Gregory's ServerListening to the first episode of @mike ‘s new podcast “Dot Social” on decentralized social networking with guest @mmasnick. They start off with discussion of his 2019 paper “Protocols, Not Platforms” and how, all of a sudden, the stagnant big social platforms are now being bypassed with rapid innovation by developers all over the fediverse.
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I have a comment here, though: there is nothing in #activitypub or any other relevant standards that says that #fediverse software needs to allow you to take your followers from one instance to another. In other words, the #fediverse does not actually promise anybody that they can take their followers! (Maybe it should. I sure would like that. Some apps allow you to do that. But whether eg #threads ever implements it is entirely up to them)  This is one of the things that I would like the fediverse to be a leader in, but it's going to require hard work and an acknowledgement of where we _actually_ are: - You should own your social graph - You should own your data - You should own how and why your data gets used I would argue that to the degree you get any of these in the fediverse it is haphazard and that understanding of these is similarly haphazard: not a promise by specification, convention, or law.   @cultdev @mike @mmasnick There is no particular technical reason why list of my friends could not move with me when I move accounts in the #Fediverse. It just needs to be recognized as a desirable feature, a protocol needs to be defined (wouldn't be surprised if it existed already) and then somebody needs to do the hard work convincing "everybody" who implements #ActivityPub that this is something they should add to their software.  @J12t @cultdev @mike @mmasnick This *should* be as simple as making your Followers/Following collections visible to the new instance. All of the primitives are there, but there’s no standardized ways to use them. It’ll probably take one app just doing it (and documenting it) to establish a standard that others can follow.  @J12t @cultdev @mike sorry, but you very much can move an account from one server to another and keep your followers. It's very smooth and easy in Mastodon! https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/data-portability-report.html @evan Is this community report basically a reverse engineering of what Mastodon does? (I don't actually know what mastodon does) @mike and @mmasnick move on in their podcast to discuss an (upcoming?) paper by @danny where he discusses the ultimate (“terminal”) values of what we are all trying to do here in the #fediverse. Apparently his take is that #decentralization is not all that important, control over one’s own thoughts and ideas is. (But: see Danny's comment below) @mike brings up a compelling argument for the #fediverse in a historical analogy with #aol: all the innovation around, say, travel in the closed AOL system back then could only come from AOL and whatever they could think up. It took the protocol-not-platform-centric decentralized web to catalyze the much broader innovation we’ve seen since, e.g. AirBnb is hard to imagine having been invented inside a closed system like AOL. @mmasnick agrees with the innovation argument: just copying the closed internet platforms, as (so far) much of todays fediverse is doing is not particularly interesting. But we don’t really know yet what amazing new inventions we will see. @mmasnick seems to say, in @mike ‘s Dot Social Podcast, that he thinks significant innovation is more likely to happen on top of the future decentralized #bluesky network than on the #activitypub network. Not sure I heard this right, but if so, I would love to hear his reasoning because I sure don’t see it. @mmasnick and @mike, in their podcast episode, ponder what the new, compelling thing is that can be done with decentralized social media that couldn’t be done with centralized systems. They agree with each other that nobody knows yet, and that if history is any guide, the centralized systems first have to be rebuilt in a decentralized fashion before that likely becomes apparent. Gotta wholeheartedly agree with @mike’s point in his dot social podcast: this is an amazing time. So much opportunity! It’s like the early days of the web all over again!! @mmasnick thinks it’s certainly bigger than mobile, when the smartphone with apps became a thing, and I would agree with that, too. @mmasnick says, on @mike’s podcast, that in spite of about 15 years of social networking in the mainstream, we haven’t really wrapped our minds around what it means to have a social graph “everywhere”. Indeed! Of course, we couldn’t, before the #fediverse, because even if we had figured it out, it would have been impossible to implement due to the centralization of the social platforms. But now we can! Social graph in your fridge? Here we come!!:-)   @J12t Is this the link to the episode? And how about this for that paper?  @J12t @mmasnick Mastodon is truly open and federated but I think Bluesky is nevertheless contributing some important ideas to advance the social web. One of the most powerful is their approach to custom feeds - what they call a "marketplace for algorithms". Algos have gotten a bad rap because they've been a) black boxes which b) have been abused by walled gardens and c) resulted in the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation. But algos are key for discovery and I like Bluesky's approach. @danny I guess we got a bit of a game of telephone going on ... I added a note to my post. Would it be fair to say that rather than decentralization being a "terminal value" in your view, it is a key enabler (requirement?) for the terminal value of control over one's own thoughts and ideas? @J12t @mike @mmasnick a sneak preview of my essay, which may be clearer: https://ffdweb.org/digest/terminal-values-cognitive-liberty/ I think I would say that decentralization is closer to the terminal value of cognitive autonomy than many other high-level values, but it's more like a necessary condition than a hierarchy of importance |
Now in the dot-social podcast episode, @mike and @mmasnick discuss how much #fediverse and #threads users understand the proposition of “own your followers”. They come to the conclusion: probably not much. (I would agree.)