Context: this is an Overview page (not a Service Page) about a topic which emerged from the 5th in a series of newsletters focused on #US2020 #disinformation. More: Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud.
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. Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:
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.
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.
Nevertheless, this still requires a 'mass decamp'. 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.
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:
Aggregates profiles across all cooperating Fediverse servers to help new user find out "where (most) of my friends are" by user providing access to contact list. Will by definition accelerate early successes, but will lower the barrier to joining.
Possibly even allow user - once she's joined on platform - to follow friends across platforms.
Good overview here:
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Highlighted Resources tagged #fediverse or #openweb follow below, or jump straight to all of them:
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Here are the latest 9 resources I've Highlighted about Fediverse (Overview). There's more reading over here.
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…
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…
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…
"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…
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?
Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.
"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…
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…
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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