75 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. betula.mycorrhiza.wiki betula.mycorrhiza.wiki
    1. https://betula.mycorrhiza.wiki/

      Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web. Use it to organize references or maintain a linklog.

  3. Feb 2024
    1. But so, where am I going to be spending my time and effort? On the Fediverse side, of course.Btw, I‘m not really thrilled with the term “Fediverse”. It’s better than “Mastodon”, of course, for obvious reasons. And better than “ActivityPub” (since that‘s just ONE protocol of the whole stack). But the thing is.. there’s nothing sacred about federation. It‘s just one (albeit important) tool in the distributed system toolbox. To name our whole scene after it, is like naming us “Array-ists”, or “Linked List-ists”. It’s just a low level detail.Let‘s just call us for what we are: the Open Social Web.
  4. Dec 2023
    1. Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

      This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

  5. Oct 2023
  6. Mar 2023
    1. The Fediverse indeed does, because its decentralization is a matter ofarchitecture, not just policy. A subreddit moderator has control only insofar asReddit, a soon-to-be public company,22 permits that control. Because Redditcan moderate any piece of content—indeed, to ban a subreddit outright—no matter whether the subreddit moderator agrees, it is subject to publicpressure to do so. Perhaps the most famous example is Reddit’s banning ofthe controversial pro-Trump r/The_Donald subreddit several months beforethe 2020 election.

      Reddit : Fediverse :: Decentralized-by-policy : Decentralized-by-architecture

      Good point! It makes me think that fediverse instances can look to subreddit governance as models for their own governance structures.

  7. Feb 2023
    1. Rozenshtein, Alan Z., Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media (November 23, 2022). 2 Journal of Free Speech Law (2023, Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4213674 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4213674

      Found via Nathan Schneider

      Abstract

      Current approaches to content moderation generally assume the continued dominance of “walled gardens”: social media platforms that control who can use their services and how. But an emerging form of decentralized social media—the "Fediverse"—offers an alternative model, one more akin to how email works and that avoids many of the pitfalls of centralized moderation. This essay, which builds on an emerging literature around decentralized social media, seeks to give an overview of the Fediverse, its benefits and drawbacks, and how government action can influence and encourage its development.

      Part I describes the Fediverse and how it works, beginning with a general description of open versus closed protocols and then proceeding to a description of the current Fediverse ecosystem, focusing on its major protocols and applications. Part II looks at the specific issue of content moderation on the Fediverse, using Mastodon, a Twitter-like microblogging service, as a case study to draw out the advantages and disadvantages of the federated content-moderation approach as compared to the current dominant closed-platform model. Part III considers how policymakers can encourage the Fediverse, whether through direct regulation, antitrust enforcement, or liability shields.

  8. Jan 2023
  9. Dec 2022
    1. "Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.
    1. FOSSDLE Commons (new OER Foundation project) https://social.fossdle.org/ 4 OERu https://mastodon.oeru.org/ 6 Open EdTech https://openedtech.social/ 8 Fossodon (open source) https://fosstodon.org/ 1 Wikis World (wiki enthusiasts) https://wikis.world 1
    1. For those of you wondering if hcommons on mastodon has taken measures to ward against the sort of meltdown the server had a few weeks ago, there's a update from one of the admins: https://hcommons.social/@kfitz/1094609

      https://hcommons.social/@amisamileanded/109466986626984098

      Apparently sometime within it's first month of existence hcommons.social had a server meltdown of some sort. The admins addressed and hardened their set up.

    1. [https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

    1. https://dolphin.town/about/more

      A social media service for dolphins where you can only send messages with the letter "e".

      compare with https://oulipo.social/about which elides the letter e

    1. As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.
    1. tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics. It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the net — in particular, on the 'cultural politics of the internet'.
  10. Nov 2022
    1. As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.

      Fediverse should mean engaged citizens

    1. hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.

      https://hcommons.social/about

      The humanities commons has their own mastodon instance now!

    1. So the first thing that I want to make clear is that Mastodon has a history of being inhospitable to marginalized users. This history is born out, as I’ve learned, through the marginalization and eventual shuttering of instances of color, of instances that were dedicated to hosting and supporting sex workers, of harassment of disabled users and so on. So Mastodon– while its federated model was premised on, well, the activity protocol, if I understand the history correctly– it was built in some ways to produce affordances that would avoid the kinds of harassment on Twitter. Things like quote tweet pile ons, things like other kinds of usage of the quote tweet or the comment or the reply feature to do violence. What that hasn’t done is prevented the violence.

