Relevant Overviews
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Fediverse
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Communications Tactics
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
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Overview: Fediverse
This topic emerged from the 5th in a series of newsletters focused on #US2020 #disinformation. A major update in late 2022 followed my #twittermigration to Mastodon, and a smaller one a year later with the sudden deletion of my Mastodon server, followed by the arrival of Threads.
What?
Fediverse: collection of interoperable social networks built on Open Web standards. ActivityPub standard, for example, is used by (inter alia) Twitter-lookalike Mastodon and YouTube-lookalike PeerTube, and sometime in 2024 newcomers Bluesky and Threads (tbc!).
Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:
- Mastodon/PeerTube are not owned and controlled by corporations. Anyone can launch and operate a Mastodon or PeerTube server, just like anyone can set up an email server and exchange emails with others using the email standard.
- The person who creates a server sets its rules (privacy, hate speech, etc).
- Users on any Mastodon/PeerTube server can not only interact with users on other Mastodon/PeerTube servers, they can interact across Fediverse platforms. For example:
- if Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B’s PeerTube videos will appear in A’s Mastodon feed,
- user A can even comment on the video from within Mastodon, without visiting PeerTube or having a PeerTube account.
This would be like if my Twitter account followed someone's Facebook page, yet we could still interact seamlessly from our platform of preference. That’s impossible as Twitter & Facebook are walled gardens. Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are not – this is the Open Web on social.
See also: Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, providing social media users with control over their data through personal knowledge graphs.
So what? New possibilities for new social platforms
While each Fediverse server is a community with its own rules, they're not walled gardens. This helps solve the vicious circle problem facing new platforms (why join a network where there are so few people on it? Hence noone joins it, so numbers stay low. So noone joins it): people don’t need to join the same social network, they just have to join any Fediverse network.
Reality check: Servers must be bidirectionally linked manually? Mastodon apparently suffers from "the singleton problem... [as it's] difficult to convince ... a major server to [federate] ... with a minor one... three Mastodon servers contain almost 60% of the known Mastodon population" - Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications.
See also: adversarial interoperability - another part of the solution to this problem.
Let's do better
If progressives decamp, they should decamp to Fediverse alternatives.
The EU Institutions could help: by simply joining and posting to Fediverse platforms in addition to Facebook/Twitter, they could:
- encourage the emergence of alternatives to today’s toxic US platforms,
- add a new dimension to the EU's strategy towards them.
Return of the Splinternet?
Nevertheless, wide Fediverse adoption still requires a 'mass decamp'. There have already been a couple of false dawns.
US2020
Cue the US2020 elections, following which "US conservative leaders may have triggered the sort an en masse decamp that Facebook/Twitter alternatives require to take off".
However they're not moving to Fediverse platforms, so this may simply return us to the #splinternet (pre-platform social media), but with even more political polarisation.
2022 update: Elon Musk and the #TwitterMigration
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter triggered a huge uptick of interest in Mastodon, leading me to finally take the plunge after 2 years of faffing about. I was optimistic (my first post was literally Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob), but within a few months I'd discovered an unhappy truth: the current infrasructure simply doesn't deliver content properly reliably.
I'd point you to the mid-2022 toot where I pointed this out, but (as if to illustrate my point) it's gone: in November my server simply disappeared, taking all my content and connections with it, without warning. I managed to dig out a screenshot of that toot from my phone and include it in All my toots gone.
As can be seen from that post, by then I'd created a Bluesky account and was promptly followed by Satan. I haven't bothered since.
Also in 2022: just as I was writing a Fediverse strategy report for another EC department, the EU's Data Protection Supervisor and the EC's IT department launched social.network.europa.eu, the EU's own Mastodon server. The result was underwhelming to say the least, with accounts limited to the institutions, rather than the people working in them. Someone clearly never read Euan Semple's "Organisations don't tweet, people do", missing a huge opportunity that news organisations started embracing in 2022: setting up a Fediverse server for their journalists to prove that they are their journalists, not an imposter.
