Last night I watched a video of @benpate's talk from #FediCon last year;
https://peertube.iridescent.nz/w/sW6qcdP4ogG5DXW1RUzyo3
What a ride! I found myself vigorously agreeing with most of it. But there were other parts where I was divided against myself. One part still agreeing. another part nervous, that if we go down the road of scaling, monetisation and professionalisation, we risk repeating the mistakes of the original web, and end up right back where we started in another 20 years.
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Ben identified this risk in the talk, so I don't want to give the impression it's something they're not aware of. What I'm trying to describe here is the weird feeling of double consciousness, where Ben pitched things that I've advocated for myself, and I was able to respond to them as if I was hearing them for the first time. Understanding some of the objections I've encountered from the inside, for a change.
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I've posted here at least a couple of times about the difference between "social networks" (many-to-many, relationship-based), and "social media" (one-to-many, content-based). I said that the fediverse can accommodate both, but they come with very different design and deployment considerations.
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I've noticed that mainstream use of "social media" is mostly following Jonathan Haidt's usage to describe only the mostly parasocial DataFarming platforms;
So in response, I'll reframe the above as 2 kinds of social networks;
* social communication networks: many-to-many, relationship-based, ephemeral, eg Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, GoToSocial
* social publishing networks: one-to-many, content-based, persistent, eg PeerTube, FunkWhale, WriteFreely, BandWagon
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Now having given these software projects as examples, I want to make it clear I'm describing use patterns, either of which can be applied to any software.
After decades of blogging, I can't help thinking of what I do on Mastodon as publishing. I link to my old posts and dig through them to find stuff, just like I do on my blogs. Conversely someone could use PeerTube to do video blogging, auto-deleting their old posts after a while like people do with their micro-posting accounts.
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Sure, now that Loops exists, it's probably the better choice for posting ephemeral microvideos, as part of a social conversation, like we do with text micro-posts. But Loops isn't constrained to this kind of social communication usage. It supports videos up to 3mins long, and people could just as easily use it to publish videos they might otherwise put on a YouTub channel. In the hopes they'll still be watched and valued many years hence.
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Some of the considerations for social publishing services, that aren't so much of an issue for social communication services;
* persistence and responsible sunsetting
* storage and bandwidth costs
* accountable governance
* Bring Your Own Domain
To be clear, I'm not saying these things aren't helpful in communication services, they certainly are. They're just not as mission critical as they are in publishing services.
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Take music publishing as an example. If artists commit to making bandwagon.fm the primary online home for their music, they need to be sure that it will continue to exist, and they will get plenty of notice before it's shut down. Which means the people running it need to have a plan for how they will cover the costs of storing and serving a growing collection of music files, long term.
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We all know about the ways tech founders have sold their souls for funding to keep their platforms online; ads, Venture Capital, acquisition by corporations, or becoming one (IPO). Obviously we need ethical alternatives for social web services.
But not just alternative funding models. We also need alternative governance models, which keep the operators of services accountable to the people using them.
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A service like bandwagon.fm could be a co-op, owned by the artists whose music it hosts. It could be a social enterprise, whose constitution prioritises the needs of those artists over the financial interests of owners.
But however its governance is structured, one of the best ways to keep services accountable is the freedom to leave. So social publishing services need to enable publishers to use their own domain names for account and post URLs, and provide full account export.
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I don't see why social communication services can't continue to be small, community-hosted, donation-funded, and volunteer-run. Arguably they're better when they are.
But when we consider all of these things that social publishing services need to do a good job, what Ben says about scaling, monetisation and professionalisation lands differently.
If we want to access music, video, books, comics, and other artistic and information works in the fediverse, we need to resource that properly.
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😁😁
Yes, Emissary already serves multiple domains from the same server cluster.
Right now, Bandwagon.fm is two web servers and three databases (way more than I need, but fun to test on). It’s the same cluster that serves fixe or six domains.
