💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › stack › 17247 captured on 2024-06-16 at 17:40:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Well, education is good, but the network effect is a real thing, and then there is the convenience. If I leave BBS, I will lose contact with the people here, unless I painstakingly contact each one and get their email address or whatever. For regular people, there is no arguing against something like Instagram or Facebook -- not because of education, but because no one wants to dick around in a place with 200 unknown people -- instead of one with all your friends and relatives and everyone you've ever known and some really cool celebrities or whatever.
Unless you are looking for a place with 200 people, and most people just aren't.
I'm not making an argument _for_ corporate networks, just pointing out _why_ the big ones formed early will be dominant, no matter how abusive. Look at X!
As for licenses, my biggest concern is that someone will take my work, patent it and prevent me from using it.
I don't care what anyone does with it, as long as they don't fuck with me. If they want to run a business and make money with it, good luck.
I don't like people with guns threatening me if I don't publish changes to their code, so GPL is out. It also seems like GPL is a good way to make sure that no one but politicians and really crooked corporations will make money in tech.
May 25 · 3 weeks ago
If you want to restrict your time in the web, hide in geminispace as much as possible but still connect with your fedi friends, you can use gemini://hd.206267.xyz or https://github.com/dimkr/tootik
❄ freezr [OP] · May 25 at 10:33:
@norayr you wrote too much... 😁
I liked your interpretation about the educational issues, but for me it is a part of a broader issue.
Regarding Gemini + fediverse, there are two methods:
stack, yes bbs is not decentralized enough (yet?). syndication works, but you cannot comment/feedback by not being on this bbs, from the bbs you host, or by being presented as someone@someplace. i opened a discussion regarding decentralization and used openid as an example but not many was interested, and surprisingly, many were opposed.
and yes, i wrote a lot, and it feels limiting on gemini space that practically we cannot feedback on gemlogs. i read things every day, and i cannot feedback. maybe if i was able to, i wouldn't write such a long text here.
well i published another piece of software recently, and again under gpl-3.
i am perfectly fine with you and everybody building my source and selling it, and gpl does not forbid it. it only says, if you made an improvement, publish it, dont take the improvement away from the community, because if i knew you would not share with us your improvement, i wouldn't want to share the source code with you. i dont point a gun at anybody, i think what gpl enforces is a fair expectation of respect of others' work.
What is it that do don't like about ActivityPub? I can see reasons why a user wouldn't like Mastodon (its UI, its feature set, bugs that don't get fixed, etc') or an implementation of ActivityPub (because federation is unreliable, etc'). But what is it about the protocol itself that you don't like?
❄ freezr [OP] · May 25 at 14:05:
@dimkr I don't have any technical reasons to explain, besides the fact that by design AP is meant for one-on-one interaction. But I know that from now on AP will be shaped to be what Meta and other corporations want.
I am always been a fan of Diaspora, not sure if the diaspora-protocol is enough plastic to offer the variety of platform AP does, maybe it can, but Diaspora is a full community project, while, AP is a project baked by the W3C, and this is an institution that I don't trust anymore, and therefore I don't trust AP.
@freezr This is not accurate, most ActivityPub implementations support the sharedInbox property. If you're on server A and have 1000 followers on server B and 1000 more on C, A sends only 2 requests when you write a post: one to B and one to C (not one request per follower).
i like diaspora, but believe me the community has its own problems. lets say admin community forces some podmins to ban some users, and they threaten podmins by banning their pods.
❄ freezr [OP] · May 26 at 03:36:
@norayr never heard anything of this... 🤷♂️
❄ freezr [OP] · May 26 at 03:41:
@dimkr what I meant is when you interact with someone only this person gets a reply plus the ones you mentioned, all the others don't, on Diaspora/Hubzilla/Friendica all the people involved in a thread are informed and can reply to all without the need to mention anyone. This is a feature that some want to add to ActivityPub.
@norayr: With GPL if you are running a business, you are taking on a liability and will have to constantly explain to investors why you are publishing the work they are paying for. And making sure some fool doesn't commit company secrets or racist jokes into the public repo. I would definitely avoid it if possible.