Soon afterwards the EU Bubble's own server - https://eupolicy.social/ - was launched. As I pointed out at the time, this had real potential:
it should be very easy for eupolicy.social to avoid creating a Brussels Bubble within the Fediverse. In the past I spent a lot of time exploring how us denizens of the Brussels Bubble could outreach to national conversations online. In the Fediverse, that’s upside down: rather than building bridges outwards, we can pull national conversations into the Bubble, simply by following the right people.
-Am I on the right Mastodon instance? (November 2022)
Back then they had 720 active accounts. 13 months later that had shrunk to 330. The EU's social.network.europa.eu has 18. It wasn't a good year.
Threads, Bluesky, and more
Literally one month after my Mastodon server disappeared, Instagram's "Twitter-killer" Threads arrived in Europe, announcing their intention - like Bluesky - to join the Fediverse, so I dug out my never-used Instagram account to kick the tyres.
As discussed during a ZNLive chat one week before, this should make 2024 at least potentially interesting:
- so far they should all use the same slogan: "We're like Twitter, but with none of your friends", so it's difficult to see people and organisations who rely on reaching an audience abandoning the incumbents anytime soon
- the hope is that their openness (if it happens) stimulates innovation in the wider Fediverse, so we get new forms of social media rather than more Twitter clones: there are already plenty of other ActivityPub-compatible networks, as well as alternative protocols like Nostr.
- all this could have huge implications for our own websites, where it might become both easier and more valuable to develop local communities of interest, networked into the wider Fediverse of decentralised social media, particularly with AI support.
---
Highlighted Resources tagged OR(#fediverse, #open web, #bluesky, #mastodon, #threads, #nostr) follow below:
Relevant resources
plutopsyche.medium.com
An interesting starterguide to Bluesky, written when it was "still in beta... though the application has recently passed 1 million downloads". Some interesting points:culture: "early adopters tended to be people from marginalized communities who were fleeing outright persecution" on other platforms; they all got invite codes &q;…
mathewlowry.medium.com
My late October 2024 newsletter introduces my ongoing work exploring #AI4Communities, and provides some of the resources going into the next version.
ruben.verborgh.org
"Decentralizing the Web means people ... store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need... requires major changes in the way we develop applications... In this post, I discuss three paradigm shifts a decentralized Web brings"Rather than "accept package deals we cannot customize", redecentralisin…
www.nytimes.com
According to Mark Zuckerberg, "Consumers no longer control their social-media feeds. Meta’s algorithm... is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with... future feeds [will] show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”" Fortunately, "Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and …
substack.com
Brander with a great intro to the role Nostr could play in tomorrow's online landscape. A choice of architecturesWalled gardens of surveillance capitalismHe starts by walking us through the various architectures, starting with that "of a typical app: a big centralized server in the cloud supporting many clients... grants the server tota…
bsky.social
As AI drives a flood of new content, "algorithms to help people sort through information must evolve rapidly" - ie, we need AI to solve AI-created problems.Today's algorithms belong to for-profit platforms, mainly social media, and lack transparency: while you can influence it through who you follow, "your ability to truly cust…
sub.club
"you should be able to ask your most passionate followers to support you with a premium subscription... ask your community members to support your instance financially ... use our simple API to build bots and other integrations that help pay for your Fediverse idea". From Techcrunch: bult by "the makers of Mammoth, the Mastodon app …
blog.elenarossini.com
"Friendica only has about 14,559 total users ... 1692 are “monthly active users” ... [but] Friendica users are incredibly passionate about it... features-rich, unique and brilliant".These include "add and follow RSS feeds and BlueSky accounts", which is enough to pique my interest. Elena Rossini is a new user, so she links to a…
www.niemanlab.org
Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "…
Like
community,
news,
filter bubble,
publicsphere,
local,
fediverse,
ai4communities,
talia stroud,
eli pariser
darnell.day
Loforo is "an ActivityPub Tumblr alternative whose vibe reminds me of the early days of Tumblr... second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress". The author lists some areas of improvement, and claims that if Loforo can implement them it'll "inherit Tumblr's fallen crown [and] ... sur…
publicinfrastructure.org
The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.
