If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Such events are usually followed by a scrambling into a variety of different platforms, where you inevitably lose some people as you have to make a choice which one to stay on. This happened before. But it doesn’t have to happen again. Use the federated web. Join Mastodon.
As a Mastodon user, I think this is my main issue with the way it is marketed to normal users. For most people, FB/Twitter going offline seems unlikely. But with Mastodon, the likelihood of your instance going dark is much higher, especially considering that joinmastodon.org’s guides recommend choosing smaller/more niche instances. Once the instance is offline, you’re SOL with respect to all your posts and follow/following lists, and regular users are not made aware of this.
Additionally, I think many new users will hop onto an instance without considering the fact that the instance admin has complete control over the instance, including access to DMs and private posts.
Federation has its benefits, but I’m not sure if federated services will ever be approachable by normal people.
For most people, FB/Twitter going offline seems unlikely.
If FB or Twitter shut down, everyone will have moved a way long ago. MySpace still exists. These decentralized platforms always advertise resilience as their main feature but they quite often are actually worse than centralized systems. How often have you found a torrent with no seeds? If I host a small program on github or on a torrent, which one is more likely to still be around in 10 years?
I think the main difference is control. Your content may be hosted on one of these big platforms for ages if they allow it but if they decide your content is not ok you have no options left. With a decentralized system, no one can ban you from your own server unless it violates local laws.
Agreed. I say the resilience aspect of these networks is more about the service itself remaining available if any instances shut down. For example, if Facebook shuts down, you don’t have any other way to use Facebook. But if https://mastodon.social goes down, you can just hop to another instance and Mastodon again. But by advertising the network by implying that mastodon will never die, people might be mislead into thinking that their data will stay online.
But with Mastodon, the likelihood of your instance going dark is much higher, especially considering that joinmastodon.org’s guides recommend choosing smaller/more niche instances. Once the instance is offline, you’re SOL with respect to all your posts and follow/following lists, and regular users are not made aware of this.
My home instance was down most of today. And while I was searching around for some info about what was going on I just thought to myself “yeah, this could be the end for that instance, and my account, and all of my posts”.
I’ll be sure to back up my follow list in future, but this has put into focus just how transient and fragile these federated services can be.
Would I like more Mastodon and ActivityPub propaganda without much real substance and cute elephant friend pictures, reiterating how great federation is? You bet your top dollar I would! Take my upvotes, Mastodon blog! And congrats on self-hosting your blog and moving the propaganda machine off Medium!
“If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Such events are usually followed by a scrambling into a variety of different platforms, where you inevitably lose some people as you have to make a choice which one to stay on. This happened before. But it doesn’t have to happen again. Use the federated web. Join Mastodon.”
Adding to your comment, this is particularly such bullshit. More like you won’t have many friends, esp in real life, if you’re on Mastodon instead of those sites. The people on those major sites also use more than one. If one shuts down, they almost always have another way to contact them. The shutdowns also don’t usually happen overnight. There’s often time to see things are in decline. For instance, there’s plenty of posts about Twitter’s financial troubles where anyone with sense will have some other account on the side. It’s also amusing to see them saying “if X shuts down” after seeing a headline about Instagram alone being worth $100 billion, watching Facebook’s revenues grow over time despite all its threats, Slack doing what IRC isn’t in growth/profits, and knowing that previous shutdowns sent users to sites like Facebook instead of P2P software or Mastodon.
The article talked of companies disappearing. That can happen due to users leaving or financial reasons. Twitter’s money problems & mismanagement are a warning sign that should signal users to have another option. That’s all I was saying.
Sorry, my reply was more opaque than I meant it to be. I think the toxic things Twitter is doing to chase a profit are why so many people are leaving. I don’t think most users cared about their financial situation other than to wonder why the service was free.
Oh OK. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s even more ridiculous when a company gets a nearly impossible amount of users, has tons of money to make off them, and just… lets them float away…
You’d think rational self-interest wouldve made them take action sooner. Not how it often works in practice, though.
Amazing how this article can talk about how great the fediverse is (a network that exists for nearly a decade now) without once using the word or mentioning its history.
What makes you say that? (Well, other than the fact that I guess it’s strictly “good” for the Mastodon brand if Mastodon and only Mastodon becomes identified with ActivityPub federation, in the same way that it’s “good” for the kleenex brand if kleenex becomes identified with all tissue paper)
What are key differences between ActivityPub and RSS+WebSub/pubsubhubbub? Its spec is long and verbose, I can’t tell at a glance what does it represent. I see that it supports likes and subscription lists, but what are other differences to RSS? Does it support comments? Is it just for twitter-like websites, or suitable for blogs and reddit-like websites too?
