This is certainly the promise and potential of getting online social activity standardised to a protocol shared by just about any online social platform.
Thing is, I’m not convinced the current structures of the fediverse are really equipped to bring about the desired stuctures. And, without knowing enough about the ActivityPub protocol, I can only fear that the issues may run relatively deep.
The fundamental problem that hasn’t really been “solved” is that an online space of any sort needs a computer that it is plugged into the internet all the time … a server. This requirement imposes a centralised type node on what structures can be created. We can see this clearly with the fediverse in the way that instances are so dominant … so many of your choices as a user are bound up with your choice of instance … moderation, IRL-people-community (if there are distinct communities on your instance), reliability (how good are the sys admins?) and what kind of platform and therefore social media you use (is it a lemmy instance or a mastodon instance).
Once you realise that IRL-people-communities are rarely fostered on distinct instances (on lemmy there’s a bit of this but the whole thing of federating lemmy-communities is really about allowing these to grow across instances … on mastodon I’d say it’s mostly not common) … and that a lot of the defederation stuff is either fairly obvious moderation stuff or grey-zone stuff that usually divides the affected users … it becomes apparent I think that the instance as a hard-wired coupling of many aspects of the social media user experience is more of a hurdle than a feature.
Over on BlueSky/ATProto they’re doing something that may turn out to be interesting by trying to remove this imposition … but the solution is still bound by the need to have a centralise-ing always on server … as they have big giant firehose servers that everything else relies on … of which only a few a likely to ever exist … thus creating another imposing structurally centralised reliance. They’re hoping that all of the flexibility will come from all of the things that depend on the firehose, but still it could turn out to be an issue.
Broadly speaking, the ability of the user’s choices to organically grow and connect the open social space that the article talks about is still very restricted IMO. And there is probably a fair way to go technologically before the foundations are even there.
I’ve seen it mentioned by a few people, and I’ve thought it myself … that the fediverse as we know it is mostly a prototype and the promise we’re all after will most likely come only once we’ve moved on to something new. If this is true … we’re in an awkward position right now where there are a lot of people who believe in these “promises” and that they can be realised on the fediverse as well as a lot of people who have built stuff on the fediverse, have stakes in its success and are really advocating that this is “the solution” to the point of resisting calls for doing better and new things. Sadly, this sounds like the recipe for some bitterness and failures to occur which, IMO, runs the risk of deflating and removing the momentum behind the broader mission of realising what the article speaks about.
Part of the problem here is that the big-social mega-corp monopolisation of social media was so bad and so long lasting that we’ve atrophied the muscles of social organisation. Collectively and behaviourally, we don’t really know how to do this or how to talk and think about it (personally I think the conversation around Threads and whether to de-fed shows signs of this).
Running your own fediverse instance is really not that hard or expensive. Definitely easier than for example running a community garden or similar shared social infrastructure.
ATproto is the wrong model in so far as it further atomizes individuals and ultimatly forces them to depend on large centralized infrastructure.
Think of it like a community library vs. ordering books from Amazon. Yes Amazon gives you more individual choice and you don’t have to be invested into them and can easily switch to another large book store, but in the end your are caught in their commercial extractive logic.
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
Of course one could start a community on a lemmy instance too, and I’m happy lemmy is here for as a community tool. Should local only and private communities land I think it’ll be quite a useful tool for running online community spaces with the possibility of federating when/if desired.
All that being said, I’m not sure the flexibility and richness of the underlying technology is there yet to serve as a default foundation across the web for organic community growth.
While I understand your ATProto critique, I personally feel giving individual users the power to move around the protocol and its spaces opens up possibilities for organic community growth not possible on the fediverse provided spaces can be created by users and devs using the system. The signal’s I’ve seen so far indicate that they could be heading in that direction. IMO, the biggest problem ATProto may have from a community fostering perspective is it seems to have even less of a privacy concern than the fediverse.
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.
The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
Mastodon and mastodon.social are huge on the fediverse. No one really runs interesting forks of mastodon. And the whole large flagship instance is a pretty consistent phenomenon (eg lemmy.world).
Perhaps we’ve just gotta learn how to do this better. But the hazard there is that it isn’t clear what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I and I think many are sceptical that the whole instance thing is worth it all the time.
Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.
I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D
My personal opinion is that
- We need to get more people in the Fediverse
- We need to educate people in the Fediverse towards more digital agency
If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.
Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.
Broadly speaking, the ability of the user’s choices to organically grow and connect the open social space that the article talks about is still very restricted IMO. And there is probably a fair way to go technologically before the foundations are even there.
I would agree that the Fediverse will probably need to change and that most people on the Fediverse are currently not ready to accept that change. However, I think that it only partially technological and primarily social.
Basically, you critizize the concept of “instances”. Basically, instances are currently synonmymous with “Server”, but they are actually describing something different: a place on the web with a distinct space of rules and standards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it HAS to be a single server. It could also be group of servers with the same shared policy.
For example, maybe in the future, the “Solarpunk” instance, will be a conglomerate of several servers that share certain community standards, now, if one server does something bad, people are leaving this server and in the worst case, other defederate from it/it gets kicked out of the instance.
This can all happen with the underlying technology. It’s all already there. Basically, imo the main thing is about creating societal protocolls on top of technological infrastructure. I don’t even think that one can expect some technological solution for this. It sounds like “solutionism” to me. Its like saying: the IP protocoll is responsible for the centralization of the web and how can we change it to make it more decentral? Its just as dezentral as it should be. imo the same holds for activitypub. Its what you make of it.
Part of the problem here is that the big-social mega-corp monopolisation of social media was so bad and so long lasting that we’ve atrophied the muscles of social organisation. Collectively and behaviourally, we don’t really know how to do this or how to talk and think about it (personally I think the conversation around Threads and whether to de-fed shows signs of this).
Couldn’t agree more
Yea I think we’re on the same page.
The trickiness with the whole tech v people problem thing, I think, is the interaction between them can be complex, and, when one is interfering with the other, or both with each other, fatal. All up, this whole organising people well thing is hard … like no one is really qualified to do it. Add technology and you get even fewer people even reasonably not bad at it.
