The original sin was merging the StatusNet article into the one on GNU social.

Yes, GNU social began as a fork of SN, and became the dominant fork after Evan moved on to working on pump.io (the precursor to ActivityPub). But these were 2 distinct projects, run by completely different groups of people, working within 2 completely different organisations; VC-funded StatusNet, and the GNU Project. They're significant to fediverse history in their own ways, and deserve their own articles.

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The existing GNU social article completely paves over that history. Except for a couple of mentions of StatusNet as a former name, and a credit to "Evan Prodromou et al" as the original author.

Aside from that, some of the information is just factually wrong. For example, the infobox gives the date for the first "Preview release" of GNU social as 2021, which is just factually wrong. That wasn't even the first release of GNU social, let alone StatusNet, let alone Laconica.

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Now every time I gripe about this, some WP reply-guy pops up to tell me that deletionism is WP working as designed. That I need to bring up issues in talk pages, edit articles myself, find more references, etc.

Yeah, I know. Been there, done that.

Then I come back a few months later, and all that work has been pruned again. In the case of deleted articles, I don't think they even preserve a history, where I could extract the work I already did, and reinsert it when I find more sources.

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Like Sisyphus, I'm thoroughly sick of pushing that particular boulder up the hill, with Wikipedia deletionists pecking out my eyes at every opportunity.

I understand that their editorial policies and practices exist for a reason. But they need to understand that every one of those norms came into existence to solve a problem. One that WP reply-guys probably denied the existence of with equal vigour, until a new policy/ practice was formalised to mitigate it.

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Wikipedia needs a new policy to fix this problem. Riffing on the popular kids game, with an older name that was a bit racist against the Chinese, I'm going to call it Phone Game Editing.

A dynamic where a WP article gets pruned, by one well-meaning but uninformed editor after another. Slowly making it less informative, and eventually inaccurate and misleading. Ending with this now-degraded article being proposed for deletion, and its history with it.

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#Wikipedia #PhoneGameEditing

Note that I'm presuming good faith editing here. But keep in mind that this is also a technique that Bad Actors could use to degrade obscure-but-important Wikipedia articles. Perhaps because they're somehow inconvenient to a hidden agenda, or just for the lulz.

A policy addressing well-intentioned Phone Game Editing would help to surface examples of malicious PGE. Allowing the PGE policy to be modified to catch that too, or a new policy formulated specifically to address it.

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Zooming way out from my gripes about particular Wikipedia articles (so I'll reset my thread counter), there's a larger issue with how Wikipedia uses the term "social network".

To those of us who've been using the fediverse for over a decade, it's an uncontroversial statement of fact that Mastodon is a software project, not a "social network". Same with Diaspora, Quitter (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:GNU_social), and so on. A social network consists of everyone you can talk to with that software.

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This is why the terms "the fediverse" and "the federation" were coined prior to the ActivityPub era. We needed a name for the social network made up of servers using only OStatus (GNU social, Quitter, Pleroma, postActiv, Mastodon). We also needed one for the social network made up of servers using only Diaspora's protocol (them, plus SocialHome, Friendica, Hubzilla).

As @deadsuperhero says, by the time of ActivityPub, Friendica and Hubzilla were part of both;

https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334

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Within about a year of that end-of-an-era post by @deadsuperhero, all the software used in "the fediverse" had implemented ActivityPub except GNU social. As had all the software used in "the federation" except Diaspora, so that term dropped out of use.

Meanwhile the meaning of "the fediverse" expanded to include all AP software, and anything federated with at least one AP app (including Diaspora and GNU social).

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@lightone founded fediverse.party in March 2018, using that definition - everything that connects over ActivityPub or to something that does - and it remains out working definition today.

Yes, the meaning of "the fediverse" has shifted over time. But every time, that shift was in service of the practice usefulness of the term; describing the social network of *people* whom someone using fediverse software could potentially network with.

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So I raise an eyebrow at the recent expansion of the definition of "fediverse". In ways that don't serve that practical purpose, by telling people what naturally interoperates with what (excluding domain blocks, bridges, etc). Because they include decentralised social protocols and pure P2P apps that don't connect to the existing fediverse.

Not without work by folks like Ryan of BridgyFed to broadcast our pirate signal and hack into their network (to paraphrase Morpheus from The Matrix).

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This strikes me as an attempt by the backers of BlueSky, Nostr, etc (eg the cult-of-personality around Dorsey), to appropriate the goodwill built up by the community we build around ActivityPub. Without actually doing any work to make their networks interoperable with ours. A way to rebrand "Web3" after the bursting of the crypto hype bubble.

IMHO this appropriation needs to be called out for what it is, and rejected. Which requires knowing our history, and stopping folks rewriting it.

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@strypey Agreed about knowing history and stopping folks from rewriting it. The WP page is unfortunate, and I also see a lot of attempted rewriting inflating some people's roles and erasing others. Also I rarely see people talk about how long-standing the tension in the fediverse and its precursors is between taking an indie approach and attempting to go the traditional big tech route (StatusNet's early VC funding, DIaspora joining YCombinator).

Anyhow I agree that starting in 2017-8, "The Fediverse" has generally roughly meant "everything that connects over ActivityPub or to something that does." By that definition, Threads, Wordpress, Medium, and Flipboard are are all part of "the fediverse" ... and so are Bluesky and Nostr.

With Threads, I agree that it's an attempt to appropriate the goodwill built around "the fediverse", "openness", and the promise of interoperability and data portabiilty at some point in the future. And many high-profile fediverse influencers have welcomed that embrace!

With Blueksy and Nostr, I don't think their backers are trying to appropriate anything with ActivityPub ... in fact, they define themselves in opposition to it. Realistically though, Bluesky's currently more closely connected to the fediverse than Threads, and shares more of the values: just like StatusNet, it's a venture-backed company based around open-source software. So it's not surprising that the press is using the term "the fediverse" to incorporate all of them.

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@thenexusofprivacy
> I also see a lot of attempted rewriting inflating some people's roles and erasing others

100%. I believe it was you who educated me about one aspect of this in the past. How many of the earliest fediverse innovators are of minority sexualities and gender identities. Which had never really occurred to me, and I appreciated learning about it.