Relevant Overviews
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Zettelkasten
- Fediverse
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
- Communications Tactics
- Psychology
- Productivity
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business
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
blog.datproject.org
An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "develo…
tinysubversions.com
Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…
thenextweb.com
"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…
Like
algorithm,
social media,
transparency,
twitter,
bias,
machine learning,
open source,
fediverse,
elon musk
hapgood.us
I suspect this will be a canonical text for me moving forward with myhub.ai.Mike Caulfield in 2015, when my first hub was only about 2 years old, had also "been experimenting with another form of social media called federated wiki... instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation…
Like
social media,
knowledge management,
garden,
curation,
stream,
wiki,
myhub,
2ndbrain,
zettelkasten,
fediverse,
memex,
fedwiki
crossposter.masto.donte.com.br
allows you to connect a Mastodon account and a Twitter account and enable cross-posting between them. You can choose some options, such as if you want to post boosts, unlisted toots or replies.
davidwolfpaw.com
re-reading some articles about Mastodon from early 2017 identifies some common misconceptions:It Isn’t “True” Federation": Mastodon instances ... can block other sites or control who has access, they aren’t truly federating" - a "free speech absolutism" argument "complaining that you want to say things and you want to forc…
forum.ghost.org
Thoughts on adding activitypub to ghose ' relevant also to myhub."There is rss-to-activitypub 11 i... the only thing Ghost would be federating is the posts themselves ... if you want to federate comments too, then this only address half the issue... I would propose is something in the middle that: pulls in content from Ghost and pushes i…
bettermarketing.pub
Interesting piece on the reverse side of the network effect: the more people leave, the faster the remainder leave. So what will make people leave?Gen Z want privacy, hate bullying/speech, don’t like ads and think "Facebook is for moms and grandparents""Millennials Are Ready to Ditch... too old to bicker with strangers... [and] stil…
commonspub.org
"ActivityPub gives applications a shared protocol and syntax that they can use to communicate with each other... [but] writing software that implements federation logic and data structues has been technically challenging"Bonfire provides developers "a kit that manages the data and federation out of the box... enable end users to dep…
publicinfrastructure.org
One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden w…
www.techdirt.com
Content moderation "will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone".any moderation will upset the moderated no moderation will upset those who don't like spam, harassment, etcpushing moderation to the users puts th…
writefreely.org
Reach outside your own site with federation via ActivityPub. WriteFreely lets anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any ActivityPub-enabled service follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with their followers. See how it works.
conf.tube
After pointing out that mainstream - ie centralised - social platforms cannot moderate effectively due to scale, then introduces fediverse/activitypub-based platforms. Will they face same moderation problems as the mainstream if/when they grow?Takes Gab's unsuccessful move into fediverse as an example: "Almost immediately, Gab was met by…
knightcolumbia.org
Given the myriad problems posed by social media platforms - content moderation, disinformation, censorship, privacy, anti-trust - this article "proposes an entirely different approach... that enables more free speech, while minimizing ... trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts... also might help users ... regain cont…
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social media,
blockchain,
privacy,
open web,
moderation,
censorship,
antitrust,
fediverse,
solid,
filecoin
www.eff.org
"adversarial interoperability... create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them... once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace" now stifled by legal means by Big Tech, which "climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them".EFF sees re…
backdrifting.net
"corporate-run social media implies a structure [and]... content limits the users have no say in, which favor harmful [content] ... while inhibiting freedom of expression. ... the next platform has the same problems ... “I’ll just build my own platform” leads to ... “alt-tech” platforms ... to host right-wing extremist content... So what does…
www.wsj.com
Didn't know: "Prominent conservative donor Rebekah Mercer is among the company’s financial backers"Interesting point: one of the main reasons many are on FB/Twitter is to troll other people - will it be harder to get people to come back to an app where everyone agrees with them?
www.economist.com
Overview of efforts to put data back into the hands of people. "platforms’ business models depend on network effects and scale to keep users engaged and to sell more advertising... a culture of virality that... poisons public discourse." Moreover, their data dominance is stifling competition & innovation. " So trustbusters are o…
mathewlowry.medium.com
What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?
Think
creativity,
productivity,
content strategy,
knowledge management,
curation,
myhub,
post-alpha,
zettelkasten,
fediverse,
personal
mathewlowry.medium.com
What did I learn from Hubbing 50 resources and writing five editions on disinformation during the US elections?
www.nytimes.com
Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.
Like
social media,
filter bubble,
polarization,
censorship,
disinformation,
echo chamber,
us2020,
fediverse,
splinternet,
fleeting
fediverse.party
"Fediverse is an autonomous universe where power and data are decentralized and scattered across multiple lands, while mainstream corporate websites each made themselves an emperor of their huge land, surrounded it with high fences, and enforce all the decision-making, data control and censorship"
www.wired.com
"Our digital public sphere has been failing ... [but] History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces."Filter Bubble author Pariser hearkens back to Walt Whitman's creation of NY's Green Park, when "New York City had no public parks ...only walled commercial pleasure gardens for those who could af…
jeremydormitzer.com
ActivityPub separates content from platform. Posts from one platform propagate to other platforms, and users don’t need an account on every platform ... for ex., YouTube clone PeerTube and Mastodon both implement it, so is Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B's new videos will appear in A's Mastodon feed. A can even comment on it f…
www.cjr.org
In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…
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social media,
media,
filter bubble,
publicsphere,
wikipedia,
open web,
radio,
disinformation,
indieweb,
interoperability
www.newyorker.com
we’ve grown wary of the so-called attention econom... But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to disengage from it completely... a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians ... the IndieWeb ... developing their own social-media platforms... preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad... Facebook and I…
fortheweb.webfoundation.org
The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.
www.niemanlab.org
platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…
medium.com
Blockchains and tokens provide two crucial puzzle pieces for .. the decentralized internet... Blockchains ... allow many different people to ... agree upon information without having to trust each other... Tokens, meanwhile, enable incentives across national and company lines... to create private economies around open platforms...
www.theatlantic.com
The open internet is a powerful tool in the fight against discriminatory mass surveillance... democracy’s antidote to authoritarianism... where the voices of dissidence that have always been watched, can watch and talk back.
Relevant Overviews
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Zettelkasten
- Fediverse
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
- Communications Tactics
- Psychology
- Productivity
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business