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. A major update in late 2022 followed my #twittermigration to Mastodon.
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.
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 - first post: Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob (TwitterMigration, day 3).
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:
(2022 Update):
Good overview here:
(2022 Update)
"the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm" - so there are pros and cons for choosing both large, general instances or small, focused ones. More as I found it: Am I on the right Mastodon instance?.
See also:
I crossposted everything for a few days, then tried to use moaparty's "trigger" hashtag to crosspost selected content, firstly in both directions and then principally from Mastodon (my principal home) to Twitter.
That didn't work, so now I just post different stuff to different places. My "noob" post sets out the "city vs country village" metaphor which I still find useful. See also:
... Twitter is not a Mastodon replacement. They're different places to do different things: on Mastodon there's "less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts... a lot more murmuring conversation", with lots of content hidden beind content warnings. The world probably needs both - Twitter, after all, does bring "crucial social and civic issues to mainstream attention", which will be harder on Mastodon even with the same sized userbase
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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.
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…
I discovered the Fediverse as I kicked MyHub.ai’s shiny new tyres in early 2020, and I’m kicking myself now for not diving in then.
Writing a chapter for a book on Personal Knowledge Graphs made me rethink MyHub.ai, and led to a new collective intelligence pilot project with the founders of massive.wiki.
I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…
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…
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…
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…
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