53 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Aug 2023
    1. The slip box needs a number of years in order to reach critical mass. Until then, it functions as a mere container from which we can retrieve what we put in. This changes with its growth in size and complexity.

      Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

      Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

      How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?


      † Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

  3. Jan 2023
    1. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just *minutes- later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:” Hi David, In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fediverse.app&hl=en*US&gl=US https://apps.apple.com/in/app/fedi-for-pleroma-and-mastodon/id1478806281 I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported. Let me know if you have any other questions

      ...coming back to this, now. ...

  4. Nov 2022
    1. the platform’s reliability is entirely dependent on which one you sign up for.

      It's been fine for years! I understand the intention behind informing readers of what the onboarding experience is like at this very moment, but if you're going to be part of this absurdly latent, dense wave of folks suddenly giving Mastodon a try, I think it's important you be very explicit about your lack of experience before the most intense influx of users in the history of the Fediverse.

    2. Joining Mastodon is undoubtably more complicated than starting a Twitter account.

      Are you sure about this argument, Janus? Are you sure you comprehensively tried all methods of onboarding?

    3. Mastodon is extremely messy compared to its shiny, centralized predecessors.

      What in the God's name of the fuck are you talking about??

    1. v5: added git and github (thanks @ceejbot), and RSS (thanks @zem42). Taking suggestions for hierarchical/distributed and hierarchical/decentralized.

      t Laurie Voss's crowdsourced set of examples of things that have structure & control in the form of the following: - centralized - hierarchical - federated - distributed - decentralized

      Picture below: Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1486563446099300359?s=20&t=C6z9xUF_YBkOFmfcjfjpUA

    1. What would a secure Federated PMK / archive network backed by a minimal blockchain look like?

      Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance

      Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.

      AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).

      In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")

    1. Well... I can't seem to get this webpage to render with the Hypothes.is sidebar alongside, so I'm going to have a go at just including entirety of the content in markdown format, annotated and presented in this same note.

      Eugen Rochko Time Interview

      ["Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands. Its Founder Has a Vision for Democratizing Social Media."]

      Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging site named after an extinct type of mammoth, {I'm sorry... what??? You didn't even fucking ask, did you?} recorded 120,000 new users in the four days following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, its German-born founder Eugen Rochko tells TIME. Many of them were Twitter users seeking a new place to call their online home.

      Those users, whether they knew it or not, were following in the footsteps of Rochko, 29, who began coding Mastodon in 2016 after becoming disillusioned with Twitter. “I was thinking that being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation,” Rochko says. “It was generally related to a feeling of distrust of the top down control that Twitter exercised.”

      Mastodon, which proudly proclaims it is [“not for sale”] and has around [4.5 million] user accounts, is pretty similar to Twitter, once users get past the complicated sign-up process. The main difference is that it’s not one cohesive platform, but actually a collection of different, independently-run and self-funded servers. Users on different servers can still communicate with each other, but anybody can set up their own server, and set their own rules for discussion. Mastodon is a crowdfunded nonprofit, which funds the full-time work of Rochko—its sole employee—and several popular servers.

      The platform doesn’t have the power to force server owners to do anything—even comply with basic content moderation standards. That sounds like a recipe for an online haven for far-right trolls. But in practice, many of Mastodon’s servers have stricter rules than Twitter, Rochko says. When hate-speech servers do appear, other servers can band together to block them, essentially ostracizing them from the majority of the platform. “I guess you could call it the democratic process,” Rochko says.

      The recent influx from Twitter, Rochko says, has been a vindication. “It is a very positive thing to find that your work is finally being appreciated and respected and more widely known,” he says. “I have been working very, very hard to push the idea that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow.”

      TIME spoke with Rochko on Oct. 31.

      This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

      What do you think of what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter?

      I don’t know. The man is not entirely comprehensible. I don’t agree with a lot of his behaviors and his decision-making. I think that buying Twitter was an impulse decision that he soon regretted. And that he basically got himself into a situation that kind of forced him to commit to the deal. And now he’s in it, and he has to deal with the fallout.

      I specifically disagree with his stance on free speech, because I think that it depends on your interpretation of what free speech means. If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.

      I think that is a very uniquely American idea of creating this marketplace of ideas where you can say anything you want completely without limits. It is very foreign to the German mindset where we, in our Constitution, our number one priority is maintaining human dignity. And so, hate speech is not part of the German concept of free speech, for example. So I think that when Elon Musk says that everything’s gonna be allowed, or whatever, I generally disagree with that.

      How do you ensure on Mastodon, given that it’s decentralized and you don’t have the power to ban users, that the space is welcoming and safe?

