Darius Kazemi
@noracodes I do think Gruber correctly identifies a major ideological rift on the fediverse here (also this might be the first time I have used "Gruber" and "correct" in the same sentence):
"Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness?"
Specifically I think most implementers are the latter, and then actual users and server admins are a mix of the two.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @noracodes we can't have an anti-corporate, anti-capitalist social web without the openness. The openness is a precondition.
Evan Prodromou
Jan Lehnardt :couchdb:
@darius his latest “mastodon has peaked” is pure maximalist-brainworm at work.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes I think that dynamic of récuperation is inevitable. We will not keep the fediverse out of mass culture, and it will not be the same forever. This never happens with any countercultural movement. They disappear, or they get absorbed. What we can hope for is that our values and our goals are encoded in the structure of the fediverse, so as it adopted by the commercial social web, it changes them, even if only in part.
Dan York
@darius @evan @noracodes I am having such MAJOR flashbacks to the early 1990s when I seem to recall that some number of SMTP administrators were adamant that they were not going to send or receive email from aol.com, because it had all these “newbies” who didn’t understand how the Internet worked and who were going to pollute all the messaging of SMTP-based email, particularly because they came from a commercialized, advertising-supported system…
Darius Kazemi
@danyork @evan @noracodes right, the parallels are there. But then are we destined to land at effective corporate capture of the fediverse by maybe 5 companies like we saw with email? That's something people are afraid of in addition to the (imo overwrought) cultural fears
Darius Kazemi
@evan @noracodes the tricky task here is: define openness. One definition of openness is "every community is free to self determine its rules and boundaries" and by that definition, people like Gruber should see fedipact as a triumph of openness. Another definition of openness is "every actor on the network should be given a fair shot at connecting with other actors", which is counter to that unless you get into competing definitions of "fair".
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes I would like to say that the process of recentralisation you describe can be overcome. I don't know how. I think the best options are to establish practices and structures that keep some servers outside the big ones. More coops, more nonprofits, more civic institutions, fewer individual volunteer admins.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes I'd also say this: a world with Open Source, community-run servers with about 10x or 20x the number of users today, with full access to the other big social networks, is a lot better than the silos we have today. More people connecting, more freedom.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes if we want a decentratopia, with many millions of small servers, we'll have to work on it. Make sure there are household servers, servers for every business and university, servers per city. We'll also have to accept that one reason people would join those servers is if they could keep access to the content of people they care about on big commercial social networks.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes so, first, the centralisation of email is really overstated. About 30% of accounts are on Gmail. That's bad, but it's not 95% bad.
Darius Kazemi
@evan @danyork @noracodes and that sense of inevitability is what people are raging against, particularly those who joined here because on some level they believed a better (social web) world is possible.
Also, ultimately I prefer even the current state of SMTP over walled garden social media! But I want to shoot for something much different for as long as possible
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes second, we know how centralisation happened with email, and we can make social networks better. Setting up and running your own server is hard as fuck. The tools for dealing with spam are 25 years old. Storage, deliverability, they're all hard.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @danyork @noracodes we can make that better, but we need to stay user focused and incremental. Make every piece of software easier to manage, maintain, upgrade. Make cloud-based services so you can run an instance without having to learn postgres.
Evan Prodromou
@darius @noracodes I prefer the first. We don't have to talk about Gruber or convince him of anything; he'll learn over time.
Dan York
@evan @darius @noracodes A challenge is that the VAST majority of users don’t want to run servers or do anything technical like that. They just want to connect and communicate with their friends, discover new interesting people, catch up on news, follow celebrities, learn new things, etc.
They don’t care about centralized vs decentralized. They just want to connect with the people they care about.
Centralized systems made this easy, removed friction.
Evan Prodromou
@danyork @darius @noracodes I think almost everyone has had a bad experience with siloed social networks. They've had an account frozen for using a forbidden keyword. Or they've put a lot of time and effort into a service that shut down with little warning. Or had to slog through signing up for yet another service just to connect with a friend or family member there. I think we can make the case that having your own service is long-term beneficial, especially for businesses, schools, cities.
Phi Φ
@evan I see civic as the best opportunity (esp. given the fresh object lesson in X/Twitter) to invest in an open replacement for communicating with citizens.
Evan Prodromou
@Sci_Phi it's going to take work.
Dan York
@darius @evan @noracodes And that’s certainly a valid concern. Attempting to run your own email server in 2023 is an exercise in frustration. (And yet I know a good number of people who still do.)
Evan Prodromou
@danyork @darius @noracodes 🙋🏽♂️
Darius Kazemi
@evan @danyork @noracodes yeah but one of my big fears is that running those servers will be about as futile as running your own mail server in 2023 and trying to get around spam filters.
Dan York
@evan @darius @noracodes I agree! That’s why I am here.
I am just saying we need to look at WHY centralized systems keep winning (even in email).
- They make *discovery* of other people and content easy.
- They remove friction from creating content to make that as easy as possible.
- They remove friction from *running* a server.
They make it easy for people to connect, communicate, collaborate.
We have to do the same. And we are in many ways!
Evan Prodromou
@danyork @darius @noracodes agree agree agree
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