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Apologies for suggesting sensorship here, I am now certain it was my error.
May 23 · 3 months ago
very interesting thread, thank you for starting it.
so i think that there are no social networks in the net other than the net itself. the term 'social network' was invented by corporations to promote their nodes on the net, not the network. i know you all know it, but let me state it again, the corporations, that are interested mainly in revenue, need to bring more and more people to their nodes. when the node is being sold, thats the users, not the servers or programs that cost so much. because the users afraid to loose connections.
now, why do they afraid? my answer is education.
i think we as societies failed tech education. companies that make money in the internet don't need tech education. they need the opposite: users that aftraid to loose the communication, because they don't know there is a way to keep in touch without holy corporation making it possile.
there was a comment that leaving the web or 'social networks' allowed to communicate only with closer people. while communicating with close people is y definition normal i. e. close people are those you communicate with often and more openly, that doesn't mean we should not communicate with others.
being out of of corporate service (lets not call it a network) or even activity pu, doesnt mean we cannot socialize over the internet.
so i think the internet is the network, ant the network is for all kinds of exchanges, so it is social network made by and for social animal.
and by saying internet i dont mean the web, i dont mean w3c.
so how internet enables communication? it is so natural for people to share, publish something for others. that can be lyrics of the song. can be daily experiences in different forms, be it a blog or gemlog, or video or audio.
so early adopters of the internet learned how to share without the help of unexisting back then corporate solutions.
later people were exposed to services, to ads, then to tracking and privacy violations, etc.
why? because they didnt know how to setup an own web page or gopher hole.
later they didnt know that it could be possible to write from whatsapp to gtalk, since both were operatong by xmpp, but the corporations restricted the freedom to communicate. thus people were running one yahoo messenger one aim one netmeeting, one icq. i remember how long would it take to load it all on someone's computer, who was complaining that it is slow.
the obvious sign that we aren't educated, ready for the digital age is how 'google' or 'photoshop' became a verb.
to me it was always weird. i never wanted to give this acknowledgement to the corporation and the exact product, and since i was exposed to the internet, i was always using words like 'search' or 'edit' and never mentioned exact product.
so we need to be able to do some basic things on the net.
these functions are not hard to automate, so we did, and rss or syndication wasn't invented by capital.
we could have our home pages, blogs, comments, syndication without depending on big tech. some of us could, but most of us didnt even know how to approach new technologies. literally, how to approach the computer, how to turn it on, how to move the mouse. no wonder people didnt know how to setup their home on the internet.
so, i think education is the problem.
second problem is that people are in need of other people, and if it takes having an account on instagram or twitter or whatever, to be connected - they will do that, in spite of understanding the problems this dependency brings.
i think in this situation having an alternative like activity pub is a blessing. well it always depends what you compare to but we have to compare it to the world where the communication is practically done by critical majority of people by utilizing corporate services.
people even sat 'what messenger do you use', and for them it is so hard to comprehend that the protocol is the standard, and then there can be many different clients that implement the spec.
so now on specs.
in a world where people use web almost exclusively and dont know that internet and the web arent synonims, the spec is highly influenced by corporations.
similar thing happened to c++, the spec is so hard that only a couple of rich industry players are able to produce thei own c++ compilers.
even embarcadero is not able to maintain their own c++ compiler, they cannot keep up with the speed features are added to the language spec.
same with web browsers. nobody can implement a browser from scratch anymore. even microsoft gave up. we only have google's browser, and mozilla's browser because google is kind enough to pay to mozilla.
no wonder that when i am building my gentoo, i get working environment in a couple of hours, but building chromium would take more than a day. the spec is the problem.
and the spec exists in part to satisfy some of us, to make it possible for them to have the features, they don't always need. but they want. they want this feature on that website. there is no other way, they need it.
and this eagerness, aim for features, plus competition which forces to release early but dirt written code, makes the tech complicated, buggy, not secure, etc.
but that eagerness, the desire for more, is in part because people want it. some of them, if educated better, maybe wouldnt want, but many still would.
so even floss projects are on the way of adding features and 'competing' with commercial solutions. because we are not ready to accept something less polished, less capable.
and here where gemini comes, it is an answer to the feature richness by extreme ascetism, by opposing the way things go by suggesting something that is radically different.
i need to say, it is very close to me. thats also why i love oberon or architecture without unnecessary features.
on ai which gathers information.
why wouldn't it gather data on gemini? if we have enough data to interest them, they will get the data. and thats okay, since what we publish is public.
most of you, i guess, prefer bsd licenses to gpl. how then are you opposed ai learning on your publicly shared data?
(i prefer gpl, i dont understand bsd)
i think diaspora as protocol for decentralized communication and syndication is much better designed than activity pub. it is smaller, more understandable,more clean, more implementable. i dont like that reference implementation is done in ruby, but well, webdevs are those who started decentralized web movement, and they used their tools.
i guess if i told you there is an activity pub project which presents data to you via gemini, it won't iterest you.
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.
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... 🤔