So yes, it’s ready to host a bunch more domains, then let people bounce from one server over to the next (on my cluster or elsewhere)
@benpate
> it probably wouldn’t be a FEP. There’s not much about the ActivityPub protocol involved.. just making a server with a switch in front to choose which database you’re reading from
@silverpill might correct me on this, but I don't think FEPs necessarily need to be about the AP protocol itself. They can also be about ways to standardise quality-of-life improvements to AP software. Which BYOD support definitely counts as in my book.
I don’t have much experience with video services like PeerTube, but I’ve been told that many servers shut down for this very reason.
I think some kind of freemium/paid model is a basic requirement for any kind of big file hosting (like audio or video)
If it’s only free, then I should plan for it to disappear some day.
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@benpate
> I don’t have much experience with video services like PeerTube, but I’ve been told that many servers shut down for this very reason
This is mostly guesswork, but I've noticed a tendency for people who don't know any better to set up fediverse services on AWS and other "cloud" hosting platforms. These are really only economic for low-storage, high-traffic websites. Especially those whose traffic is highly variable, with regular spikes that would slashdot a traditional server.
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So people set up fediverse services on AWS, and wonder why they need to keep leasing more storage, and why the whole thing seems to be costing them a fortune. This is bad enough with a large Mastodon service, but for services that store large media files, like FunkWhale and PeerTube, it gets financially crippling really quickly.
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People have tried to get native torrent clients to support WebTorrent;
https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/issues/369
I figure that if that happened, home computers could be the storage layer for PT, and a PT service would only need to be a WebTorrent player;
https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/47
But as I learn more about the online hosting industry, I've come to think people wanting to set up fediverse services just need to read the fine print. Finding hosting deals that don't charge through the nose for storage.
@strypey I agree. And there are more categories one can make, some of which I'm considering for Social experience design, and haven't really given a name yet in SX concept design.
On SocialHub I just posted about Personal social networking, which is a design approach SX uses, to make perspective and mindset shifts, between sociosphere / technosphere, when modeling
Your "social communication networks" allow new and interesting ways to design for inclusion and diversity. I just described on Codeberg in a FEP issue as those networks having..
> Social dynamics that forge cohesive 'concentric circles and bubbles' based on Trust, and a trust-first culture that attracts good behavior, and repels the bad actor from the benefit of participation.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/336#issuecomment-13141878
Social coding commons follows for Social experience design (SX) the notion of a concept called “Personal social networking”. Which entails adopting a SX perspective for designing social web solutions. The approach first considers the so-called sociosphere, i.e. the purely social reality one experiences both offline and online, and then reasons from there to the desired social dynamics to project onto the technology layers, i.e. to the technosphere. Deliberately making these perspective and mind...
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@smallcircles
> there are more categories one can make
Oh for sure, each of those 2 broad categories can be subdivided into loads of subcategories. For example, social communication can be broken into;
* personal: replacing the original purpose of FarceBook
* community: replacing MeetUp, or the original uses of Ning
* professional: replacing LockedIn
Each of these can be sliced a few different ways, by profession, by features, etc.
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Eg professional communication includes slices like;
* freelancers: replacing MTurk, Upwork, Fiverr, gun.io, etc
* academics: replacing ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc
* Software developers: replacing the social aspects of GritHub, dev use of Miscord, etc
Yes, great categorization. But I also meant adjacent category to your top-level division, like service exchange networks, for instance, which offers yet a different form of engagement.
@smallcircles
> I also meant adjacent category to your top-level division, like service exchange networks
I'm guessing you mean things like;
* complementary currency exchanges: timebanks, LETS/ green dollars, etc
* hospitality sites: BeWelcome, WarmShowers
* dating sites: replacing Tinder, Bumble, etc
To me these all come under social communication networks.
We may need to agree to disagree on this, but let's see if we can disagree in a way that produces more light than heat : )
With social experience design I define social networking as "any direct human interaction between people", so that is very broad. A package delivery is not a form of communication (unless against a very generic definition of the word).
