might take a social media sabbatical while i focus on getting my website up and ready, as well as some other things that are more "social web" than "social media". i'm hoping to have more to share by the end of 2024...

infinite love ⴳ

also, no guarantees, but i am kind of disengaging from fedi in general as i am no longer optimistic for its future given its current trajectory over the past several years. i don't have any intention of fully withdrawing, and i'll probably continue to be involved in theoretical discussions and with efforts to help drive things forward, but day-to-day i find myself not wanting to be here anymore. this whole mode of engagement is just not doing it for me. it hasn't been since at least 2019 or so.

infinite love ⴳ

as i've been compiling content for my website, i've had a chance to look back at the things i've written in the past. i idly wondered in 2017 if or when mastodon would end up repeating twitter's mistakes. i think at this point i have to conclude it's more or less inevitable, because it's part of the design dna, it's the whole paradigm that needs to be shifted. granted, it's not as bad as twitter because the commercial element isn't here. but at its core, it's not fundamentally any different.

infinite love ⴳ

which is to say, this whole "social media" thing, and especially the twitter-like parts of it, are built on simplifying the act of "posting". this makes it more approachable, but we also lose a lot along the way. we lose expressivity. we lose context. we lose control over our experience. we lose the distinctions between different forms of communication. we lose the ability to understand and to be understood. we lose meaning. we lose attention. we lose careful consideration. we lose deliberation.

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ That is why I think the future of the fediverse is forums and communities. It solves a lot of the problems associated with Twitter style social media.

Oblomov

@trwnh it's a bit of a double-edge sword (I wrote about this some time ago here <https://wok.oblomov.eu/riflessioni/mastodon-v-father-dessert/>).

infinite love ⴳ

in working on my website recently i've been having a lot of fun because in no small part, i get to be *intentional* in what i'm doing. i get to choose what to publish, and how, and where. it's one of the higher forms of self-expression to be able to design everything from the uri structure to the metadata. i'm developing and documenting patterns for communicating on the web. i'd like to distill everything into insights that can be applied toward future projects, and applied by other people.

infinite love ⴳ

as for what i'd like to devote my thinking toward, i think the focus ought to be on identity and storage. it's pretty simple to have a bunch of static files behind a basic web server, but there's gotta be a way to progressively enhance that without making the whole system too complicated. and there's gotta be a way to make this into a generic framework that works across multiple protocols. we have more than enough transport protocols; the challenge is in keeping consistent references.

infinite love ⴳ

@scott forums are cool but honestly they don’t need to federate their content. it’s far more important to federate identity so you can participate in forums anywhere, regardless of whether the content is federated or not.

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ That is where OpenWebAuth comes in. It is a device-level federated single sign on. If you are logged into your home instance on your device, you can log into any other OpenWebAuth-enabled instance without a password using that device.

People in the fediverse don't seem to grasp the power of this technology, so I am going to build dozens of websites, ranging from forums to membership websites to project management apps to blogs that all use this technology. When people see it in action, they love it. We just have to show them.

infinite love ⴳ

@scott i don’t like owa because i think the act of logging into a remote website should be intentional, not something that happens automatically via a query parameter token.

i also don’t think identity should be handled by the same software as your communications. fundamentally i don’t believe in “instances”.