Hey #lawfedi friends, every day a new person in #law or #legal adjacent fields joints the #fediverse and isn't aware of Lawstodon - the legal community directory for #Mastodon (and eventually the fediverse more broadly).
Feel free to add yourself, claim your profile, etc. I have been using it when I send recommendations for folks looking for practitioners in specific practice areas and it works a treat!
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
"If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook
"What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls”
As a reader, do you prefer when people give you random books as gifts, or do you prefer getting a gift card to a bookstore (so you can pick the book)? Just curious.
SPays Wikl atly puiiil dLLUUiL i s TREAIVEL S The First 25 to Federate I this first phase we are partnering with 25 publishers and creators to help them federate their Flipboard accounts and gather feedback from people across the Fediverse. This includes a range of publishers covering global news, tech, music, gaming, travel and science as well as a few content creators like Erin Brockovich and Jefferson Graham. We are also federating several non-profits dedicated to advancing non-partisan journalism and combating misinformation. These include The News Literacy Project, The 74 and The Conversation. Finally, we are federating Medium’s account on Flipboard where they regularly feature great stories from their best writers. Here's the full list: BSEE P'STGMPANY SEMAFOR IR s . %% | @8 Medium DIGIDAY scienceatert: ®Polygon Frommers ® MENTAL FLOSS Pitchfork Rerinery2s THEIROOT <
New blog post: Understanding ActivityPub - Part 4: Threads
A first detailed look into how Threads implements ActivityPub. Learn about the data that is shared (or not), an interesting implementation of HTTP signatures, and Threads' take on quote posts in ActivityPub.
So, here's a problem I have with Mastodon: let's say I make a post and someone replies with a racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic comment. I can block that comment, but that only hides it for me. Other people who come to my page will see the comment, and believe that I tacitly condone that behaviour. I'd like to be able to delete the reply from my replies list entirely. Or at least hide replies from blocked accounts. And, yes, I know that wouldn't delete it from the originating server.
if Mastodon treated all replies like reddit does (giving us votes but not boosts or favorites), we could down vote this stuff into oblivion.
I really want to see Mastodon and lemmy or kbin merge. hashtags function like subreddits. eventually all content should be a POST on the fediverse. all this combined functionality would make us better than any closed platform could be. the #fediverse should be the attention layer for the open web.
It’s been quite a week for news in the fediverse, with the news that Threads has started their process of incrementally adding federation to Threads taking most of the attention. But lots of other great stuff happened in the fediverse as well:
Threads
Threads has started their implementation process of federation and adding ActivityPub to Threads. The first careful step is that a few Threads profiles are now visible in the fediverse, and that posts made by them can be viewed from fediverse servers. For now only the accounts for the profiles of Threads head Adam Mosseri and 2 Threads engineers are visible. Replies to their post made by a fediverse account does not federate back yet. Mosseri says that the process of adding federation will be done gradually in steps, and that he expects that this process will take most of the year. In another post, Mosseri also notes that federation will likely be opt-in for Threads accounts. This is in contrast with most fediverse software, which federates with all other fediverse servers by default, and federation is opt-out (blocking).
PeerTube
Framasoft announced their plans for PeerTube for the next year, in an extensive blog. I also hosted a livestreamed AMA with Framasoft for the community to ask all their questions about PeerTube, and it turned out amazing, with lots of great information. The entire AMA can be rewatched here. I’ll do a larger writeup on all the PeerTube news next week, but for now already the highlights: PeerTube is doubling their dev team, creating a mobile app, and will work on better moderation tools, and a review and redesign of the user interface. Stay tuned!
In other news
Lemmy has released their latest big update, v0.19. In this blog post they go over all the changes they’ve made. Two major new features are improved post ranking and instance blocking for individual accounts. With the new feed sorting of scaled sort, the community size where the post is made gets taken into account. This allows for smaller communities to have better visibility, and should increase their reach. People can now block entire instances as well, which should provide a significant increase in the ability for people to curate their digital spaces.
Discourse has been working on joining the fediverse for a while, and their latest update shows how far along they are. A Discourse category can now follow any actor in the fediverse. Check out their video to show this in practice, with federation between both different Discourses as well as Mastodon. This is a major step in expanding the fediverse, and worth keeping your eyes on.
The links
FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.
Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.
Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.
Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.
Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.
IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.
Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.
Other articles
I wrote other articles as well this week, check it out!
For me it was me looking up alternative social media platforms on Google, as I never had any liking towards the mainstream social media platforms in any way.
Then I chance upon this "Mastodon" and am intrigued by it.
I sign up for it....
I have been here 2 years and counting! :blobcatgiggle:
Happy birthday to the accidental typo, John Mastodon! Started when a writer misread the Mastodon account that was banned from Twitter as "John Mastodon" instead of "Join Mastodon", John Mastodon may not be real but thanks for the memes and everything else. Let's celebrate John Mastodon's birthday by tooting about what you love most about the #fediverse. #JohnMastodon#Mastodon
Well this would make #ActivityPub support on #Threads pretty pointless. It’ll mean the vast majority of their users will be defederated by default and have to opt into the #Fediverse. Defeats the point @mosseri.
Just blocked #threadsnet and you should, too! Don't let #facebook do an "embrace, extend, extinguish" on #activitypub and the #fediverse - search for "threads.net", select an account and do this.
Handmade.social welcomes all handmade artisans to join the Fediverse community. Create an account for your business or shop and showcase your unique creations to a broader audience. If promoting handcrafted items is your goal, consider making handmade.social the home for your artisanal brand.
While I am an active critic of distributed privatisation (i.e., #Fediverse as we know it), I will still choose that over corporate privatisation if public service internet is just not a thing yet. Why?
• Corporations under capitalism have but one guiding tenet: the profit motive.
• Social media corporations profit from advertisement operations — especially data harvesting.
• It is their objective, therefore, to maximise profits by maximising data exploitation in every possible way.
Glad to see the entire #fediverse roadmap for Threads laid out. Mastodon and other Fediverse users will be able to follow Threads users and vice versa. You will also be able to see comments from Fediverse users on your federated posts in Threads.
The long term goal is to allow people to take their followers with them from Threads to other Fediverse apps. The last one is huge and wasn’t on my radar. 🤯