Notes for FediForum meetup

The FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little over a month from now.

Why don't people switch to Mastodon?

• It's hard to use.
• Twitter beat RSS because it was so damned hard to subscribe to a feed in RSS, and with Twitter it was a single click. Mastodon has the same problem. You might want to think of coming up with a Mastodon Lite that trades off some of the decentralization for ease of use. Not sure how that would work. But I promise you — you all are having the same problems we had with RSS. People wouldn't work together, Twitter blew right through that.
• If you want to get an idea why adoption is slow for Mastodon, take a typical task, responding to a post, and write down the actual steps you have to go through. It'll be a long list, and every one of those steps is a reason someone will give up and go back to Bluesky or Twitter.

Does it matter if people use Bluesky?

• What are you actually accomplishing by using Bluesky?
• It's not decentralized. Bluesky could shut down any developer or all developers any time they want.
• It's not replaceable. Pretty sure it never will be.
• People get confused because they have an API. Twitter has had an API since inception. It broke when Musk took over, but it works again. Bluesky breaks developers too, and if they want to be part of the "open web" why didn't they just use the existing standards of the web.
• Bluesky at some point decided to clone Twitter, which is fine — it's actually a better twitter than Twitter is. But once they did that, it becaume impossible for it to be federated, because Twitter has features that can't be federated, that depend on it being centralized. Again the realities of software kick in, you can't do what's impossible.

Start over

• The only way imho to achieve your goal is to start over.
• Start with a simple to install server and make it peer-to-peer at the server level from the beginning.
• No features go in that don't work in that mode. Now see what you can make that's social.

Who owns Bluesky?

• You have to start thinking about who is behind these companies.
• Mastodon I believe is what it appears to be. I don't think you have to worry about anyone breaking developers there.
• But Bluesky appears to be a pretty normal tech startup, except we know much less about its backers than we usually do.
• They disclosed a $15 million investment two years ago. Have they raised more money? No idea. Do we know who their original backers are? We know who the founders of the Blockchain Capital fund are, but that's all that's publicly known, as far as I can tell.

Open social web

• You should leave out the "open" part — because it's implied by "web."
• And imho neither of the products is connected to the web.
• There's more to being on the web than being able to use the product in a web browser.

Why do I keep saying this stuff?

• Because I think a social web wouldn't just be nice to have, I think we need it, last year, not next year. (Actually we needed it twenty years ago.)
• You guys have been wandering.
• And the biggest flaw in your culture is that you don't listen.
• If you want to bootstrap something of significance, you should always be looking for clues of things that will work.
• Just coming out with something that's a labor of love basically what you have now does not help you find the magic spot where it grows virally on its own.
• I speak from decades of experience trying to do products that do what you say you want, sometimes with success. Sometimes with huge success. I know what it's like to find the sweet spot at the right time.
• But I say things you don't want to hear. Like this — you have not found the answer from a product standpoint.
• When we look back at this I want to be sure people know I tried.
• And ultimately I think we will succeed and I think some of you folk could help. 🙂

A pair of good rules

• Things that can be decentralized should be.
• Things that should be centralized should be.

Want to comment?

• I recommend using the Mastodon version of this post.

• Mastodon.

• WordPress

• RSS feed.

• My blog.

🚨UPDATE: TikTok uninstalls surge 150% amid US takeover concerns, per eMarketer… Can’t wait for new Loops app in Apple App Store!

EDIT: it is now live here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/loops-by-pixelfed/id6499375182

cc: @dansup @loops

Loops is Now on the App Store

https://blog.joinloops.org/loops-is-now-on-the-app-store/

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warns AI agents embedded in OSes are eroding end-to-end encryption's real-world security, despite its mathematical soundness. With root-like access to messages & data, they bypass E2EE isolation—urgent rethink needed! 🔒🤖❌
https://cyberinsider.com/signal-president-warns-ai-agents-are-making-encryption-irrelevant/

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