An excellent thread from @[email protected] The links to oliphant.social probably won't work if you cllick on them directly.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @u2764 I'm making the case again that the core value prop of a social network is a place that gains value as more people join. There are other kinds of experiences that people may also want. They're not mutually exclusive. But in either case, there still remains the problem of paying for it. With social networks, the cost tends to scale with the user base. So it's a bigger problem. Small scale costs don't tend to warrant this much discourse.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek @jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 I think the answer comes from looking at other community spaces. Which are smaller, like dreamwidth which still exists.
Development still happens on that platform which was a fork of livejournal. But Livejournal also had similar issues for it's forks. The skillset of folks were limited.
Community is what keeps a dev going when there's not money on the table or little money.
Healthy online spaces still need moderation etc. Otherwise it's load on Devs.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by [email protected]
@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 But we also need to consider why people form communities on telegram, WhatsApp , Facebook etc. @polotek is right.
It's the relative ease of use, with alot of the technical labour handled by those platforms.
Which I don't think we have an answer to yet.
Other than education and making easier for non technical folks to group their instances.
This issue isn't a technical problem really, it's a social problem. We don't engage with non techies.
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witchescauldronreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
@onepict @jdp23 @oliphant @u2764
Where is the hub to talk about this and rally round to make the change and challenge that is needed to take this path?
This used to be https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-community-values-policy/1391/71?u=hamishcampbell, but is not at the moment.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to witchescauldron last edited by
@witchescauldron @jdp23 @oliphant @u2764
Indeed @how brought this up last week with the new group being formed on W3C.
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Jonreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
Yep, the lack of a hub or space to talk about stuff like this is a huge problem, for now it's happening in bunches of different threads which makes it very hard to focus the energy. I've been thinking about setting something up as part of @[email protected] as a short-term placeholder.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @how @thenexusofprivacy @u2764
If we go back to socialhub we would have to widen the admin and mod team as it's currently shrunk down to #NGO and #geekproblem which is too limited for what we need. It used to be the place to talk about these issues.
Now we have #NGO on fediforum and #geekproblem on socialhub, nothing left native to the #openweb which is of course the subject
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to witchescauldron last edited by
@witchescauldron @jdp23 @oliphant @how @thenexusofprivacy @u2764 Perhaps an appeal for moderators for Social hub is needed.
There's no provision on @iftas for discourse moderation at the moment, perhaps there's a chance to expand the scope.
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@polotek @jdp23 @oliphant “if there are "a lot" of them, then why isn't this a solved problems?” Dreamwidth has existed for years on a largely volunteer basis. Archive of Our Own, for all its problems (there are many), hosts over 13 million works and 7 million users and operates on an entirely volunteer basis. Internet forums, chatrooms, Discords, et cetera have for the large large bulk of their history been run entirely on volunteer labour.
Yet massive corporations have spent billions of dollars, and literally sold all of their user data many times over, trying to make social media profitable, and not one of them have succeeded. Open source has been trying, and failing, to pay people adequately for their work for decades. Nobody has any answers. The burden of proof is extremely on you if you still think this can be done.
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witchescauldronreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
@onepict @jdp23 @oliphant @how @thenexusofprivacy @u2764 @iftas
Will need widening of admins as well... maybe a statement of what the #openweb is, as people will always sell out for funding and status, we would need some way of mediating this universal crap behaver. This is what the #4opens is for https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki/Home it needs a page.
Then the is the question of how to support this infrastructure, which i think where we started this thread. We had to shut down 5 instances with a few thound users because the was no suitable funding, they were just shouting into the void, and the code was completely unresponsive to change to mediate this.
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@u2764 @jdp23 @oliphant then I'm not sure why you're here. Seems like you're showing up outside of your happy utopia expressly to give people shit. I don't feel burdened to prove anything to you. You can feel free to go back to what you were doing and leave the unwashed masses to fend for themselves. Cheers.
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Jonreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
I certain agree with @[email protected] that there isn't a good answer in the fediverse today for how people who want a non-public social network can get it. I'd say it's there are technical as well as social problems, and the social problems also get in the way of making progress on the technical problems.