Or find a way to comply without complying. Years ago I had to work with an early version of gcc on the arm. The toolchain was maintained by a company that sold an expensive version and a year later would update the source to comply. I don't think you could even compile it: the make file was hardwired to some guy's machine...
Intellectual property is a joke. If you want control, don't publish. Once it's out, you can't tell people what to do with it without pointing a gun at them.
@freezr That's also inaccurate, some ActivityPub implementations ignore https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#inbox-forwarding and that's why only thread participants can see replies. For example, tootik forwards all replies in a thread to followers of the user who started the thread (with depth limit). It's an implementation issue, not a problem with the protocol itself.
@freezr If you're talking about mentioning somebody in a reply vs. not mentioning, and the notification Mastodon shows if you do, that's 100% a Mastodon thing. ActivityPub doesn't define how notifications should work, and not all implementations insist on you mentioning somebody for them to get notified or receive the reply. Maybe you just don't like Mastodon 😐
❄ freezr [OP] · May 26 at 05:39:
Absolutely I don't like mastodon... At all...
❄ freezr [OP] · May 26 at 05:53:
@dimkr I didn't read the specification, I don't believe I am even able to understand it... Perhaps Mastodon, since took over all the AP projects, inducted me to have a bad opinion about it...
The point is before the AP protocol there were also the diaspora protocol, the friendica protocol, the hubzilla protocol , however on the internet always prevails what the W3C decides...
Well, after the scandal of the DRM inside the HTML5 the W3C is not credible anymore as a "super partes" entity... For me can be erased anytime, as well as anything it does or promotes...
@freezr Nobody should read the specification because nobody *really* follows it - Mastodon ignores big parts, adds stuff (like HTTP signatures) and everybody implements their own, quirky but compatible-enough variant of ActivityPub. But ActivityPub itself seems fine to me: without insulting those who wrote this long specification, at the end of the day it's just a bunch of JSONs over HTTPS. Mastodon's *implementation* is the problem most of the time: the biggest fedi instances are Mastodon and sometimes they don't pass posts to other instances, don't show a reply without mention, ... they coerce other software and users to mimic Mastodon's implementation quirks.
❄ freezr [OP] · May 26 at 06:54:
@dmkir and this does Mastond with 10M users, now try to figure what is going to do Threads with its 150M users... 😩
@freezr I bet Threads follows the Mastodon 'dialect' of ActivityPub, and I think that people should calm down, limit post audience and block users+instances they don't like if they don't want their posts to feed AI/trackers. Threads won't 'break' the fediverse unless instances with viral posts don't have enough disk space, bandwidth and database compute to handle the extra load - for people who aren't social media influencers and don't follow such people, it probably won't be a problem 😼
@freezr
What do you don't like with Mastodon? I am curious to have a different opinion, as a user of Mastodon
Edit: I am sorry, I talked before reading. I didn't saw that you already answered this question.
freezr, i wanted to feedback on what you've said that bufore activity pub there were different protocols: diaspora, friendica, hubzilla, etc, and then the w3c ap dominated.
my understanding is, from what i have read and remember about the history of the fediverse, is that all the people behind those decentralized social networks gathered together to design a new protocol, and asked if w3c would agree to host the protocol group under their umbrella, since they pass jsons via http.
diaspora devs decided to not participate. that's why all adopted the protocol except diaspora.
but it's not rike w3c pushed something or had an interest to push something. they just agreed to give their name basically.
btw how does that go/feel?
❄ freezr [OP] · Jun 06 at 03:08:
@norayr I have totally different memories. W3C stepped in because the relative success of Diaspora, Friendica and Hubzilla, with Diaspora being the most diffuse.
The problem with the W3C and Diaspora, for what I can remember, were determined by the fact that Diaspora asked to be the protocol.
In the same period the W3C was working to find a solution or a resolution regarding the DRM.
And that is when became clear that the W3C was just another tool in the hands of GAFAM and the fact that any internet thing must obey to the W3C will.
🚀 Going full Gemini — Since I am extremely disappointed by the weird course of ActivityPub, Mastodon, Threads and BlueSky... I am seriously considering to do 30 or even 60 days challenge using exclusively Gemini for my online social activities... 🤔