@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I wanted to run a couple of definitions by you and see what you think ...a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentra...
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I can see that ... I'm using "the fediverses" to mean something along those lines (because I want to emphasize the multiplicity), although your meaning's more specific. I have a paragraph on how different people use the terms differently, is it okay if I quote you in that?
Also, I haveAnd "the fediverse" is often used as synonym for "the Fediverse" or "today's Fediverse", sometimes as a synonym for "the fediverses," and sometimes in the cultural sense of what I'm calling "fedi".
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
If you're thinking that this is kind of messy and confusing ... welcome to the fediverses! -
@jdp23
i like this blogpost a lot. I feel sort of similarly about these definitions as when this question came up re: threads - defining something as "in or out of the fediverse" is not the most useful way to talk about the distinction to me, though i don't mind attempts at a definition.consider me a 'fediverse generalist' and a linguistic functionalist - the fedi means what i'm referring to as the fedi as it is understood in context. much like how i read people referring to fedi as "mastadon" internally with "i know what you are referring to and it's not important to correct unless there is a meaningful ambiguity between a mastodon-specific thing and the fedi at large." the fediverse is AP-fedi, threads, bluesky, and hell even the much hated nostr when used without qualification - anything that is at its core a federated architecture with multiple servers communicating with each other with a protocol, and ig specifically federated social systems (eg. federated SPARQL endpoints and federated CDNs are not the fedi). When i say "sup fedi" i am referring to "the shorthand of all the creatures who can see my post." I like the "a fediverse" vs "the fediverse" distinction to highlight how 'verses can be discontinuous, but to me "fedi" is just a short name equivalent to "the fediverse", and i would say "fedi culture" to specifically refer to the culture.
the only deviation w.r.t. bsky specifically is that they don't seem to describe themselves as being part of the fediverse. all the choices from not using AP, making bridges to it (or even the masto api, which would be trivial), and emphasizing the ATmosphere and not even mentioning the broader fedi (or again referring to it only as mastodon and saying 'they're cool but not us'). so like.. if they're distancing themselves from the idea of the fediverse, that's sort of weird but fine.
there is a great deal of conflation of culture and technology that's genuinely hard to disentangle - some parts of the fedi like reply-guy-ism are probably largely rooted in the technology, but the discourse on bsky re: fedi is like "people on mastadon are intrinsically annoying and xyz bad thing." and like, i get it, group identity is usually in part constructed on exclusion, "we are us because we are not them," whether we like it or not, but one of the major reasons i don't post there more is because that kind of sniping culture is one of the things i wanted to leave behind on twitter. I have some pretty scathing criticisms of atproto and bsky the technology, but i just don't see that same kind of disdain for the people of bsky around here. I'm not on the fedi because i'm intrinsically annoying (even if i am), I'm on the fedi because i'm an anarchist and an anticapitalist who wants to practice my beliefs of shared governance of small systems built to serve the needs of the people they support. as an anarchist, i think it's important to see the problems of the systems we inhabit as our responsibility, so i try and fix them with my friends here instead of seeing the problem being one of shopping around between whatever set of options a market of information overlords might present me. I could easily level the same kind of criticisms at bsky users like "they are a bunch of passive rubes and performative leftists who fundamentally misunderstand the political reality of digital infrastructure and are being duped into an even worse algorithmic attention market because they can't shake the addition to virality" but i don't because i know we are all just people trying to find a good place to chat with our friends and they have found community there and that's great! if there and here could be the same place that would also be great! There's ultimately no need to choose, you can go to more than one website!
I say all that because the difference to me, and indeed the thing that is presenting us with the exhortation to define whether bsky is or isn't in the fediverse, is more of a distinction in politics, culture, and goals than it is one of technology. When i say "the fedi" i usually don't mean threads even though it is literally an activitypub-capable service because it has a dramatically misaligned culture and politics than what i want to associate with the fedi. Same thing with nostr, which is a federated protocol (they claim p2p, but like.. lmao) that bridges to AP, because we don't like them. bsky is another neighbor but broadly we like them! All these things are and are not "the fediverse" depending on context because that definition is not the important one to me. My goals are not to "expand the fediverse" or "save the fediverse" and won't even be "kill the fediverse" when i enter my supervillain era. My goals as they relate to the fediverse are to create a world together where people develop self-sufficient digital cultures built on strong bonds between each other to serve our needs for connection and information such that we are no longer vulnerable to constant manipulation, extraction, and exploitation by the information capitalists. The fedi is a transitional medium towards those goals, but bsky is a move in the opposite direction to me - a mastodon instance takes a lot of resources and if you end up on the wrong server operates like a kind of digital feudalism, but atproto and bsky are designed so that instead of finding common cause and building things together with aligned people, you are a totally atomized individual where the entire operation of the system is opaque to you and your subjectivity is that of a consumer who can shop between equivalent PDS's and feeds. I think a lot of people on bsky probably have similar politics, and so that's why i don't ascribe any negativity whatsoever to the people there, just the technology and the ideology that the technology is reflective of.
so after all that, bsky is the fedi and not the fedi if it doesn't want to be. everything else is the fedi and not if it doesn't want to be. to me defining "the fediverse" is the wrong question because ultimately i don't care about "the fediverse" and have always intended to work on evolving it into a p2p medium - the thing that is important to me are the people that are around here that have shared values and dreams for the future, and if people on bluesky or wherever the hell else share them too, then they get to be part of whatever definition for a collective entity that serves as a metonym for myself if they want to.
