@Crazypedia Oh that's really interesting. So something like a trending posts feed/notification but just for admins as a way to flag potential moderation issues. I think that's a good idea.
So, @kissane and I have formally kicked off our Fediverse research project! Briefly, we are doing interviews with admin/mod teams about governance models and practices that are in place on servers with ~150-2500 active users. More info is available here on the project blog:
The blog hosted at write.as which means you can follow it at @fediversalist-papers, or via RSS, or via email (there's a form on the bottom of the main blog page).
@tchambers@kissane I can't speak for Erin but that seems like a reasonable distillation of the main points, though I think "mendacious" as an adjective undersells the moral arguments and should be replaced with "willfully genocide-enabling" or something like that
@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.
@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@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".
@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
@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.
@are0h@craigmaloney@noracodes yeah everything else in the article was unserious and dangerous, I mostly thought the sentence I quoted did sum up a divide between a lot of implementers I have seen and a big faction of users here. For example: the w3c standards groups use a code of conduct that essentially forbids anti corporate statements in working groups because it's insensitive to the corporations that participate in the w3c
Extremely happy to announce that @kissane and I have been funded by @DigInfFund to run a project called Fediverse Governance Successes & Gaps!
We will look at the people, software, and processes of the Fediverse, and make strong recommendations for how open source projects, philanthropic funders, civil society organizations, and others can co-create a Fediverse that is safer and better for humanity than the social media we've been stuck with for decades.
@farrer I am attempting to get a merge with 4.2.x working and it is harder than I expected. I don't have a ton of spare time to develop so I try to get it in where I can. I am sorry for the inconvenience -- I will put a call out for community assistance on a 4.2.x merge since that seems like it might happen faster than I can get to it.
If there are any folks out there who would like to merge #hometown with Mastodon 4.2.x, that would be really helpful to me. My recent attempts to do the merge have ended in inscrutable failure and I don't have a ton of extra time to work on this. (Specifically there will no longer be security patches for 4.0.x from the main project that I can merge as needed.)
Sometimes I find a non-peer-reviewed paper on Arxiv and I get dismayed that it wasn't a blog post. Like man, this thing could have been a cool blog post but instead you decided the rhetorical move of formatting it with LaTeX and uploading it to Arxiv was the way to get eyeballs on your idea. And maybe the authors are correct and it is, in fact, a better way to reach an audience than blogging!
idk what even my point is, ultimately I am just a 40 year old man who misses the golden age of blogs
I'm the administrator of this server. https://tinysubversions.com is where most of my stuff lives. I make Hometown along with a bunch of other fediverse software (see pinned posts). I'm trying to fix the internet, and some people say I'm at least kind of succeeding. Based in Portland, Oregon, USA. he/him