      Interesting point, as a lot of Mastodon's design decisions are focused on reducing risk of violence. This is an argument that it does not work.

    1. Everyone who goes through the exercise of “what is journalism?” quickly learns there are no obvious, uncontroversial answers. We had a conversation this morning about somebody who has a blog about beer. We said, well, this person does reporting, they actually interview people, they look at statistics, they’re not just sharing their opinion on beer. And it felt like, yeah, that’s journalism. Now, would we make that decision a month from now? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to get into specifics, but we’ve had some tricky edge cases. Inherently, it’s tricky.

      Distributed verification, or "What is Journalism?"

      The admins of the journa.host server are now taking on the verification task. The example Davidson uses is a beer blog; the blog is more than opinion, so for the moment that person is added.

      So what is the role of professional organizations and societies to create a fediverse home for recognized members? This doesn't seem sustainable...particularly since people set the dividing lines between their professional and personal interests in different places.

      Spit-balling here...this reminds me somewhat of the Open Badges effort of Mozilla and IMS Global. If something like that was built into the Mastodon profile, then there would be transparency with a certifying agency.

    1. But - as the overall network has grown exponentially the network topology has changed. Digg, Reddit, Hacker News etc all still exist but the audience you can reach with a “homepage” hit there has become much smaller relative to the overall size of the network. And getting a homepage hit there is harder than ever because the volume of content has increased exponentially

      A similar dynamic can now be observed in the mass migration from twitter to mastodon. People who were successful at using the big "homepage" of twitter are likely to be a bit thrown by the fediverse but it represents an opportunity to connect with a smaller but more specialised audience.

    1. Can someone point me to a writeup or venn diagram explaining the relationship between the #Fedivers and #IndieWeb?Doing a lot of learning and not afraid to dig in on the protocol level. Do these protocols compete? Interoperate? Complement each other?

      https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

      At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

    1. Mastodon is just blogs

      "Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter." That is pretty accurate, microblogging and following does what feedreading does too. In this case commenting is put at the exact same level as the orginal blogpost, akin to how I can reply to posts with a post of my own (like old trackbacks, now webmention)

    1. manton Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon’s design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I’d say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like… Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.

      https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

      @manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

    1. The idea that a billion of us can keep dumping fresh content into our account for free and that none of this content seems to be ever lost, is honestly quite bizarre even if we take it for granted.

      You can change the framing and gain new insights.

      In the mastodon.technology shutdown post linked, the author describes a situation where the workload exceeds the capacity of an ordinary person, even a motivated one. (There's an argument to be made that this makes for someone who isn't merely an ordinary person—but that strengthens the point I'm about to make, instead of weakening it.)

      How do we fix this problem? In other words, how do we ensure that the workload of an "instance" remains within the realm of feasibility for an ordinary person?

      Answer: making it the responsibility of each person. A single volunteer admin should not be responsible for hundreds, thousands, or more other people. Getting each person to shoulder their own personal load is far more tractable.

      What's absent, currently, is the means for each person to do so on their own in a way that we can realistically expect. That can be worked on. Software like Mastodon can be improved upon—necessarily drastically so—and infrastructure configuration can be improved to, to the point that it doesn't even feel like infrastructure configuration.

      For people with very large spheres of influence, like Aral Balkan who recently disclosed that he's spending ~600 EUR per year for his instance, they can seek help, mining from the resources that are at their disposal that are a consequence of their wide reach. For ordinary people with up to a few hundred followers, they won't need to be exposed to this.

      As for the sentiment behind the remarks about "dumping fresh content into our account for free", recognize that the fresh content has value, and there are ways to subsidize the resource use by parties with an interest in being able to capture some of that value for themselves. When you post a widely shared piece to your blog, then Google for example benefits from this, whether you're using Google Ads or not. It's the mere fact that there's something on the Web worth looking at that makes this beneficial.

    1. This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do.
    1. In other words, the community of early users were super serious about consent. They don’t like their utterances circulating in ways they don’t like. You could say, “well, tough; you’re posting stuff in public, right?” But since this is Mastodon, users have powerful tools for responding to actions they don’t like. If the folks on server A don’t like the behavior of people on server B, they can “defederate” from server B; everyone on server B can no longer see what folks on A are doing, and vice versa. (“Defederating” is another deep part of Mastodon’s design that is, ultimately, powerfully antiviral.)