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:compy: Lady, EVOLVED :awoo:replied to Jon last edited by
@jdp23 @rra @jonny @noracodes @rwg you’re welcome to
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@[email protected] Glad you like it and thanks for all the thoughts here! I'm primarily interested in shifting to people thinking of multiple fediverses, but feel like it's useful to capture the definitions both to convey how I (try to) use the words, and to give an overview of the broad range of usage others have.
My goal is one or more fediverses that are anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-surveillance capitalist, I don't really care whether they're called fedi, "the Fediverse", the free fediverse, something else that doesn't have fediverse in its name, or whatever ... my intuition is that will be hard to define "the fediverse" or "the Fediverse" in those ways both because that's not how it's ever been and because most people (and the most powerful players) in today's Fediverse don't want that (at least in the short term). Since I don't want to privilege any definitions of "the" f/Fediverse that don't have the qualities I want; I'd rather focus on the "one of many fediverses".
In terms of whether Bluesky is a Fediverse instance, at some level it doesn't really matter, but the arguments people make for whether it is or isn't are revealing and a good way at looking at the power dynamics in today's Fediverse. Similarly, whether Nostr or Threads is a Fediverse instance is very similar to the question of whether Gab was a Fediverse instance in 2019. It's significant that the resounding answer to Gab was no, and that the answer to Threads is mixed in general but "yes" from the current power structure.
Agreed about the entangling of technology and culture. And, I'm also on fedi because of its possibilites as a transitional to define a new social networks that aren't grounded in oppression and surveillance capitalism. Of that's not why a lot of people are on fedi, and some people are on Bluesky/AT to create social networks that aren't grounded in oppression. Rudy's series of posts sketch a really powerful vision of what's possible, so while there's a lot to be skeptical about (as there is with fedi!) I also to see it as a transitional platform/protocol. Of course Bluesky PBLLC and the people running it probably don't share that vision, and even if they do they've got enough VC investment that it's extremely unlikely to be a vehicle for that ... then again a lot of people in the Fediverse's power structure don't share that vision either. The Fediverse's progress towards its possibilities over the last seven years has been minimal, so shaking things up is a good thing, and changing perceived boundaries and problematizing definitions are useful tactics. And in today's social network world there's clearly a desire for "big world" interactions, maybe that will prove transitional as well, but it's not unreasonable to have a tech stack that focuses on that to complement AP-fedi's focus on networked communities. I'm not concerned about "growing fedi", but as people who share our goals leave Twitter I'd rather find ways to align with them. -
@jdp23 i'm trying to log off of having words for the night but just want to say agreed and well said for the moment
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@[email protected] sounds good, have a wordless rest of the night!
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@rwg @jdp23 @Lady @jonny @noracodes
Hi Jon thanks for sharing the piece. I think it highlights the fact that the ongoing definition and redefinition of the space itself is a core feature of what the fediverse is (and as such will never be settled!).
In my opinion, there is benefit from zooming in to the specific ways federation is implemented and conceptualized, which is something I hope to contribute to such discussions with my phd work (soon). One of those distinctions you point out in your post: the desire to have a singular interconnected system (THE fediverse) and the insistence on a pluralist system, where multiple things run side by side and perhaps don´t interconnect even though they technically can.
As for multiprotocol applications: I saw it described as the "polyglot" approach (here https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3125433.3125455 ) which is an interesting way to think about it: is the fediverse a single protocol space or a polyglot space. In my phd work I only consider the Ostatus/AP lineage, even though that decision is also based on workable scope and what was historically there.
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Thanks for the polyglot terminology and link, Roel, I'll include that as well. And it totally makes sense to focus on just one particular lineage or subset of the overall space -- Erin and Darius' "Fediverse Microblogging Governance" focused even more narrowly on Mastodon and Hometown instances, and "Whiteness of Mastodon" talks about using "Mastodon as a metonym for the Fediverse".
And a separate conversation with @[email protected] and @[email protected] also highlighted to me that there are different definitions of 'federated', so I added this:I'm using "federated" in the general sense of "interconnected servers." Others use it to refer to specific kinds of interconnections. L. Rhodes in Federated and mediated networks and Robert W. Gehl in Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse both argue for more specific meanings of federation in this context.
And, based on other discussions in this thread, I also amended"fedi culture" is either the culture or community of the Fediverse; or, a set of cultural attributes that came to the Fediverse with the 2017 Mastodon/Glitch wave. Of course if you ask different people you'll get a different list of attributes of , but many long-timers include things like pro-LGBTQIA2S+, dislike for algorithmic feeds, defederation, and anti-Blackness in their list.
"fedi" is shorthand for "the fediverse" (whatever that means) or "fedi culture"
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Jonreplied to :compy: Lady last edited by [email protected]
@[email protected] As always the question of how to attribute it.
Do you preferGlitchCat Administrator Lady, sometimes described as a "Fedi Cassandra,"
orGlitchCat Administrator and Fedi Cassandra Lady
or would you prefer I leave out the Fedi Cassandra? Or something else? -
:compy: Lady, EVOLVED :awoo:replied to Jon last edited by
@jdp23 typically these days i sign things as “Lady of ladys.computer” or something similar, but if you prefer to emphasize my link to the fediverse, i think “Lady, admin of glitch.cat.family” would be fine
(where ladys.computer and glitch.cat.family can be replaced with Ladys Computer and GlitchCat if you prefer prose names over domains)
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:compy: Lady, EVOLVED :awoo:replied to :compy: Lady last edited by
@jdp23 (you can call me fedi cassandra if you WANT but that’s a description, not a name)
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@[email protected] I saw satsuma's description of you as a Fedi Cassandra on your profile and liked it -- it's accurate! but yeah it wasn't clear how best to phrase it to make sure it's a description from others, not a name or an egotistical self-description. So, I'll just go with Lady of gltich.cat.family for now.