Gregory's Server
If you work at Apple, Google, or Microsoft, how do you feel about Meta building a Fediverse social network?
Send me a direct message if you don’t want your opinion to be public.
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Just discovered why I'm seeing quoted Mastodon posts. It's not mastodon.social that added quoted posts. It's not Firefox that added quoted posts. It's the Graze for Mastodon extension that added it. So there we have it! Graze for Mastodon just added quoted posts to Mastodon! Wow! That was a lot of excitement! By the way, I originally installed Graze so I could like and boost posts from remote Mastodon servers. I didn't expect them to add a quote feature. But I'm glad they added a quote feature because it actually displays really well, and it makes for a much better Mastodon experience. Still, it would be nice if Mastodon has native support for quotes. Yay! @mozilla's official Mastodon server, mozilla.social, is finally up and running! Take a look at the first post! And say "Hello!" to @morethan.
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 @atomicpoet @morethan @fediversenews @mozilla I'm getting an auth error. Is the Mozilla Mastodon server open for registration? Twitter's ongoing death spiral is incredibly dramatic. But Instagram and Facebook's slow descent into death is just as important to understand. As much as Twitter is Big Social, Meta is even more so. This is why it's so important to continue building Fediverse services like @pixelfed and Friendica -- they are alternatives to Instagram and Facebook. There's a few threats to the Fediverse. Here's what I think they are: 1. Google extending their dominance into Fediverse search 2. Jack Dorsey's crypto obsessiveness (see Nostr) 3. Cloudflare's Mastodon competitor (Wildebeest) 4. A16Z investment in Towns -- which is just Matrix with crypto pixie dust 5. Developers' myopic focus on Mastodon to the detriment of the rest of the Fediverse
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 @atomicpoet Mostly agreed on nr 5, with some nuance: I think this is a threat to the (micro)blogging side of the fediverse. PeerTube is unique enough that I think itll get dev attention once it gets a bit bigger, even if the devs are currently myopic on Mastodon. Its the growth/potential of Pleroma/Calckey/Misskey/Bonfire thats more worrysome for that @atomicpoet@mastodon.social we must defend our independence, @Gargron@mastodon.social told that accepting VC is detrimental to hard-earned independence for Mastodon. Microsoft’s official @dotnet sent its first Mastodon post today. Pay attention to the domain: dotnet.social. Which means Microsoft is officially connected with a Mastodon community server. @dotnet account was registered in November, but it became active today. Clearly, Microsoft sees the Fediverse as core to marketing to developers. I wonder what other brands they’ll bring to the Fediverse as well. https://dotnet.social/@dotnet@dotnet.social/109990127969245035
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@atomicpoet @dotnet @fediversenews Une très bonne occasion d'exploiter la force du fediverse en bloquant le domaine @dotnet.social 😋 @atomicpoet @dotnet Thanks for sharing this, Chris. I have followed the discussion and I think that even that if there were no affiliation between MS and the instance - like some are saying - then we should be discussing the fact that powerful corporations are using community-sustained resources like our mastodon servers to position their brands.This I find ultimately irreverent.
 Spotify doesn't want to be Spotify anymore. Instead they want to be TikTok and Instagram. Which is funny because Instagram doesn't want to be Instagram. Twitter doesn't want to be Twitter. And Facebook definitely doesn't want to be Facebook anymore either. You all seeing a theme? Whenever platform adoption plateaus, Big Social tries to pivot in a drastically different direction. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/8/23630821/spotify-design-home-music-podcasts-audiobooks-app This is why I believe the Fediverse can ultimately out-compete Big Social: new features can be added by building new services. You want a microblogging experience? Mastodon. What about a photo gallery? Pixelfed. And book reviews? Bookwyrm. No need to pivot and leave behind your previous social graph because the network effect is due to the protocol. If you don't like what someone is writing about, you have the following options: 1. Hide their boosts But going into their threads to police what they write about is pure asshole behaviour.