      Defederation to combat breaches of norms

      I wonder if this sort of thing would happen if someone created an ActivityPub node that did exhibit some of these viral behaviors. Would that node be shunned by the rest of the fediverse? Will that answer be the same a year from now when the fediverse is more mainstream?

    1. Page recommended by @wfinck. Seems @karlicoss is the author. This project seems similar to what I've been trying to do with Hypothes.is, Obsidian, Anki, Zotero, and PowerToys Run but goes beyond the scope of my endeavors to just quickly access whatever resource comes to mind (without creating duplicates). The things that Promnesia adds beyond my PKM stack is the following: - prioritize new info - keeping track of which device things were read and how long

    1. for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block lists for them to do so

      This instance encourages their account holders to actively block for themselves. Pushing agency into their hands, also by providing existing blocklists to make that easier. After all it isn't pleasant to have to experience abuse first before you know whom to block.

    2. In fact we added a feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.

      Providing lurking opportunities for security reasons. Very sensible. Example of actively providing tools that create agency for groups to protect themselves.

    3. s pecifically from the LGBTQ community, onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking for their physical safety. There were big name biggots (like milo yanappolus) who were on the network. They used their accounts here to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and their community and protect themselves accordingly

      Having the ability to see what known bigots get up to on social media is a security feature.

    4. allowed people read content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules)

      Blocking means your account holders don't see that part of the fediverse, you're taking away their overview. A decision you're making about them, without them. A block decision isn't only about the blocked server, it impacts your account holders too, and that needs to be part of the considerations.

    5. So there are some servers out there that demand every server int he network block every instance they do, and if a server doesnt block an instance they block then they block you in rettatliation.Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server and we boost it, they wont see the boost, thats how blocks work.

      There are M instances that block servers that don't block the same servers they do. That seems to defeat the entire concpet of federating (and the rationale isn't correct).

    1. See also Dan Hon’s excellent suggestion for news organizations— or universities, companies, or any organization or institution — to set up their own Mastodon servers to verify and control their users.

      Small town newspapers and libraries could set up Fediverse servers for their constituents as well.

      See also: Hometown by Darius Kazemi

  11. Oct 2022
    1. The end of Twitter

      Ben Werdmüller sees the Musk take-over as one of more signs that Twitter as we know it is sunsetting. Like FB it is losing its role as the all-in-one communal 'space'. I think the decline is real, but also think it will be long drawn out decline. Early adopters and early main stream may well jump ship, if they haven't already some time ago. The rest, including companies, will hang around much longer, if only for the sunk costs (socially and capital). An alternative (hopefully a multitude as Ben suggests) needs to clearly present itself, but hasn't in a way the mainstream recognises I think. It may well hurt to hold on for many, but if there's no other thing to latch onto people will endure the pain. Boiling frog and all that.

  12. May 2022
  13. Sep 2021
  14. Apr 2021
  15. Feb 2021
  16. Jan 2021
    1. Pixelfed is one of the best privacy respecting and federated alternatives to Instagram. It's great that is also allows posting from a desktop browser.

    1. This has some interesting research which might be applied to better design for an IndieWeb social space.

      I'd prefer a more positive framing rather than this likely more negative one.

  17. Sep 2020
    1. What were the “right things” to serve the community, as Zuckerberg put it, when the community had grown to more than 3 billion people?

      This is just one of the contradictions of having a global medium/platform of communication being controlled by a single operator.

      It is extremely difficult to create global policies to moderate the conversations of 3 billion people across different languages and cultures. No team, no document, is qualified for such a task, because so much is dependent on context.

      The approach to moderation taken by federated social media like Mastodon makes a lot more sense. Communities moderate themselves, based on their own codes of conduct. In smaller servers, a strict code of conduct may not even be necessary - moderation decisions can be based on a combination of consensus and common sense (just like in real life social groups and social interactions). And there is no question of censorship, since their moderation actions don't apply to the whole network.

  18. Mar 2018
    1. by URL All annotations on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Letter to my Son Atom: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?uri=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/ RSS: https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?uri=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/ by Tag All annotations tagged edu305 Atom: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tags=edu305 RSS: https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?tags=edu305 by User Paul Allison’s annotations Atom: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=paulallison RSS: https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?user=paulallison

      Excellent way to add users and tags to the Fediverse (the federation of free networks) -- through Friendica's RSS functionality.