Marco, I'm not trying to argue (and apologies that it came across that way). I very much agree with your points that thinking about how to fund the fediverse should should start by leveraging what's unique about it, and that it's generally not getting approached that way (at least in the most-visible parts of the fediverse). And I agree that for many social networks, the core proposition is that it's a place that gains value as more people join.
Where we disagree is that I don't think that's true for social networks in general. I think there are at least two other interesting scenarios: closed social networks, and networked smaller social networks. Bluesky's focusing on the "big world" scenarios, and as you say there are plenty of alternatives for private social networks (as well as commercial providers like Mighty Networks that make it very easy to set up a very usable closed social network).
So I think the fediverse's potential uniqueness on this front is when it comes to smaller social networks that can participate in a larger network-of-networks. Of course not everybody wants that, but that's okay: a lot of people do (without necessarily using those words), and there aren't any great alternatives right now.
Unfortunately the "no great alternatives" also applies to today's fediverse, because the current implementations are flawed and limited and don't have the mechanisms in place to make it easy for people to find or create those smaller social networks or networks-of-networks. Of course one big reason is because very little effort has been devoted to that in the most-visible (and best-funded) parts of the fediverse. Still, none of this is written in stone, so it's fixable (although challenging because of power dynamics etc etc).
Anyhow, I don't think it's either-or, which is why I see Bluesky as so complementary with other stuff going on.
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Jonreplied to Marco Rogers last edited by [email protected]
Nobody needs to prove anything to anybody else, and I very much appreciate seeing how today's fediverse looks through your eyes. Still, @[email protected]'s been here since at least 2017, and has always had a lot of trenchant insights as well as making some major tech contributions, so I sure don't look at it as showing up outside of a happy utopia to give people shit.
Similarly I don't hear anybody on this thread referring to the unwashed messes or saying that non-techies should fend for themselves. I see different views on how to make different kinds of solutions more broadly available to people who want them.
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The SWICG standards group is taking over running activitypub.rocks, incuding socialhub, so I don't expect it to shift away from a technical focus. And IFTAS is focused on moderators and trust & safety issues, so while https://connect.iftas.org/ includes a good example of a forum that mixes social and technical issues, others are needed as well.
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I edited the previous post because I forgot to mention Allie Hart's major tech contributions when I originally posted this, focusing instead on the trenchant analyses. I added that to emphasize that this is somebody who's consistently done the work, as well as thinking about and refined their vision of The Fediverse over the years.
Marco, one of the things your perspectives have really helped highlight to me is how many people feel unempowered about what's going on -- a learned helplessness (my term not yours), as well as the very common phenomenon of just complaining and not trying to do anything about it. It's a great point in general, but I really want to emphasize that's not what's going on here. (And Oliphant's another person who does the work as well as haing some trenchant analyses.)
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@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 I appreciate you trying to diffuse tensions Jon. But I wanna be clear. Showing up to say "I have systems that work for me" is not helpful discourse. What it does is paint a picture where everyone else is just ignorant or stupid and that's the only reason things aren't fixed. Or it suggests that maybe we just haven't heard that other people feel that they have workable solutions. I just don't know what the point of showing to say those things is exactly.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 what I feel like I receive is people showing up to my conversation and saying things that have little to do with what I'm talking about. If you wanna have a small, private social network, great. Go do that. You don't need my permission and you don't need to show up in my mentions to tell me about it. What I'm talking about is the large, connected social network, and how to pay for it. Because there are a large number of people who want that.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 I'm really trying to figure out why people insist on diverting to talking about small private social networks. To what end? What are you trying to convince me of? What is the goal? How does it help me with the thing I actually started talking about? I mean at the outside, it starts to feel extractive. Like you're gonna take whatever we build and go put it in a private enclave where you don't contribute anything back. I'm just not sure what the point is.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 I realize that I sound frustrated and standoffish. That's because I honestly don't understand what conversation you're trying to have with me. And when people start saying things like "the burden of proof is on you", I'm like yeah I'd prefer to skip this entirely.
I hope that helps to explain where I'm coming from. If you wanna talk about what I'm talking about, great. If you wanna talk about some other shit, you don't need me and you can do it outside my mentions. Easy.