      Well, this is the kind of strange dichotomy of how it’s turned out. On the one hand, the technology itself is what allows basically anyone to host their own independent social media server, and to basically be able to do anything they want with it. There is no way for Mastodon, the company, or anyone really—except the normal law enforcement procedures—to really go after anyone specifically running a Mastodon server. The way that you would shut down a normal web site is how you would shut down a Mastodon server, there’s no difference there. So on that end, it kind of turns out to be the ultimate free speech platform. But obviously that’s basically just a side effect of creating a tool that can be used by anyone. It’s kind of like cars. Cars are used by everyone, even bad people, even for bad purposes, there’s nothing you can do about it, because the tool is out there. However, I think that the differentiating factor to something like Twitter or Facebook, is that on Mastodon, when you host your own server, you can also decide what rules you want to enforce on that server, which allows communities to create safer spaces than they could otherwise have on these large platforms that are interested in serving as many people as possible, perhaps driving engagement up on purpose to increase time people spend on the web.

      You can have communities that have much stricter rules than Twitter has. And in practice, a lot of them are [stricter]. And this is part of where, again, the technology intersects with guidance or leadership from Mastodon the company. I think that, through the way that we communicate publicly, we have avoided attracting a crowd of the kind of people who you would find on Parler or Gab, or whatever other internet hate forums. Instead we’ve attracted the kind of people who would moderate against hate speech when running their own servers. Additionally, we also act as a guide for anyone who wants to join. Because on our website, and our apps, we provide a default list of curated servers that people can make accounts on. And through that, we make sure that we curate the list in such a way that any server that wants to be promoted by us has to agree to a certain basic set of rules, one of which is that no hate speech is allowed, no sexism, no racism, no homophobia, or transphobia. And through that, we ensure that the association between Mastodon, the brand, and the experience that people want is that of a much safer space than something like Twitter.

      But what happens if you hateful people do set up a server?

      Well, obviously, they don’t get promoted on our “Join Mastodon” website or in our app. So whatever they do, they do on their own and completely separately, and the other administrators that run their own Mastodon servers, when they find out that there’s a new hate speech server, they may decide that they don’t want to receive any messages from the server and block it on their end. Through, I guess you could call it the democratic process, the hateful server can get ostracized or can get split off into basically, a little echo chamber, which is, I guess, no better or worse than them being in some other echo chamber. ::The internet is full of spam::. It’s full of abuse, of course. Mastodon provides the facilities necessary to deal with unwanted content, both on the user end and on the operator end.
      

      What made you want to go into building a service like this back in 2016?

      I remember that I was just not very happy with Twitter, and I was worried where it was going to go from there. Something very questionable was in its future. That got me thinking that, you know, being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was actually very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation that can just do whatever it wants with it. I started working on my own thing. I called it Mastodon because I’m not good at naming things. I just chose whatever came to my mind at the time.(fn) There was obviously no ambition of going big with it at the time.

      It must feel pretty special to see something that you made grow from nothing to where it is now.

      Indeed, it is. It is a very positive thing to find that your work is finally being appreciated and respected and more widely known. I’ve been fighting for this for a long time, I started working on Mastodon in 2016, back then I had no ambitions of it going far at all. It was very much a hobbyist project at the start, then when I launched publicly it seemed to strike a chord with at least the tech community and that’s when I got the original Patreon supporters that allowed me to take on this job full time. And from then on I have been working very, very hard to make this platform as accessible and as easy to use for everyone as possible. And to push the idea forward, that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow.

  5. Oct 2022
    1. Some 18,000 people signed up for Mastodon accounts between October 20 and 27, says Eugen Rochko, the platform’s CEO. As of October 28, it had 381,113 active users. Mastodon’s Twitter handle is also being used a lot across Twitter by people announcing new Mastodon accounts, Rochko says.

      SO... y'all tech media folks finally willing and able to acknowledge Mastodon's existence now?

  6. Jul 2022
    1. StarPterano I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact. I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.

      I shall always love you, StarPterano. NEVER DIE.

  7. Jun 2022
    1. Simply stated, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten structure was not dynamic or fluid in nature. Yet, it was not rigid, either. Examples of a rigid structure are classification systems like the Dewey Decimal Classification System or Paul Otlet’s massive notecard world museum known as, The Mundaneum. These types of systems are helpful for interpersonal knowledge systems; however, they’re not illustrative of what Niklas Luhmann’s system was: an intrapersonal communication system. Luhmann’s notebox system was not logically and neatly organized to allow for the convenience of the public to access. Nor was it meant to be. It seemed chaotic to those who perused its contents other than its creator, Niklas Luhmann. One researcher who studied Luhmann’s system in person says, “at first glance, Luhmann’s organization of his collection appears to lack any clear order; it even seems chaotic. However, this was a deliberate choice.” (11)11 Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was not a structure that could be characterized as one of order. Indeed, it seems closer to that of chaos than order.

      This seems illustrative of the idea that some of the most interesting things in life or living systems exist at the chaotic borders.