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 Doesn't it depend on what they're writing about and what they're saying? Some messages that fall short of reportable should still be called out as better not posted  @atomicpoet I'm just waiting here with my Bon Bons and popcorn for the release of that deprecated code to be open sourced.... Like he said he wanted. #Elon is doing great things and I'm among his tens of millions of fans for things like #Starlink, #Neuralink, the #Boring_Company, #PayPal, #SpaceX, flamethrowers, #Tesla, and other #visionary achievements... And although it's not his fault - #Twitter is s shithole and needs to be extinguished, along with #Faceplant, etc. ⛵ . @atomicpoet @pixelfed @dansup @fediversenews @atomicpoet @pixelfed @dansup @fediversenews That's awesome. I love bonsai photos on Instagram, but you can't zoom in to see the fine detail. Prediction for Twitter's demise: 1. Twitter gets harder to maintain 2. Outages increase from once a week to near daily 3. Elon Musk pronounces that Twitter's old code is a mess that can't be saved, and he promises Twitter 3.0 -- which will be better in all ways from the old Twitter 4. A year later, Twitter 3.0 is released, and it's not like "real" Twitter -- but it's a pay-to-play platform 5. People finally realize "old" Twitter is not coming back, and go elsewhere -- probably to Mastodon Why do I believe Twitter's demise will follow the above playbook? Because I've seen this happen before. The most infamous example is Digg. In that example, Digg's demise meant Reddit's ascendancy. So the developer of @mammoth used to make the iOS app Mast for Mastodon. Four years ago, he listed it for sale on Flippa for $9,750, advertising monthly profit of $895/month. @atomicpoet on the app store this developer called PoeticBytes seems to own all the apps previously worked on by shihab https://apps.apple.com/us/app-bundle/developers/id1517834055 that bundle has the same penguin icon that shihab mehboob uses on his official Twitter account https://twitter.com/jpeguin?s=21&t=wPrc1R91xqf17s8QjGNxKA. So no idea if it’s the same person under a different guise or what. Ironically he doesn’t even use his own mastodon instance. Here’s the first problem with @mammoth. On an iPhone SE, I can’t even see my Display name when I attempt to type it in. Here's a preview of #SpaceHost, a fully-managed Fediverse hosting service that @reiver and I are building. As you can see, you'll be able to select your Fediverse community server based on: * Micro Blogging @fediversenews On #SpaceHost, after you select what your social network will be focused on, you can next select what your capacity will be. Note: this capacity is based on estimates. This is why we say "up to" a certain number -- your mileage may vary. Nevertheless, we think it's extremely important to offer an option for single-user servers. A newly-formed Tesla union was shadowbanned on Twitter. Hmmm... Elon Musk is both the CEO of Tesla and Twitter 🤔 What an odd coincidence. There cannot be a conflict of interest here! Or can there? https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gmqx/tesla-buffalo-union-busting-shadowban-twitter
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@atomicpoet @FlotteBiene86 this guy will not hesitate a single minute to read their DMs … or anyone‘s DM if the content is somehow useful for him.  @atomicpoet Hope they also have an account on Facebook. That's the only social-media with real reach vs #birdchan, and isn't sitting on conflict-of-interest enemy-ground.  Here's @pixelfed's portfolio view. I like it a lot. Reminds me of how I still use Tumblr. Take a look for yourself: And here's what an individual post looks like in @pixelfed's portfolio view. Again, very much like Tumblr. I can see this becoming extremely popular. Take a look: https://portfolio.pixelfed.social/atomicpoet/36723715135901696 Head’s up. The crypto world is trying really hard to pivot towards decentralized social media. It’s important for everyone to know that the Fediverse has NOTHING to do with cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or whatever Ponzi scheme the “coin” hucksters have been trying to peddle. Whenever something gets trendy, that’s when the bottom feeders arrive. https://www.blockworks.co/news/web3-social-media-apps-to-watch I really have tried to give these apps a try. They’re a wasteland of spam. For example, people may trumpet Nostr’s 500,000 accounts. But what are those accounts talking about? Most of it is just people pleading with you to buy a coin. Not even kidding here. I check with Nostr every few weeks to see if anything’s changed. Nope. Just a continuous flow of crypto spam.
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 That's awesome! Can a billionaire buy your current instance and shut it down? Maybe More instances = more democracy @atomicpoet @reiver While I'm super thrilled with masto.host, I think it's great for there to be more than 3 options for how to run an instance. One thing I'd love to see is a middle ground between fully-managed hosting and DIY. For example, with masto.host, I have no control over the software version, and can't make any modifications or change environment settings. That's the only reason I've even considered installing it myself. Managed hosting with more control would be amazing. @atomicpoet I love that Lemmy is being supported right away! Signed up for the wait-list, can't wait until closed beta With respect to @gruber, the best Mastodon app is on Android. That app is Fedilab. That's because Fedlab is not a mere Mastodon app but a Fediverse app. Why is this important? Because a basic premise of the Fediverse is that apps should talk to each other. And thus, a *great* client should be able to talk, not just to Mastodon servers, but Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, and Friendica too. Just like web browsers interact with diverse websites, a Mastodon client should talk to diverse servers. Now @gruber may say, "Mastodon is the 800 lb. gorilla in the Fediverse ecosystem." Maybe, but it's nowhere near as dominant as many believe. According do fediverse.oberserver, there are 21,723 Fediverse instances -- of which there are 11,944 instances. That means there are 9,779 instances that are *not* Mastodon. By ignoring all those non-Mastodon instances, 3rd party client devs are ignoring a huge amount of potential in the Fediverse. |
@atomicpoet I used to work at Meta and Google, but don’t currently work at either. I don’t think Meta has any sort of good intentions in building a federated platform. Meta, just like Microsoft, uses the embrace extend extinguish philosophy, so if they join the Fediverse, it’s in an attempt to kill it.
@atomicpoet Let’s say I am one of these three companies’ board directors who have seen Meta failed with their Metaverse. If I’ve heard that they’re building Fediverse then I would confidently believe that they will fail once again.