@atomicpoet 😂 Thanks! My Apple Watch has been vibrating a lot for the past 10 minuets!

So I just don't understand why so many newbs like ⬆️ that guy seem so angry.

He's not the first guy like this. So what's going on?

Is it just the sentiment on Twitter right now?

@atomicpoet Agree completely on gatekeepers being captured by malicious actors. However, I do think the issue of identification in journalism is important. Journalists and news media depend on their credibility. As do we. And that IDing should be fairly idiot-proof. Not sure there is a solution but it would be nice if there was one.

@atomicpoet centralization is extremely dangerous. It creates a single point of failure. Any systems architect knows that.

The big corps like to pretend that what they do require centralization, and though there are naturally centralized tasks (like search), for the most part, this is simply not true.

There is nothing in publishing that mathematically requires centralization

@atomicpoet Indeed.

Around this time last year, I realized that retirement was going to be boring. What was I going to do? Play badminton all day?

So I called my friend @reiver, and he had a project for me to work on.

Now @reiver has been coding for something like 25 years, and has an interest in open protocols. So I told him about ActivityPub.

After looking at the dystopian landscape that's social, we started talking to others, and decided, "Let's build something!"

So my big autistic furry dev friend makes his presentation -- absolutely kills it. Pretty much rolls out a compelling case for his software.

But I'm looking at the executive, he's frozen in disbelief.

After the presentation is over, we make our goodbyes.

45 minutes later, I get a call from the executive. And he tells me, "It's cool. I like it. It does everything I need -- but the Fediverse now scares me."

"But you told me that you'd respect the culture," I said (Contd.)

The first social media revolution started ~20 years ago.

The features may have changed, but the general structure has remained intact since then.

Since Friendster, every social network's value has been contingent upon grabbing as much of a mass of people as possible, and leveraging the network effect.

Why was MySpace, Twitter, Facebook valuable? Because of how many active users were on it.

At least, that was how the first social media model worked.

@atomicpoet
> You're coming to grips with ideas that were previously foreign to you: decentralization, federation, instances, etc.

More like the ideas you've been safely shielded from by the corporations which somehow found a way to subvert the whole idea of the Internet, turning knowledge into ignorance and ignorance into profit.

Also, when Twitter yoinked API access from 3rd party developers, that convinced VCs that continuing a bait-and-switch with APIs was lucrative.

That they could fund the next potential monopoly.

The result was competing walled gardens -- and that has hindered the Internet's development, perhaps set it back for decades.

As you all can probably tell from comments, I just used the "edit" feature on the original post to clarify that this feature isn't available to all instances.

So there you go, the edit feature sure is useful 😅

@atomicpoet Pixelfed!

If you're new to Mastodon (and the Fediverse) you might have a lot of questions:

How many followers do I have on Twitter compared to Mastodon? 8,583 followers on Twitter, 1,324 on Mastodon

Are you more notable on Mastodon than on Twitter? No, I'm more notable on Twitter.

Did you do anything special to make people want to interact with you? No.

Is the difference always consistent? Yes, I always get more interaction on Mastodon -- even on small accounts with small instances.

@atomicpoet that's probably one of the reasons why they're skeptical about it.

@atomicpoet I disagree with most of this, but good luck anyway!

Proliferating a lot of new, low-quality servers would drive ppl away and ruin the fediverse idea.

AFAICT there's no simple way for misc sites (like news) to integrate 'participation' links. Should CNN feature 131 different "Toot this article" icons on each page?

Trademarks/branding is haphazard and just asking for a major phishing scandal. Why do most M. instances feature the same logo??

@atomicpoet what's going on?

@atomicpoet A very insightful thread.

Honestly, I'm happy to roll with the punches. Maybe the #Fediverse will change as result of the buy-out, maybe a lot, maybe not much, but part of the fun is finding out how this unusual internet phenomena is going to pan out.

Big migration to the Fediverse is incoming!

@atomicpoet @reiver 👀

@atomicpoet @reiver what sort of thing did you make? any plans with what you will do with it? the successful federation step is a major one

@atomicpoet I feel a sudden urge to move to UK pronto.

@atomicpoet This is something I stumbled into just a few weeks ago, and not even with video content.
There was this service that let you set up free web forums (EZboards) that was very popular around the turn of the millenium. The web forums were originally preserved on the Internet Archive, but the domain was picked up by a malicious squatter in 2011.
Thanks to a retroactive robots.txt that forbids archiving, those archives are lost now. And that's just HTML and pictures, not something weighty like video.

@atomicpoet On the creation vs. destruction rates: Total Internet data is still growing AFAIU.

The doubling rate has been about 18 months to 2 years, for decades now (and pre-dating both the Web and Internet).

So unless half of all data is lost within 18--24 months, no, the total would still be growing.

Though average lifespan is likely low. Internet Archive's metric is that the typical webpage on last 50 days until deleted or changed.

@atomicpoet the best argument against 100% P2P hosting is the millions of dead torrents. Ideally you'd have a system where there is multiple local points of centralisation, that can also keep functioning based on direct P2P between users in case the central entity disappears. So basically peertube, but other instances should be able to archive content form other instances as long as it is shared by some user/seeder.

@atomicpoet My entire extended family doesn't seem to use the Internet beyond Facebook. Makes me so glad I never had to worry about coming out anywhere else and not Facebook, since it means I never have to come out to the rest of my family. If any of them are clever enough to find me elsewhere, they'll probably understand why, too.

@atomicpoet They seems to not understand "The Internet" is a network, not a person or Skynet. It doesn't "react" to anything… By the way, "web" and "Internet" are two different things. Social media be it twitter or something else, is just a small part of the web. It is not and can't be "the Internet".

@atomicpoet I will say, the nicest thing about moving from the birdsite to Mastodon has been the lack of pundits on the latter.