Gregory's Server
I was today years old to learn that “sonata” is the past participle of “to sound” as opposed to “cantata” which is that of “to sing”. #classicalmusic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonata_form
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“A Third of North America’s #Birds Have Vanished” in the last 50 years.  @J12t glass skyscrapers kill birds. People spraying pesticides kills birds. People cutting down trees (especially during nesting season) kills birds. Free-roaming cats kill birds. Bird flu kills birds. Warming oceans kill birds. If you didn't think that #Meta has been thinking in detail about the #EU's Digital Markets act, consider this: "Meta is planning to let people in the EU download apps through Facebook" / https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778928/meta-eu-facebook-plans-app-install-android-ads Re-reading tyhe #EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act ... it strikes me again, how much the stated objective is to "improve the proper functioning of the internal market". We do not have a political objective like this one in the US. Not that I know of anyway. What would happen if we did?   @J12t Amercian competition law was changed dramatically by a movement led by Robert Bork who taught that the law should focus only on business practices' impact on prices. Prior to Bork, antitrust had often addressed issues related to market power, concentration, barriers to entry, etc. Bork and Reagan dramatically limited the scope of antitrust enforcement. ActivityPub everywhere? That might very well be a medium-term consequence of Meta starting to implement it for their upcoming Twitter competitor. Blogged. https://reb00ted.org/tech/20230628-activitypub-everywhere/ @J12t With "ActivityPub everywhere" innovators won't have to invest in audience building, they will instead be able to focus on delivering innovative and distinct user experiences. Rather than building the general clients needed to attract broad audiences, innovators may invest effort in addressing the needs of specific communities. Journalists, chemists, physicists, the blind, photographers, etc. all have distinct needs that could and should be addressed by specific clients or client-features. @J12t hello I am unsure about your reading of the regulatory triggers. Interoperability measures are introduced in the DMA and not the DSA. But more importantly they concern only messaging services. While the specific services have not been named, the discussion concerns services like WhatsApp and Matrix, not Instagram and Mastodon. For this reason #ActivityPub will most probably not be the protocol at the heart of #DMA messaging interoperability. #Matrix is a good candidate "Our records indicate that in 2022, Equifax received a Right to Know request from you under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Due to a technology issue, which has been resolved, the Right to Know request was not processed successfully." How convenient? At least supposedly it has been fixed. #CCPA #privacy #equifax More thoughts on Meta, ActivityPub, the EU and the Digital Services Act. Blogged. https://reb00ted.org Consider two scenarios to add the next 10m monthly active users to today's #fediverse: 1) we all block #meta and today's fediverse grows organically by the next 10m users. 2) we interact with as many #meta users as possible from Mastodon etc. via their ActivityPub integration, make our points why this is better, and convince 10m of them to leave meta and come over to apps not run by a surveillance capitalist. Which of those two is more likely and quickly to lead to success? Food for thought.
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(1) Blocking only serves to isolate Meta users, as they may find they can connect with some friends but not others. It would be like trying to isolate your email server from gmail because you disliked Alphabet as a company. (2) Convincing people to join an alternative server is unlikely as well. Millions of individuals still using AOL despite other email services offering a superior experience. Once connected with their friends, people lack the motivation to migrate to a "better" platform. @J12t Bear in mind the possibility that Meta disables contact export. This has already been done in Wildebeest, Cloudflare's turnkey Masto fork.  @J12t How successful are we at convincing people to leave their large instances (#MastodonSocial)? Why would Meta implement ActivityPub? 1½ reasons are compelling, another frequently mentioned one is not. Blogged yesterday. So far, a bunch of nodding, no real disagreements. Still want your thoughts, particularly if you disagree or have something to add I missed. https://reb00ted.org/tech/20230625-meta-why-activitypub/
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@J12t My guess is that folk at Meta finally realized that they can maintain useful dominance even within an "open" SocialWeb. The reality is that there are still many network effects associated with large platforms. (Mastodon.social is a good example) While theory may argue that being open may result in fragmentation, in practice it doesn't. An "open" Meta encourages the troublesome folk to federate elsewhere while staying connected and thus somewhat co-opted.  @J12t Another possibility: Meta has good business reasons for doing a decentralized network (which I think is clearly the case), and ActivityPub is one of the best-known decentralized protocols , so it's a good PR/marketing approach to say they're starting there. Either they make it work with proprietary extensions, or they say "we tried it but it didn't work out, and our approach is better because ..." A great piece on”movement #narcissism”. Read this if you sometimes wonder how some highly principled let’s-fix-the-world movements can be so … shall we call it … “not nice”. The #fediverse comes to mind. We have plenty of this here, too. I wonder what we can do about it. (Taking cover now …) Why would Meta implement ActivityPub? 1½ reasons are compelling, another is not. Those reasons have consequences. Blogged. Would love your thoughts.
