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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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.
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Yeah I certainly see why everybody's frustrated here. There are multiple conversations going on: some with you, others about what you said in the context of multiple ongoing multi-year conversations, and they blur together.
In terms of my conversation with you, what I hoped you might find useful from my posts, your original post was about alternatives to extractive capitalism, and talked about "funding the fediverse" more generally. I think it's useful to consider both of those in terms of networked communities model as well as other models. Even with the specific focus on how to pay for the large, connected fediverse-based social network, I think you and others are more likely to come up with workable non-extractive solutions that leverage the fediverse's strengths if you also take the networked communities model into account.
Also, there's been a lot of discussion over the years looking at specific forms of extractive capitalism in the fediverse context, so knowing that is hopefully useful (whether or not the specific discussions are useful is a different question, I'm not suggesting you should dig in unless you're interested, I'm saying that I hope that knowing they exist is useful for understanding some of the reactions to your post).
[And quite possibly these aren't actually useful to you, but hopefully this clarifies why I thought they could potentially be.]
As for the discussions that are more about your post, not directly with you, it's not always clear when to keep tagging people when the topic shifts to something related, and when not to. I'm always on the fence about tagging people when i quote them, in generally they don't get notified otherwise, but it leads to them being included in the followups whether or not they want to be. So apologies for the unnecessary and frustrating tags I sparked here, I'll look for another approach next time.
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@jdp23 For the record, I am comfortable not being tagged if you choose to quote one of my posts. I prefer the assumption that if you're tagging me it's because you want to engage me in the conversation.
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@[email protected] cool, i'll do it that way next time with you (and think about doing it that way more generally).
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@jdp23
as a total aside, I have found it useful to do the quote/link in the top post and then tag the person in the first reply in a post thats basically "tagging this person so they know im talking about them but also so they dont get a bunch of follow-on notifs so please dont reply to this post or tag them unless they reply directly" -
@[email protected] thanks. I've sometimes done that -- similarly when I share a blog post and want to let people know I've quoted/linked to them in it -- but more often than not people wind up replying to the reply so it doesn't wind up helping. And sometimes I reply to the original thread saying "I quoted you over here" but that seems like just calling attention to myself. No good answers in general, it's just learning who prefers what.
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smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)replied to Jon last edited by
@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @witchescauldron @u2764
> The SWICG standards group is taking over running activitypub.rocks, incuding socialhub
Well.. without consulting anyone. I think it is unlikely that SWICG wasn't aware of prior attempts to improve the web portal, where I communicated with Christine about activitypub.rocks and set up various forum threads: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-from-standards-movement-to-grassroots-fedi/3577
Think they're also aware that SocialHub sits under that domain and @how + Nightpool are admins to at least inform.
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( hellekin )replied to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊) last edited by
@smallcircles @jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @witchescauldron @u2764
The #SocialHub has been here for five years, three of which the SWICG was mostly inactive.
It's a decision of the community what happens next, but now you all know what it entails: controlling the domain name, having a working test suite, and getting involved in community governance. If all three are not present, then it will fail again.