The Verge article extolling the #Fediverse. I personally think the writer has the wrong point. #Facebook isn't good. Its attraction is "everybody I know is on Facebook" and not any of its half-baked features. Therefore, multiprotocol / multi-network federated social is important to dethroning #corpocentric #socnets like XTwitter ( #x.com / #twitter ) and Meta's Facebook & #Instagram.
I feel this writer's exuberence will turn out to be fantasy, mostly because of misunderstanding what keeps people in the walled gardens and what it will take to free them.
@fu From #GNU_social, I only see a few of your posts in the thread. As you may know, #Diaspora's protocol is different from #OStatus, so the D* posts do not cross over.
But there's more going on. Years ago, when I hosted a #Friendica instance, posts from ~F to OStatus appeared natively. Now they don't. For example, almost never will a mention or reply from ~F to GS appear in the recipient's replies stream. This doesn't only happen on GS, though.
On Pleroma instances, ~F posts (at least from #libranet.de) appear with delays of 2-12 hours or more, sometimes out of context, usually out of order. They also sometimes change the scope when they reply to a scope limited post.
I have a ~Friendica account on libranet.de, but I barely ever use it because _everything_ seems to be broken and it frustrates me every time I try to use it. I should probably close it and check to see whether the issues are local to libranet.de or something common to all Friendica instances.
The Iris #Nostr client on #Android now has a "block and mute" function, so I've started using that against the #spambots.
Nostr has some great ideas that are way beyond what either #OStatus or #ActivityPub branches of the #Fediverse are doing, but the spam and the fact that there's a really big #Bitcoin "Maxi" faction there are chasing regular people away.
I seem to recall there's a standard API that should be common to all the #StatusNet derivitave servers. I'm pretty sure that in its infancy Mastodon conformed to that API. But Mastodon's API expanded beyond that, and I suspect some of the common API was removed, probably around the time #OStatus was dropped from Mastodon too.
But that's sheer speculation on my part.
Time to upgrade my server, so I can upgrade PHP, so I can upgrade this GNUsocial instance...
#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
(1) #Twitter has millions of users. There is no #ActivityPub nor #OStatus implementation in which an instance hosted on a $5/mo #DigitalOcean / #Linode / #Vultr #VPS could handle the volume of a seamless connection with #Twitter. If they adopted AP OStatus, #Diaspora, or any other current open federation protocol, instances that didn't use firewall blocking would topple once the two userbases had sufficient interconnections (within a few hours or a few days after they started federating).
(2) Twitter's business model is to push ads disguised as tweets. If their users could escape those and still interact with all the same contacts, they would. I'm certain that Twitter's management know this. They also turn all links into tracking links, and sell access to media (images, video, audio) uploads of important news events to news organizations.
(3) Most Fediverse instances are financed out of the admin's pocket. Some have financial contributors, but nothing like Twitter's revenue. As the largest and best-financed instance, they would immediately have to start implementing modifications to make AP or other existing federation protocols useful to them, and those modifications would (as Mastodon's currently do) become unofficially mandatory in order to be compatible.
(4) This isn't the first time that Twitter has considered federation, though this may be the first time they openly discussed it. Back when Identica was still a happening place (during Twitter's fail-whale days), Twitter considered federating. They didn't do it then, and I honestly do not believe they will do it now.
(5) I'd say that Twitter's #BlueSky initiative is more meant to try to get bidirectional connections across #Facebook's moat and wall than it is to surround Twitter with a cloud of #Fediverse instances.
@licho #Mastodon 3.x and #Pleroma 2x no longer speak the #OStatus federation protocol. !GNUsocial 2.0 will add the #ActivityPub federation protocol, so ask your admin to be ready to upgrade soon.
This requires some adjustment and fine-tuning, but you can subscribe to it through Diaspora, Friendica, GNU Social, Mastodon, Socialhome, Hubzilla, or anywhere that can use #OStatus, #ActivityPub, #Diaspora Protocol, or #Zot.
> So if the proposed client/server protocol says the client should send a request twice and discards the first result (a Level 3/design-level statement), and the designer tells you it’s because there are three different kinds of request handlers in the codebase, and Bob’s sometimes gets it wrong the first time (a Level 2/implementation-level statement), you should get confused. You should be as confused as if someone wanted to call a file or write to a function.
Security between #OStatus and #ActivityPub is exactly the same. If that's the sole advantage you're looking for, you'll be soundly disappointed on an AP-only network.
As for the #blockwars problem that Roy @schestowitz mentioned, the only possible solutions are (1) to put better blocking and filtering tools in the hands of the users instead of concentrating more power into admins' hands; and (2) smaller instances instead of larger ones.
@silverwizard wrote: "AndStatus is an Android app for OStatus clients" This is wrong. #OStatus is a server-to-server protocol, #AndStatus connects to servers using server-to-client protocols. This is why AndStatus doesn't know and doesn't depend on OStatus protocol. Moreover, #Mastodon 's client-to-server protocol is still based on outdated Twitter like API, not on #ActivityPub, unfortunately. @jackyalcine
@usbhump Evan P's Status\.Net startup lost its funding. Around the same time, he was trying to get the developers of the underlying protocols that compose #OStatus to agree to make changes to their protocols to enable enhanced privacy. Among the organizations he was trying to motivate was Google, which had recently introduced #GPlus and was no long interested in the open web.
In a hurry to cut costs, he developed the #Pump.io software and protocol to be simpler to develop and cheaper to operate, and to offer some additional privacy built into the protocol. And also to be independent of the progress some of these protocols.
Pump was built with the idea that most federated networks would switch protocols to be compatible. That did not happen. But the hope is that its descendant #ActivityPub will unite the disparate networks.
@gargron Don't oversell AP. If you start to sound like a used car salesperson, people will become suspicious of your motives and the veracity of your claims.