The thing I love about this post and all its replies, is the stark difference in replies in answer to Brent's very reasonable question.

Emelia 👸🏻

@can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener freelance work as an advisor for fediverse projects, sometimes freelance work on fediverse projects.

I literally work exclusively on the Fediverse. That's my full-time job.

TomKrajci 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

@mawhrin @Badgardener @thisismissem @mekkaokereke

"...this should not be done in a way we learned to tolerate from the non-profit sector, on a shoestring budget, underpaying for labour, and with no way to plan the work for longer than a year or two...."

About that:

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

"Mastodon in it's entirety"

conflating Mastodon.social with Mastodon *IS* the problem. seeing a litany of sites co-branded sites as mastodon is confusing.

what's worse: for an instance like Black Mastodon, you have to apply and wait for an answer. to this day i never received a yes or no. if you notice, AM BLACK.

came to .social because after literally YEARS , found people i know here.

so, no.

there is no ease of joining.

at all.

@juergen_hubert @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke

.

@mekkaokereke Thanks, I hadn't heard mention of it lately. As a creative, it's put the urch on my posting my own work here again until I can find a way past that. I've heard the #NoBot tag isn't effective outside of Masto ‍️

tom jennings

@can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem

I'd gladly pay a small monthly fee that went to a pool of developers. If 0.1% of us paid $5/month, what's that, 50k/mo?

Emelia 👸🏻

@tomjennings @can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener

My goal isn't to get rich either, I want to meet my needs (€68k) and have maybe €250-500 per month I can put into savings.

Outside of that I'd be finding ways to work with others & paying for their time

Jon

Everything on Bluesky is public, and it's very easy to get access to the firehose, so somebody is almost certainly scraping them. Not sure whether Bluesky themselves are curently doing it but they easily could. Also, they send them to an automated moderation service (Hive) ... although people have otld me that the terms of use prohibit that being used for anything else.

That said spublic and unlisted posts here are in general scrapable; and unlike Cara, instances' terms of use dsn't e prohibit it. (Although, I don't know if Cara's prohibitions would hold up in court, so it mifht be a moot point). . Also it's possible that some instance has set things up so that everything federates there gets scraped, even followers-only and private posts. In fact Threads privacy policy is written so that they're explicitly allowed to do that (although I don't know if they are yet).

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Jon

Yep. Starter packs are attached to people's profiles, individuals maintaining the starter pack manage them, this could in principle work just as well in the fediverse -- in fact @[email protected] pointed out that Mastodon used to have list of recommended accounts attached to people's profiles, which isn't so far away from starter packs (which also have a "follow all" button). Agreed that an equivalent here should be opt-in here -- and also you should be able to know what starter packs you're part of, which isn't the case on Bluesky -- but that's not a decentralization issue.

So @[email protected] I agree that we shouldn't just copy the UX improvements there, but in general I don't think fedi's decentralization rules the significant ones out. Multiple implementations make things more challenging here, but GoToSocial's approach to reply controls illustrates how to move forward without waiting for consensus (which BTW is how we got scoped visibility and blocking back in 2017 -- Mastodon unilaterally extended the standard at the time and it was messy for a while but most implementations wound up going along with it). One thing that is much harder to do in a decentralized way is private profiles, but Bluesky hasn't done those.

As for their moderation tools, it's an interesting idea, and there are a few examples that work great -- Aendra's XBlock Screenshot Labler, the opt-in prounouns labeller where you chose your own labels. In general though I think it's best to look at the current implementation as a prototype with some major flaws, and some assumptions that might not apply so well over here.

@[email protected]

Urzl

@mekkaokereke I think the distinction between BlueSky as an org set up to suffer the same enshittification arc as Twitter and BlueSky as a platform and a suite of features really needs to be thought about for the next big thing.

The BlueSky platform does some things right that others should learn from. I was looking over the ActivityPub docs today to try to distinguish whether the moderation stuff we want is even doable here.

Jon

Also, Blacksky is a great example of how the different pieces of Bluesky's technology fit together -- a feed, a starter pack, a moderation service, and a (still-under-development) PDS. That's why Black Twitter is moving to Bluesky. There' a lot to learn!