What I like in ActivityPub is that it’s RDF-based. It’s cool technology based on romantic ideas of expert systems, Prolog, rule-based AI, etc.
Besides mastodon and pleroma which are twitter clones using ActivityPub, there’s also peertube for videos, PixelFed for images and Plume for blogging. Those projects are all pretty new though, so it’s too early to say whether ActivityPub works well for this kind of stuff, but it looks promising imo
RSS+Webmention can be used to realize a very rudamentary version of federation (I’m currently developing a platform and testing simple federation using RSS+WM).
However, ActivityPub allows much more versatility and provides the endpoint with a low-overhead, machine-readable version of actions (AP is not like RSS in that stuff operates as feeds, rather, it’s actors doing actions on other actors or objects)
As much as I would like a decentralised web to take over. I think I see a major issue with ActivityPub. Apparently, search doesn’t appear to be specified. And one advantage big centralised services will have is the ability to search all their network. For example, I would like to search all the network for a specific username, keyword, etc… Without that, it’s like going back to the net before google search.
Yeah, I’m curious if ActivityPub can support arbitrary aggregation over multiple nodes. It seems to me that in this kind of architecture, maybe nodes ought to support publishing changes over websocket to interested listeners. You could have aggregation nodes doing things like search, or post rankings, which could attach themselves in this fashion. Plus this would have the added benefit that if you didn’t like a particular aggregator’s implementation (a hotness formula for example, or search indexing algorithm) you could switch to a different one.
I was thinking about peer tube for example. It would be very nice if I was able to search only for the current node or on all fediverse for the things I’d like to find. Like niche programming languages for example. The goal of publishing something is to be read, even by bots. Also I’m not sure a federated network would be more robust in face of bots. Pretty sure it would be the opposite, because each node would have less data to analyze for bot detection. Still by the end, I’m pretty sure the only good solution would be to have a global “Web of Trust”.
Ahh, I see. 99% of my social media us is to connect with people I already know (or have in my extended network). For that use case, it’s a feature to be less easily discovered.
For publishing content it’s definitely the opposite; you want it to be found. Difficult though because now you’re competing for attention with spammers.
Love the tech, going to donate. Web is moving the opposite direction though. Even email is having a rough time. Quite a bit of the communication moved to Slack, social networks, chat etc. IRC & RSS are having a rougher time.
As a Mastodon user, I think this is my main issue with the way it is marketed to normal users. For most people, FB/Twitter going offline seems unlikely. But with Mastodon, the likelihood of your instance going dark is much higher, especially considering that joinmastodon.org’s guides recommend choosing smaller/more niche instances. Once the instance is offline, you’re SOL with respect to all your posts and follow/following lists, and regular users are not made aware of this.
Additionally, I think many new users will hop onto an instance without considering the fact that the instance admin has complete control over the instance, including access to DMs and private posts.
Federation has its benefits, but I’m not sure if federated services will ever be approachable by normal people.
If FB or Twitter shut down, everyone will have moved a way long ago. MySpace still exists. These decentralized platforms always advertise resilience as their main feature but they quite often are actually worse than centralized systems. How often have you found a torrent with no seeds? If I host a small program on github or on a torrent, which one is more likely to still be around in 10 years?
I think the main difference is control. Your content may be hosted on one of these big platforms for ages if they allow it but if they decide your content is not ok you have no options left. With a decentralized system, no one can ban you from your own server unless it violates local laws.
Agreed. I say the resilience aspect of these networks is more about the service itself remaining available if any instances shut down. For example, if Facebook shuts down, you don’t have any other way to use Facebook. But if https://mastodon.social goes down, you can just hop to another instance and Mastodon again. But by advertising the network by implying that mastodon will never die, people might be mislead into thinking that their data will stay online.
My home instance was down most of today. And while I was searching around for some info about what was going on I just thought to myself “yeah, this could be the end for that instance, and my account, and all of my posts”.
I’ll be sure to back up my follow list in future, but this has put into focus just how transient and fragile these federated services can be.
Would I like more Mastodon and ActivityPub propaganda without much real substance and cute elephant friend pictures, reiterating how great federation is? You bet your top dollar I would! Take my upvotes, Mastodon blog! And congrats on self-hosting your blog and moving the propaganda machine off Medium!
I’m @JordiGH@mathstodon.xyz in case anyone wants to say hi.
“If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Such events are usually followed by a scrambling into a variety of different platforms, where you inevitably lose some people as you have to make a choice which one to stay on. This happened before. But it doesn’t have to happen again. Use the federated web. Join Mastodon.”