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  @J12t Why did Facebook spend $19 billion (mostly in cash) to acquire WhatsApp back in the day? Monopoly preservation.  @J12t To quote the Violent Femmes, "third verse the same as the first" part of embrace and extend for open protocols can be a play to hold off regulators for anti-trust, especially when used against a smaller group embrace and extend being a play to mollify regulators doesn't mean Facebook isn't bent on controlling the space S what did you do on the weekend? Oh, well, Saturday night, I hung out with my friends, chatting. I had great fun, and stayed up longer than I probably should have. Did you go to that new brew pub in town? Nah, we were all home, in I don’t know many time zones, chatting about the potential financial ceilings of certain decentralized social media architectures. #fediverse #is#just #a #tad #different. A very tough, but excellent article "Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?" on the challenges of #mastodon and the broader #fediverse by https://finecity.social/@bloonface. https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/  Yea … bottom line summary for me is … If you’re here, chances are you’re not a normal reasonable user and your standards/judgment doesn’t matter if you want any sort of uptake/growth. Fediverse probably needs a good group of product managers willing to say “no, that’s shit”, if growth is desired.  The user interface is also to blame. * Bigger post sizes are a FLAW, not a feature. If posts can be 500 or 5000 chars long, they should have a 1- or 2-line subject field, as in email: the subject only is displayed at first, and the rest is shows only if the reader clicks on it. As it is, I miss most posts on my timeline because only a handful are visible at a time. 🧵> @J12t It makes some good points but it doesn't even talk about the racial issues which were (IMHO) by far the biggest barrier to more widespread adoption Also I disagree with the overall framing of "failure." It was certainly a missed opportunity, but still something to build on. Of course the dynamics were extremely similar to the missed opportuinty in 2017, which is discouraging. Still, as we're seeing with reddit, it won't be the last opportunity. The #putin address is over according to sky news, where I watched it, and CNN’s headline remains “Putin to address nation soon”. They should rename “news” to “olds”. One of the core #values of the #fediverse is reciprocity. Meaning, for example, that you permit me to follow you with any software I like. And so I permit you to follow me with any software you like. It wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t reciprocate. I can comment on your stuff. You can comment on my stuff. (Unless one of us gets abusive, for example, then reciprocity ends.) Perhaps this is a lens we can use to tell whether #meta is participating in good faith or not. Who needs embrace and extend if: #Meta users will be able " ... to import existing account info and posts from other #ActivityPub servers, meaning someone could, say, move all their content from #Mastodon into Meta's app."  @J12t Not sure that was as shocker of a feature. They will do the same from IG into Threads. Will be *very* curious if they allow the reverse to Mastodon. One would expect not...but they do offer IG account data export now. (granted not your your social graph)... So will be watching. https://help.instagram.com/181231772500920 And here you have it what I’ve been saying all along: “#Meta is hoping for at least 10s of millions of users within the first few months” for their Twitter competitor #p95 The #fediverse and #activitypub will be a small minority show within months. Assuming they can do it, but getting 1% of Instagram users if they promote it from within Instagram? Sounds very doable. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/23/23771599/command-line-musk-versus-zuckerberg @J12t As I have been pointing out too …the “Embrace” of ActivityPub is coming regardless of if existing Fedi did preemptive blocking or not. We have to fortify against the “Extend” risks. What’s going on in #russia today is not something I ever heard of even in a history book. When does it ever happen that a general in an active war turns around and marches on his own side’s top leadership?
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When he’s NOT a general, but a private mercenary. #Prigozhin #Wagner #Mercenary not a #Coup
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@J12t I really don’t get the sense that Ukraine would make deals with the people committing war crimes against them |