EDIT: I talked more about Blacksky here

All that said, even though I think starter packs are useful they're also likely to lead to rich-get-richer dynamics in terms of followers, and magnify existing equity issues (because in general, white people tend to recommend mostly white people, and guys tend to recommend mostly guys). So I really don't mean to say we should just copy Bluesky's approach -- I very much do agree with @[email protected] on that! And there's an open question about how discovery of starter packs and feeds will work, do you opt in to have your starter pack listed in various directories? Is it searchable via fedidsovery services? etc. etc.

I'm mostly just saying not to get hung up on the different decentralization models. My intuition is that in general it's the different consent models that will make it more challenging to adapt things (and that in some cases it might well be better off to look at completely different impementations). So, view it all as a prototype that they've invested in on our behalf!

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Emelia 👸🏻

@gooba42 @mekkaokereke if it's not, let us know! https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety

I'm leading this taskforce and really pushing for better moderation at protocol level

.

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke
Thanks for the info. I gather it's pretty pervasive then, generally.

It seems that many ppl have either accepted scraping, haven't considered it, or use apps that prevent their creative content from beng scraped (not sure how many use those apps, but some apparently do).

I appreciate the overview, Jon!

Jon

My pleasure! Yes alas it's fairly pervasive and I think most people are resigned to it (not that I'm saying that's a good thing).

If yo're on an fedi instance with local-only post, that's one alternative. Also we're starting to see federations of isntances like The Website League, where posts aren't public to the entire internet, so that's also scraping-resistant. I think things will go more in that direction in general, not just because of scraping. Time will tell! But on public Twitter-like social networks, it's hard to be optmistic.

@[email protected]

Oblomov

@jdp23 @djsundog @Eris other implementations going forward without waiting for Mastodon is good, but it's not enough (case in point, Quote Boosts; nobody cared that other platforms had them). Part of that is a general misconception of what the Fediverse is and how it operates (and one of the reasons I insist on speaking about the Fediverse rather than Mastodon alone), but part of it is that practically the biggest player in town not supporting something *is* a problem. Monocultures are bad.

nickapos :clubtwit:

@mekkaokereke I think we need to take into account the resources available to BlueSky and the resources available to mastodon. Mastodon will always be slow to evolve and because its controllers have certain convictions it will take extra time to persuade them to move to a different direction. But eventually they will get there. BlueSky may be ok today, but we have seen this play out in the past, when VC people are calling the shots we all know what happens in the end.

Jon

Well, if adoption by Mastodon gGmbH is essential to any progress here, then the ActivityPub Fediverse is just as centralized as Bluesky at this point. Fortunately I don't think that's the case.

EDIT: I had originally described them as for-profit, based on this article about them losing their non-profit status. But, I don't know German law, maybe a gGmbH is still a non-profit but not for tax purposes. So I edited it to remove a possible misstatement -- the key point from a decentralization perspective is that they're a single entity, https://www.heise.de/en/news/Mastodon-Laut-Finanzamt-nicht-mehr-gemeinnuetzig-9701352.html

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

mekka okereke :verified:

@nickapos

I'm explicitly calling this out as an excuse that I will not accept.

As an example, I'm saying that the obstacles to making something like starter packs work on Mastodon is not hundreds of millions of dollars.

As another example, I said that BlueSky is winning against Twitter, who has 2 orders of magnitude more resources than them. Because it's not about resources as much as it as about "listen to your own users."

Many of those BlueSky users tried Mastodon first. ‍️

Eris Renée

@jdp23 but mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit, hence the g in gGmbH.

nickapos :clubtwit:

@mekkaokereke you may have noticed that there are people submitting patches to mastodon that are not accepted for months or ever for no technical reason apart from the lead Eugen not liking the person who submitted them.
This is what I meant by the phrase certain convictions. What you think should happen and what many other people think should happen will not happen until Eugen is convinced. I believe as has happened in the past he will eventually see that this is the way forward.

Jon

@[email protected] According to this, Mastodon gGmbH lost their non-profit status earlier this year - https://www.heise.de/en/news/Mastodon-Laut-Finanzamt-nicht-mehr-gemeinnuetzig-9701352.html

They're still a gGmbH so maybe they're still a non-profit just without the tax status? I'll edit my post.