Gregory's Server@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.
|
8 comments
 @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. |
@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.