Like
algorithm,
social media,
regulation,
community,
privacy,
publicsphere,
moderation,
fediverse,
adversarial interoperability,
cozyweb,
pluriverse,
vsop,
pubhub,
robert putnam,
idpi,
ai4communities
activitypub.ghost.org
A report from Ghost on ActivityPub integration, starting with a nice intro for newcomers: "HTML is a standard for displaying text and images on a computer. Email is a standard for sending and receiving messages privately. ActivityPub, then, is a standard for sending and receiving content publicly.", and followed by some musings on the di…
www.blog-pat.ch
Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & f…
www.augment.ink
Anuj Ahooja asks, on Threads' first birthday, the "existential question... Why does Threads exist? ... an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But ... a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose... [unfortunat…
www.platformer.news
Casey first gets the Perplexity.ai scandal off his chest: "the Clearview AI of generative artificial intelligence companies: scraping billions of pieces of data without permission and daring courts to stop it. Like Clearview, Perplexity’s core innovation is ethical...".Is the Fediverse a solution? He likes it, but "a partial one... …
www.theverge.com
"Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms... [but] you can’t reply to replies “yet,”". Meanwhile, Fediverse integration expands to another 100 countries "and hope to roll it out everywhere soon".
www.blog-pat.ch
"Channels enable any user to create a curated feed with a mix of post type, hashtags, lists, filters and mutes. Customised timelines which anyone can post to via their app or web UI, or by using a dedicated hashtag or emoji."This exists already outside the Fediverse: "The Farcaster app, Warpcast, has a fully formed and fast growing …
www.augment.ink
Now that Threads has joined the Fediverse, "I can follow Threads users that opt-in to Fediverse integration through my Mastodon account" - Anuj's journey, which apparently exceeded expectations, despite - or perhaps because of - his many issues with Threads (which I share): defaulting to For You, an impoverished chroni feed, no list…
joanwestenberg.com
"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…
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ai,
curation,
open source,
rss,
disinformation,
posse,
fediverse,
signal2noise,
joan westenberg,
ai4communities
nostr.com
"A simple, open protocol that enables a truly censorship-resistant and global social network."They're clearly gunning for ActivityPub, with a secondary page entitled Why isn't Mastodon good enough? The key point made is that while Mastodon was OK when "server owners could be trusted to be cooperative, but it doesn't r…
www.linkedin.com
One of the snippets from a ZNLive interview I did in December 2023: "emerging social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky face a humorous yet real challenge - they're like "Twitter, but without your friends."With the European launch of Threads, the question arises: Can it offer a unique appeal to draw users? Will [they]...…
mathewlowry.medium.com
Exactly one year after publishing Am I on the right Mastodon instance?, I discover that I wasn't. At least I got a good image out of ChatGPT for the occasion, for a change.
rushkoff.medium.com
One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."
Like
social media,
community,
identity,
publicsphere,
mobocracy,
mastodon,
twitter migration,
quit,
douglas rushkoff
commonplace.doubleloop.net
"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…
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curation,
liquid democracy,
decentralised,
myhub,
fediverse,
activitypub,
agora,
flancian,
digital garden
mathewlowry.medium.com
The second in my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts exploring collective intelligence looks at the role of decentralised social networks: "A personalised, decentralised Social Knowledge Graph for each user multiplies the knowledge available to them via a trusted network of Followers and Friends, and creating collaborative possibilities more akin to w…
mathewlowry.medium.com
The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."
www.manton.org
"Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account... Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog ... someone can follow your blog posts".As a result "you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your ow…
fasiha.github.io
Yoyogi "breaks from the timeline... elevates the author and centers the thread".Pick a Fediverse account (Mastodon for now, Pleroma and Misskey next) that you’re following and see just their threads, in a columnar interface.You need to login and give it permission: the accounts you follow are presented at left, allowing you to select one…
mathewlowry.medium.com
My second post following my personal #twittermigration: "the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm".Not that I like algorithms, but "Apart from hashtags, ,,, your server’s Local and Federated timelines [are your] primary discovery channels when y…
Relevant Overviews
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Fediverse
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Communications Tactics
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business