Adding to your comment, this is particularly such bullshit. More like you won’t have many friends, esp in real life, if you’re on Mastodon instead of those sites. The people on those major sites also use more than one. If one shuts down, they almost always have another way to contact them. The shutdowns also don’t usually happen overnight. There’s often time to see things are in decline. For instance, there’s plenty of posts about Twitter’s financial troubles where anyone with sense will have some other account on the side. It’s also amusing to see them saying “if X shuts down” after seeing a headline about Instagram alone being worth $100 billion, watching Facebook’s revenues grow over time despite all its threats, Slack doing what IRC isn’t in growth/profits, and knowing that previous shutdowns sent users to sites like Facebook instead of P2P software or Mastodon.
It’s not Twitter’s finances that are making people leave; kinda the opposite.
The article talked of companies disappearing. That can happen due to users leaving or financial reasons. Twitter’s money problems & mismanagement are a warning sign that should signal users to have another option. That’s all I was saying.
Sorry, my reply was more opaque than I meant it to be. I think the toxic things Twitter is doing to chase a profit are why so many people are leaving. I don’t think most users cared about their financial situation other than to wonder why the service was free.
Oh OK. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s even more ridiculous when a company gets a nearly impossible amount of users, has tons of money to make off them, and just… lets them float away…
You’d think rational self-interest wouldve made them take action sooner. Not how it often works in practice, though.
I thought Twitter was doing well lately
It might be. I read it a while back. Just using it as an example warning sign.
Amazing how this article can talk about how great the fediverse is (a network that exists for nearly a decade now) without once using the word or mentioning its history.
“Fediverse” is damaging to the Mastodon brand
Except the whole post is about the fediverse? It’s right there staring you in the face in bold.
The word “Fediverse” is not on the page…
What makes you say that? (Well, other than the fact that I guess it’s strictly “good” for the Mastodon brand if Mastodon and only Mastodon becomes identified with ActivityPub federation, in the same way that it’s “good” for the kleenex brand if kleenex becomes identified with all tissue paper)
GNU/social et al?
Yes, it’s all the same network. See https://fediverse.network/.
What are key differences between ActivityPub and RSS+WebSub/pubsubhubbub? Its spec is long and verbose, I can’t tell at a glance what does it represent. I see that it supports likes and subscription lists, but what are other differences to RSS? Does it support comments? Is it just for twitter-like websites, or suitable for blogs and reddit-like websites too?
What I like in ActivityPub is that it’s RDF-based. It’s cool technology based on romantic ideas of expert systems, Prolog, rule-based AI, etc.
Besides mastodon and pleroma which are twitter clones using ActivityPub, there’s also peertube for videos, PixelFed for images and Plume for blogging. Those projects are all pretty new though, so it’s too early to say whether ActivityPub works well for this kind of stuff, but it looks promising imo
RSS+Webmention can be used to realize a very rudamentary version of federation (I’m currently developing a platform and testing simple federation using RSS+WM).
However, ActivityPub allows much more versatility and provides the endpoint with a low-overhead, machine-readable version of actions (AP is not like RSS in that stuff operates as feeds, rather, it’s actors doing actions on other actors or objects)
As much as I would like a decentralised web to take over. I think I see a major issue with ActivityPub. Apparently, search doesn’t appear to be specified. And one advantage big centralised services will have is the ability to search all their network. For example, I would like to search all the network for a specific username, keyword, etc… Without that, it’s like going back to the net before google search.
Yeah, I’m curious if ActivityPub can support arbitrary aggregation over multiple nodes. It seems to me that in this kind of architecture, maybe nodes ought to support publishing changes over websocket to interested listeners. You could have aggregation nodes doing things like search, or post rankings, which could attach themselves in this fashion. Plus this would have the added benefit that if you didn’t like a particular aggregator’s implementation (a hotness formula for example, or search indexing algorithm) you could switch to a different one.
Usernames include the server, so I’m not sure that case makes sense.
Not supporting keyword search means I don’t get random and bots sealioning my conversations.
I was thinking about peer tube for example. It would be very nice if I was able to search only for the current node or on all fediverse for the things I’d like to find. Like niche programming languages for example. The goal of publishing something is to be read, even by bots. Also I’m not sure a federated network would be more robust in face of bots. Pretty sure it would be the opposite, because each node would have less data to analyze for bot detection. Still by the end, I’m pretty sure the only good solution would be to have a global “Web of Trust”.
Ahh, I see. 99% of my social media us is to connect with people I already know (or have in my extended network). For that use case, it’s a feature to be less easily discovered.
For publishing content it’s definitely the opposite; you want it to be found. Difficult though because now you’re competing for attention with spammers.
Love the tech, going to donate. Web is moving the opposite direction though. Even email is having a rough time. Quite a bit of the communication moved to Slack, social networks, chat etc. IRC & RSS are having a rougher time.
The Fediverse is a welcome pushback against this centralizing trend