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Michael Seemann (mspro@fnordon.de)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:14:31 JST Michael Seemann

plattformen sind infrastrukturen, die den austausch wahrscheinlicher machen, indem sie die austauschbarkeit der elemente darauf erhöhen.

In conversation about 21 days ago from fnordon.de permalink
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  Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:14:25 JST Evan Prodromou
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  @plinubius @mspro I have a pretty broad idea of what a platform is. I think any environment that you can use for building an application, and that provides necessary services to support that application, is a platform. So, I'd call iOS a platform, since you can build applications that use APIs to run. I'd say internet email is a platform.
  
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  Plinubius 🇪🇺 (plinubius@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:14:27 JST Plinubius 🇪🇺
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  @evan Would you agree that the ActivityPub protocol is a kind of a plattform? Or is this a misconception, even though it is meant metaphorically? @mspro
  
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  Michael Seemann (mspro@fnordon.de)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:14:28 JST Michael Seemann
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  @plinubius oder: ein protokoll kann eine plattform sein.
  
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  Plinubius 🇪🇺 (plinubius@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:14:30 JST Plinubius 🇪🇺
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  @mspro Beachte die Diskussion Protokoll vs. Plattform. Das ActivityPub-Protokoll unterläuft den Plattformbegriff, weil dank ihm nicht mehr eine singuläre Instanz eine Plattform ist (z.B. Facebook, Instagram oder YouTube), sondern sich eine Föderation von Instanzen teils unterschiedlicher Softwares ergibt, mit dem Ziel, Silo- und Monopoleffekte einzelner "Plattformen' zu unterbinden. Strukturell vergleichbar mit E-Mail.
  
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  Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:17:22 JST Evan Prodromou
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  @plinubius @mspro I'd call the Web a platform. I think most former platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Google, have worked hard to shake off their applications developer ecosystems. It's hard to be a Facebook Platform app anymore. They've nerfed the APIs so badly, and added so many developer TOS restrictions, that it would be hard to say that any app is really operating "on top of" that platform.
  
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  Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 09:21:56 JST Evan Prodromou
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  @plinubius @mspro so, the question originally was, is ActivityPub a platform? I think I would say that the Fediverse is a platform. ActivityPub is an important component of that platform, but there are other moving parts.
  
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  Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 13:48:01 JST Evan Prodromou
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  @plinubius my idea of a platform is very much from the POV of a software developer and entrepreneur.
  I think for publishers, including individual amateur publishers, a *publishing platform* is a system you can use to publish and consume content -- text, video, audio, images.
  I'm not sure if ActivityPub is a publishing platform. It might be more correct to say something more specific, like Ghost.org, is the platform. Or maybe more general, such as the Web, instead!
  In conversation about 21 days ago permalink
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  1. Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: ghost.org
    
    Ghost: The Creator Economy Platform
    
    from @ghost
    
    The world's most popular modern publishing platform for creating a new media platform. Used by Apple, SkyNews, Buffer, OpenAI, and thousands more.
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  Plinubius 🇪🇺 (plinubius@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 13:48:03 JST Plinubius 🇪🇺
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  @evan
  Michael Seemann wrote about platforms in his 2021 PhD thesis “The power of platforms: Politics in the time of internet Giants” where he develops a theory of platform power. See https://zenodo.org/records/6335307
  I guess you both just broadened my understanding of platforms, as the term is usually used publicly in an undercomplex way, I guess. I focus on the future structure of the public, whereby I assume that the Fediverse will gain relevance @mspro
  In conversation about 21 days ago permalink
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  1. Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: zenodo.org
    
    Die Macht der Plattformen - Politik in Zeiten der Internetgiganten
    
    Platforms are powerful. Everybody agrees on that. But opinions diverge where that power stems from. Is it because of the superiority of their technology? Is it because of their crushing market share? Is it because of their surveillance capabilities? These and similar questions around digital platforms are also increasingly discussed among organization scholars. What kind of organizational form - somewhere between market, network and hierarchy, or a strange mixture of all three - are platforms? And what is their economic and societal impact, given they are already changing whole sectors, work relations, media production and consumption as well as politics? The book “The power of platforms: Politics in the time of internet Giants” by Michael Seeman develops a unique angle on the topic and develops a theory of platform power based on a unified and abstract understand of what platforms are and do - an understanding that can describe Microsoft as well as Amazon and Uber, i.e. the vast heterogeneity of platforms, by using several social science theories, including e.g. the resource dependence theory by Pfeffer/Salancik. Platforms, Seemann argues, have a particular kind of power that derives from the fact that we - as individual or organizational agents - all engage in countless mutually dependent relationships. Platforms have developed a specific set of tools and strategies that enable them to occupy and manipulate these relationships - “own” them, steer them in their favor and extract value from them. The book claims that the platform is a new structural paradigm of social organization in its own right – next to the nation state and the market. Accordingly, platforms have specific properties and dynamics that are fundamentally different to the latter two. By diving deep into platform history, the book explains what platforms are, how they evolved, how they function, and how they gain and apply power. The book also explores the impact of the emergence of these new powerful entities in the world. They have changed politics on various levels: domestic, foreign and even security-related. They also changed the economy quite dramatically in a way that - as Seemann claims - is different from the capitalist mode of production. All of these impacts can be traced back to the tools and mechanisms of platform power that Seemann outlines in his book.

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