      There seem to be differences between more rigid structures like the Dewey Decimal Classification system or Paul Otlet's Mundaneum and less rigid branching systems like Luhmann's version of his zettelkasten. Is this really a difference or only a seeming difference given the standardization some of the systems. There should be a way to do both. Maybe it's by the emergence of public standards, or perhaps it's simply through the use of subject headings and the cross linking of emerging folksonomies.

      What does the use of platforms like the Federated Wiki or the early blogosphere and linking and discovery methods enabled by Technorati indicate?

      Luhmann's system may seem intrapersonal, perhaps as a result of the numbering system, but it becomes highly penetrable by the subject index and the links from one idea (card) to the next. Use over time makes it even easier.

  8. May 2022
    1. Scott, I'll spend some more in-depth time with it shortly, but in a quick skim of topics I pleasantly notice a few citations of my own work. Perhaps I've done a poor job communicating about wikis, but from what I've seen from your work thus far I take much the same view of zettelkasten as you do. Somehow though I find that you're quoting me in opposition to your views? While you're broadly distinguishing against the well-known Wikipedia, and rightly so, I also broadly consider (unpublished) and include examples of small personal wikis and those within Ward Cunningham's FedWiki space, though I don't focus on them in that particular piece. In broad generalities most of these smaller wikis are closer to the commonplace and zettelkasten traditions, though as you point out they have some structural functional differences. You also quote me as someone in "information theory" in a way that that indicates context collapse. Note that my distinctions and work in information theory relate primarily to theoretical areas in electrical engineering, physics, complexity theory, and mathematics as it relates to Claude Shannon's work. It very specifically does not relate to my more humanities focused work within intellectual history, note taking, commonplaces, rhetoric, orality, or memory. In these areas, I'm better read than most, but have no professional title(s). Can't wait to read the entire piece more thoroughly...

  9. Mar 2022
  10. Dec 2021
    1. When sending links to a page by email consider following links from the beginning to the page of interest and sending the whole sequence to provide context.

      Interesting to see this same sort of contextual background here as in TiddlyWiki which calls the space a "river". TiddlyWiki does this in a vertical scrolling space where as Federated Wiki does it horizontally.

  11. Aug 2021
    1. These applications also rely on sending a large amount of information to the cloud, which causes a new set of problems. One regards the sensitivity of the information. Sending and storing so much information in the cloud will entail security and privacy challenges. Application developers will have to consider whether the deluge of information they’re sending to the cloud contains personally identifiable information (PII) and whether storing it is in breach of privacy laws. They’ll also have to take the necessary measures to secure the information they store and prevent it from being stolen, or accessed and shared illegally.

      See federated machine learning for a discussion on how we might avoid some of these challenges.

  12. Jul 2021
  13. Jun 2021
    1. Reply to Nick Milo:

      Ward Cunningham may have been using a similar UI prior to it for other projects, but he unveiled the Smallest Federated Wiki at IndieWeb Camp 2011 in late June: https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki. I don't have a receipt to prove it, but I have to suspect that Andy's version was certainly influenced by Cunningham's work.

      Mike Caulfield, subsequent author of the influential The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, Iterated on the Smallest Federated Wiki and created a WordPress-based plugin shortly thereafter called Wikity that used some of the card-based UI that Obsidian comes with out of the box.

      Both had some early influence on the UI-based research that the IndieWeb space has done since. For those interested, there's also a sub-group within it focusing on digital gardens, commonplace books, Zettelkasten, etc. that can be found here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

  14. Apr 2021
    1. The insertion of an algorithm’s predictions into the patient-physician relationship also introduces a third party, turning the relationship into one between the patient and the health care system. It also means significant changes in terms of a patient’s expectation of confidentiality. “Once machine-learning-based decision support is integrated into clinical care, withholding information from electronic records will become increasingly difficult, since patients whose data aren’t recorded can’t benefit from machine-learning analyses,” the authors wrote.

      There is some work being done on federated learning, where the algorithm works on decentralised data that stays in place with the patient and the ML model is brought to the patient so that their data remains private.

  15. Jan 2021
    1. Lemmy is a great open source federated and privacy respecting alternative to Reddit. Nodes can be self-hosted and posts will sync between them.

  16. Nov 2020
    1. There are, as you’re about to see, lots of problems with PGP. Fortunately, if you’re not morbidly curious, there’s a simple meta-problem with it: it was designed in the 1990s, before serious modern cryptography. No competent crypto engineer would design a system that looked like PGP today, nor tolerate most of its defects in any other design. Serious cryptographers have largely given up on PGP and don’t spend much time publishing on it anymore (with a notable exception). Well-understood problems in PGP have gone unaddressed for over a decade because of this.

