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Mon, 29 Apr 2024 07:52:55 +0200

tallship

tallship@public.mitra.social

This comes as no surprise to anyone who's actually been paying attention over the past couple of years:

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-hard-fork/

All I can really say is, "OH Happy Day!"

Let the games begin, I'll bring the popcorn :p

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #fork #masto @thenexusofprivacy

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show all 8 comments

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 19:35:25 +0200

The Nexus of Privacy

thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange

@jupiter_rowland Right. As I say in the first section of the article,

"It's worth highlighting that a new hard fork complements the official Mastodon fork, which is likely to remain a better alternative for large, Threads-friendly instances like mastodon.social."

One way to look at this is that Mastodon gGmbH has successfully (at least so far) done an embrace-and-extend strategy on the AP standard, just as it previously did with the OStatus standard. One of their tactics has been not investing in migration or nomadic identities. This makes it hard for individuals -- and communities -- to get off of Mastodon; and, now that .social is the default signup, it reinforces the centralization of .social (which is now almost 30% of Mastodon MAU).

Tthere are multiple paths to changing that. One that's already happening is decentering microblogging within the fediverse as a whole. Another, also already happening, is decentering Mastodon withing microblogging. Forking Mastodon complements both of those.

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:46:00 +0200 zuletzt bearbeitet: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 01:12:44 +0200

tallship

tallship@public.mitra.social

@jupiter_rowland @danie10 @thenexusofprivacy @mikedev

Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.

No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?

Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.

No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.

The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.

Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.

True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.

With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.

Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.

In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when they're on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.

The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".

That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.

masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.

Jupiter:
> That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.

Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.

There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.

I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.

Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!

Danie:
> thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?

In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.

My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.

The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.

I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.

And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him [paraphrased, of course]: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.

Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.

I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.

They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)

#tallship #FOSS

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Tue, 30 Apr 2024 12:50:45 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@tallship So that's the intention.

I mean, most Mastodon forks that exist today really seem to have been created for one out of two reasons.

Either someone thought the Fediverse is only Mastodon, but wanted some new features, so they also thought that the only way to get these features into the Fediverse was by forking Mastodon and adding them to the fork.

Or someone wanted to offer features only available outside Mastodon to users who absolutely have to use Mastodon for some reason.

What you're suggesting is a variation of the latter. And that's to offer people a better Mastodon than the "official" one. One that isn't controlled by Rochko and the Mastodon gGmbH.

Ideally even one that opens itself to the rest of the Fediverse instead of locking it out. One that adds features which go beyond the standard fare (over 500 characters, markdown), features that official Mastodon refuses to have for political reasons. Once Mike Macgirvin has completed his work on implementing cross-project nomadic identity and (streams)-level permissions with nothing but ActivityPub, it could include these, too.

At the very least, for starters, your fork should offer migration on Sharkey's level and show what instance type a post came from. This would really open it to the rest of the Fediverse. With these two features, people could come over from mastodon.social with ease, discover that the Fediverse has so much more to offer than Mastodon and move on to something that has never been Mastodon in the first place. So it should be positioned as competition for Mastodon, but not as competition for everything else out there (*omas, *keys, Mike's creations etc.).

Still, the problem will be to get people to use it. Rochko does everything in his power to make sure that 99.9% of all Fediverse newbies are railroaded into his wannabe monolithic silo, that it takes them as long as possible to learn that Mastodon is decentralised and that it's as difficult as possible for them to leave again, at least without starting over from scratch.

After all, the vast majority of newbies think Mastodon is Twitter without Musk, but otherwise the same. So they start like they started on Twitter, namely by installing the eponymous app on their phones. And that app is controlled by Rochko and designed to maximise the railroading to his silo.

Thus, you'll need four things. One, the hard fork. Two, a bunch of general-purpose instances that run it. Three, a mobile app that has "Mastodon" in its name, that goes along with the fork, that supports as many features which the fork has that Mastodon doesn't as possible. And four, a whole lot of publicity targeted at those who think the Fediverse is only Mastodon as well as those who have heard of Mastodon but not the Fediverse.

As for vanilla Mastodon users, keep your eyes open for those who want Mastodon to have certain features. If you have them, and you'll be likely to have them, tell them that your fork is "Mastodon, but with that feature you want". Let them discover the other goodies once they've moved. Only tell them about the other features if they aren't easily convinced to move over.

Unfortunately, you won't win those over for whom vanilla Mastodon is the be-all, end-all of social networking, those who want vanilla Mastodon's set of features to be the one and only Fediverse standard and everything that goes beyond it to be banned.

CC: @Danie van der Merwe @The Nexus of Privacy

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Fork