. Time will tell if it will actually work.