      The meta-problem with PGP is that it was designed by crypto-engineers in the 90s and it is horribly outdated, yet due to its federated architecture, difficult to update.

    1. So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update.

      Although the option to host your own email offers you freedom, it's precisely this freedom that makes change more difficult and the reason why email isn't yet end-to-end encrypted.

      Centralized architectures, like whatsapp, allow you to roll out end-to-end encryption to the entire network with 1 software update.

    2. That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving.

      Because the ecosystem around software application is quickly evolving, you need to be able to adapt in order to be competitive.

      Once you federate your technology, however, you lose this ability to adapt quickly, as is evidenced by the relative stagnation of federated standards such as IP, SMTP, IRC, DNS etc.

    3. This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks.

      The implicit threat of federated architectures is also emerging in centralized services. It emerges there because the core of the social network, the address book, is saved locally (i.e. federated). This makes it easy for users to switch networks, and this ease keeps the providers honest.

    4. Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the effort.

      The implicit threat of federation

      In a federated architecture, most users tend to coalesce around one provider. Few actually want to run their own server, but the fact that that option exists, acts as an implicit threat which keeps the current host honest.

    5. In a way, the notification center on a mobile device has become the federation point for all communication apps, similar to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple IM networks.

      Mobile device's notification centers are federation points for communication apps

      The notification center in our phones acts as a hub where messages show up from WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS etc. analogous to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple networks.

    6. Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt.

      A federated model requires some type of consensus to form to accept changes. This is great to promote consensus, but reaching consensus takes time and results in an inability to adapt quickly.

  17. Oct 2020
  18. Nov 2019
  19. Oct 2018
  20. cloud.degrowth.net cloud.degrowth.net
    1. One of the proposals would be togenerate more spaces for sharing knowledges. Eg providing virtual spaces, eg I have done this, what has and hasn ́t worked. I admire what you do in Unitierra, and the Zapatista, and my context is very different, so we need to change the way of looking atthings.

      There is a thing which we call Federated Wiki, that challenges how we produce knowledge : http://federated.wiki/federated-wiki-introduction.html

  21. Nov 2017
  22. May 2017
    1. Interesting things are happening over at Mastodon. If you have had your ears tuned to the hacker grapevines, you will most likely have heard that Mastodon is an open source federated social network that works very much like Twitter but is, in fact, not Twitter, and thus poses a challenge to the venerable bird site.
  23. Mar 2017
    1. We expect a farm operator is "friends" with each user and is available to help restore the long-lived session should it be lost.

      Federated Wiki is a place of friends.

  24. Feb 2017
  25. Jul 2016
  26. Jun 2016
    1. If only 2% – 5% of all faculty and their students (who are doing renewable assignments) were active creators and improvers of OER, that would likely be sufficient.
    2. We need to enable and facilitate alternative development models if our vision of universal OER adoption is to become a reality.
    1. especter les dispositifs réglementaires et adhérer à l'utilisation des licences Créative Commons

      Though licensing issues may be less of a focus in Francophone work on Open Educational Resources, this portal mostly focuses on material under Creative Commons.

  27. May 2016
  28. Mar 2016
    1. How do I register custom matrix event types?

      This resembles the federation of Plugins for different (federated) wiki activities in the log. How could we standardize around oEmbed (+ rich JS Web/Service Workers/Components?), Twitter Cards, Facebook OpenGraph, JSON-LD, RDFa, microdata et al. for sharing "widgets"?

  29. Jan 2016
    1. own music projects, exchanging tunes and coding in the online community that has sprung up around it. 

      Like teaching, music is sharing. In both cases, the impulse for generalized reciprocity varies quite a bit, but musicians and teachers who know to get together can help shape a world of deep insight and learning.

  30. Dec 2015
    1. Users publish coursework, build portfolios or tinker with personal projects, for example.

      Useful examples. Could imagine something like Wikity, FedWiki, or other forms of content federation to work through this in a much-needed upgrade from the “Personal Home Pages” of the early Web. Do see some connections to Sandstorm and the new WordPress interface (which, despite being targeted at WordPress.com users, also works on self-hosted WordPress installs). Some of it could also be about the longstanding dream of “keeping our content” in social media. Yes, as in the reverse from Facebook. Multiple solutions exist to do exports and backups. But it can be so much more than that and it’s so much more important in educational contexts.

    1. In open education we have generally focused on the rights that individuals have to remix content, while not providing or using publishing tools that make it easy to fork content in ways that make sense to non-programming communities. Wikity attempts to apply the tools and logic of forking to WordPress, the world's most popular web content platform. Content published in Wikity is easily forked to new sites while maintaining an attribution trail and keeping track of past versions.

      Mike Caulfield is working on WordPress software to make Federated Wiki concepts accessible to a wider audience. http://wikity.cc/ is the most recent result.

  31. Nov 2015
  32. Feb 2015