Democratizing Social Media Networks: 🚀 #Fediverse, #Lemmy, #Mastodon, #Pixelfed and many other #Decentralized #Federated Networks have significantly democratized the sharing of information through #ActivityPub .

📅 On Saturday, November 9, 2024, at 15:30 (Athens Time), I will be presenting “Welcome to Decentralization” at FOSSCOMM 2024, hosted by the University of Macedonia! 🇬🇷🇪🇺

🗓️ Agenda and Streaming Links: 🔗 2024.fosscomm.gr

#FOSSCOMM2024 #Decentralization #OpenSource#Federation

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/32283041

As currently they’re only using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

History has shown us time and time again that these corporate platforms are unreliable and untrustworthy.

•Twitter has a moderation problem.

•Facebook has been found interfering with the message delivery of crucial information during emergencies, putting people’s lives at risk.

•YouTube often takes down videos for the wildest of reasons and Google had a massive fight with the federal government over Canadian media outlet compensation. Who’s to say they won’t use their dominant position to sabotage the efforts of governments they don’t agree.

We could email the council requesting that they post on the platform.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

I used to primarily use Instagram for following illustrators, sculptors, digital artists, etc., but I dropped Insta for obvious reasons.

There was also a large exodus from Insta to Cara.app almost a year ago due to Meta's stupid policies on using Insta content to train AI. While Cara is generally a great site and has anti-AI policies (I'm not anti-AI, just anti the way most companies implement AI), my problem with Cara is that it's an owner funded site that will inevitably need to find a way to monetize the content/users.

On the Fediverse, I'm on Lemmy, Mastodon (though I don't love the micro-blog format), and Pixelfed (very little activity).

So my question is: What platforms in the Fediverse are you seeing the most original artist content?

Append attachments to comments by flamingo-cant-draw ?? Pull Request #5143 ?? LemmyNet/lemmy

I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
[…]
Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.

In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
[…]
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

So far, there is only some user settings accessible in the web interface. I don't have an iPhone, hence I cannot say for their app. The android app will come later, apparently.

I really wonder if this is just a different frontend for pixelfed that is video-centric, or if it will be something else.

Since it is supposed to be the TikTok of the fediverse, I really wonder if it will, like pixelfed also just feature a chronological timeline? Because what makes TikTok so popular is not the short videos, but the recommendation algorithm that doesn't even require people to follow any accounts.

If it's just another chronological media feed then they could have just modified pixelfed to only allow video upload and would jabe archived the same thing. So far I am really wondering if loops is a new thing, or if it will be just another reskin of mastodon/pixelfed/...

The whole project seems down

• https://sffa.community/
• https://sffa.wiki/wiki/Science-Fiction_Fantasy_Alliance

There were a few fantasy communities there such as !fantasy@sffa.community , sad to see them go

The fediverse has been good to me so far, I am more than happy to support these projects, and to support the future of social networking.

I'm still learning the quirks of federation and the behaviors of communities hosted on different instances, so I apologize if this is something that's been asked repeatedly.

I made a post to a community I am subscribed to at lemmy.ca, from my home instance at slrpnk.net. Public posts on that community (as well as the post that I made) are not showing up from my home instance. My profile page on my home instance does not show any record of the post that I made.

I was only able to find existence of the post that I made by going to lemmy.ca, and then finding the community that I posted to from there.

!woodworking@lemmy.ca

It must be the recent questionable moves made by YouTube recently disabling the upload date and the viewer counter.

When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.

This week's news

• The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new tool to help interoperability
• the botsin.space server will shut down
• Add monetisation to federated WordPress blogs with sub.club
• You can now set custom handles on fediverse accounts that are bridged to Bluesky

Article by Mike Masnick

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

How is the best way to get started building apps in the fediverse?

(relates to https://thebrainbin.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/350958/Minetest-Luanti-rejected-suggestion)

Pure walled-garden behavior (by federation/decentralization) from the Minetest devs.

Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren't being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.

That's where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.

As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.

So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:

"Microblogging" but with relaxed character limits:

1. GoToSocial
2. Hollo
3. Ktistec
4. Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
5. Takahe - More experimental compared to others above

Other

1. GoBlog - Simple blogging
2. Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
3. Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.

I'm sure there's way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you're into that I may have overlooked!

For a long time, users have been able to submit microblog-style posts to link-aggregator subs (a.k.a. subcommunity, community, magazine, etc.). Some platforms such as mbin require you to select one for your post. Previously, I've thought this sub selection as a special hashtag for the post. However, I've recently been reminded that posts actually show up in communities as full-on threads. So what do you (or the threadi gods) consider to be proper etiquette in selecting a proper sub to make your microblog post to? There's always !random, but that feels kinda worthless...