Btw, with Protosocial AP extension I'm ideating on, the network is inherently service-oriented, and everything is based on service development, delivery, and exchange, including Communication services and Delivery services. Services then becomes a kind of top-level concept. Services help fulfil the stated Needs of Stakeholders in a SX solution.
https://discuss.coding.social/t/protosocial-activitypub-protocol/665
Protosocial ActivityPub v1.0.0 Pro-social protocol suite for the social web, based on ActivityPub Protosocial ActivityPub protocol is an extension of W3C ActivityPub that focuses on ease of use for the development of fediverse solutions and services. Together with comprehensive guidance and design tools it provides solution developers simple ways to model rich and interactive social web experiences. 💬 Come to our Common social groundwork chatroom if you are interested...
@smallcircles
> A package delivery is not a form of communication
You mean a physical package, like a courier delivery? If it's a letter, it's definitely a form of communication. If it's a product that's been ordered (say a music album on physical media), we could file that under social publishing. But once we move onto offline interactions like package delivery I'm not sure we're really talking about the social web, or social software of any kind. That's more the domain of logistics software.
Yea, it may not be the best example, as indeed you might see the interaction with an automated online webshop, the basket checkout, and the order receipt a communication. But you don't say that the postman 'communicated' a package to you door.
It doesn't really matter. There are countless taxonomies one can make to abstract our real world, and they are chosen for their purpose in particular contexts. You can also say that all bits on the wire constitute communication, then there's no publishing. The taxonomy that is the preferred one, you choose. I need more semantic meaning and categorization.
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@smallcircles
> you might see the interaction with an automated online webshop, the basket checkout, and the order receipt a communication
> You can also say that all bits on the wire constitute communication, then there's no publishing
If you try to apply a taxonomy intended for social software to other domains, it's hardly surprising that it doesn't really make sense. As the old saying goes, the theory that explains everything explains nothing.
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I find the communication/ publishing binary helpful, for reasons illustrated by the thread the post you replied to was part of. Maybe give the whole thing a read so you've got the full context?
I'm open to the possibility there may be a third category of social software that is neither. But I can't yet think of a category of social software that doesn't fit neatly into one or the other.
What I am trying to say, everyone chooses the abstractions that are a best fit for their case. No one is right or wrong, and there is no "agree to disagree". It is "whatever works for you". I simply have need for different categorization than you. But it is good to hear about how other people categorize, to reflect on and learn from that.
@bhaugen
> I'm interested but get "bad gateway" on every link.
Have I slashdotted spectra.video? 😳
Maybe I ought to have found the video post from within my fediverse app and started this thread as a reply to it. But WebTorrent is supposed to help @peertube servers cope with heavy attention on 1 video. So maybe it's @Mastodon's way of fetching link previews that's overloading spectra.video?
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Me
> Have I slashdotted spectra.video?
Upon further investigation, it seems spectra.video was on the fritz already;
"Due to changes in a PeerTube data migration script, an exponentially high amount of jobs to transcode videos and move them into Object Storage has caused a high amount of tasks (roughly 10,000) in our job queue."
https://spectra.instatus.com/cmnsgpdcl098qzilvy26g50hk
So maybe a few people trying to watch the video knocked it off its perch.
This led me down a PeerTube UX rabbithole. I tried searching the URL of Ben's talk video on peertube.iridescent.nz, and I was able to find and watch it there, but only while logged in. When I tried it in a private window, to see if I could share a link to the video via our PT service, it didn't work.
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So then I thought, can I pull a copy of the video the our service, and link that? I dug around the interface but couldn't find any way to do it. Seems I have to download it from spectra.video, then upload it to peertube.iridescent.nz.
It would be really handy to have a button that allows me to pull transcoded copies of a video directly from another PT service (with an appropriate set of permissions controlling that on their end)
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@spectra
> Hey sorry, we're working on this the best we can
Not at all, if anyone is owed an apology it's you folks, for having your ailing server slashdotted. The warning message was right there on the page when I copied the URL.
If I'd really been thinking, I would have downloaded the video, uploaded it to my own PT account, and shared that URL to set the scene for my rant (done now). Sorry I didn't think of that, and for any inconvenience caused to you or your members.
Strypey
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
🫧 socialcoding..
bhaugen
Spectra Video