Gregory's ServerIf you're looking for a platform without billionaire investors and owners, well, this is the only one.
 30 comments
The distributed administration and diverse community structure also give it resistance to large scale bot and disinfo campaigns. My main beef is that some design constraints of ActivityPub are generally poorly explained. E.g, I've seen virtually no discussion about its "lossy" memory model. No instance sponsor can afford to archive all of the Fediverse message traffic. Hence, full search is impossible. To me, that's a feature of ActivityPubs resistance to abuse. But others expect it. @vicuzumeri Data impermanence and content obscurity is a feature as far as I'm concerned. @evan I fully agree, but it turns off my wife! I haven't succeeded in explaining the tradeoff to her 😞 @vicuzumeri She's unsalvageable. Leave her on the pastures of Meta to get harvested like digital livestock. @evan Umm ... are you married? There are costs to that strategy. I'm just asking if some folks who are smarter than me can help craft an effective story. I suspect there are quite a few potential converts who might be helped. You know, a "feature, not bug" type explanation.  @vicuzumeri @evan If you host a Mastodon (or Akkoma, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Epicyon, PixelFed and so on) instance for your family and if the software supports full text search and you'd enable it would that be a good compromise ? I don't think there is any need to compromise on the design. The limited distribution and archiving creates valuable friction against nefarious actors. I can still search and find a ton of stuff, especially if my instance supports good feeds and I use hashtags effectively. My point is that I've met many newbies who react in horror when they can't instantly find everything they want with a plain text search. "I can in X!" IMO, just needs a clear and cogent explanation.  @vicuzumeri @adiz @evan It's growing your own instead of letting a billionaire plant and grow the fruit trees they want you to pick from? @vicuzumeri  @Puck @vicuzumeri the biggest problem with trying to get people off FB is the fact that they like the content being fed to them. @vicuzumeri @evan Do we even know how much data is Put through the fediverse a day? What's the closest estimate?  @evan Or, rather, there are a lot of them and they all interoperate.  @evan ... but I'm willing to receive a billion-dollar gift if someone wants to change that. 😜  Sorry. My billionaire folks took that back after reading my TL. Please accept this jar of bread ties I saved up as a conoslation prize, though. @evan There's also the Diaspora platform (which uses diaspora protocol, not ActivityPub). Diaspora is older than ActivityPub and older than Mastodon. I actually prefer Diaspora over all of the ActivityPub platforms, and it's my main social media hangout really. I prefer the rigid posts/boosts and comment thread paradigm, which allows people to moderate comments. Also, the diaspora protocol is simpler and less flexible than AP, making it robust against Embrace Extend Extinguish... @evan  @evan Depending on what you mean by "platform" (and if you mean "social media platform, then depending on what qualifies as "social media"...) then https://dreamwidth.org is still billionaire-free to the best of my knowledge. It's a fork of Livejournal's code from back when LJ was getting sold to Russia. The people who run it are good, kind, and dedicated.  @Evan Prodromou *checks with our treasurer*
We don't seem to have any billionaire investors or owners over here on our platform. @evan I would rather refer to the fediverse as a network and Mastodon as a service, than calling it a platform. My mission is to move from platforms to protocols. Platforms are lock-in instruments. |
@evan How do you think the message can most likely get out?