Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social), page 3

@danhon @evan 🫂

Finding the balance is tricky, and I don't envy those tasked with doing it. I just hope that in 2024, the legislators are pushing back – hard – against established capital interests, because the incumbent operators have comprehensively shown that they're not on the public's side in this, just as the incumbents that they "disrupted" were exploitative pseudo-monopolies before them.

What's the opposite of enshittification? Can we have a little of that, for a change, as a treat?

Email and ActivityPub, by contrast, don't need any certification or lawyers etc for federation. Even though Google et al are working hard to enclose the Email commons by rejecting the bulk of non-cartel sourced email, it's a miracle it ever worked.

I can 100% see the benefit of having a semi-closed network, because spam and abuse are very real issues, and having a small group of people gatekeep makes the problem a lot easier to deal with. But it also shuts down innovation and competition.

The rumours about WhatsApp/Matrix federation are very promising, but the suggestion that legal contracts will need signing to federate is worrying. We've done this before, with the traditional telephone network, and we got a cartel.

The first version of Twitter was illegal (or, at least, against telco rules – what's the difference?) because it wasn't "approved" by the telcos. We were only able to launch publicly because of an expensive certification process that skirted the truth.

I'm taking orders

My world for a single, reliable, contact-oriented messaging interface.

But here's the thing: culture and community matters. They can't "just" leave their homes and their communities and move to Canada because a law commits women to forced births, or their identity is banned. Many have, and speaking as someone who's been an immigrant times over, it sucks and is harder than anyone who hasn't found themselves uprooted can imagine.

So for me to cut off America when I didn't know any Americans: that was the easy part. And moral.

But to cut off my amazing American friends who choose not to leave America? Honestly, I would be the baddie.

I'll never be as eloquent as Erin, but for me this experience transfers directly to the Fedi debate. I understand wanting safe space, and strongly believe in communities' rights to build and protect those spaces. From my perspective, though, online safe spaces have always been relatively easy to build, like an off-grid homestead.

But if not, here's the thing: the United States is worse than Meta, but it turns out that some things aren't boycott-able. I literally boycotted everything I possibly could from the US for about year after the US invaded Afghanistan. We don't grow a lot up here in the winter, so I ate a *lot* of Jerusalem Artichokes. I still can't stomach them.

Even putting pungent tubers aside — and this might sound obvious — for me as an individual Canadian boycotting the USA wasn't sustainable.

More importantly, the year after I gave up, I went to the US and met an incredible group of committed, tireless activists.

Most Americans aren't bad, even if their country has committed many terrible atrocities. In fact, it's quite the opposite (if you're familiar with Canadian culture, you'll know what a statement this is!):

The Americans I know are consistently some of the most amazing, incredible people on Earth. Also resilient.

I missed @kissane's post on Threads last week, but I bet a bunch of others did, too, so I just want to share it in case you're one. If you care about the fediverse or how we think about the future of human communication, go read it, in full. ❤️

https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads

We've needed so much more deep, thoughtful, and specific writing on these topics for decades now, and I for one couldn't be more grateful for Erin's work.

@kissane I think gets to the heart of it; is the fediverse a "safe place" or is it just part of the world?

For me, the pragmatic "big fedi" option is clear, and let me explain why:

I live in Canada.

Okay, maybe that's not enough. If it is, you can stop reading. 😅

@haubles @kissane 💯

That's how I see it, too.

The debate around blocking Threads hinges on the question of "is it possible to have both?"; @evan wrote up a great summary of the trade offs: https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/

From my perspective, we don't have a choice. We have to be part of the world, connecting with everyone AND build safe spaces. We all lose if we fail to do both.

For me, the project of federation wasn't to create a global utopia, or even a local one — that's a project that no protocol or technology could possibly enable, and anyone selling that is a fraud.

In goal of federation as I see it is to give people choices; choices that were taken away by Facebook, mostly. That freedom ALWAYS implied a lot of hard work. It's going to be hard, and it's going to take a lot of work. I hope Facebook & others offer N-S-A/anonymous grants to enable some of that work.

While I fully, really, completely get all the arguments on every side around Meta implementing ActivityPub, I'll confess to not understanding the profound concern that this will kill the fediverse.

Federated social media never "belonged" to anyone. Feel free to block Threads. Build disparate communities!
Or federate with them!

The network and power dynamics are not & will not be any way worse than they are now, or before Threaderation, or before Musk bought Twitter. They are only better*.

When Facebook started, they bootstrapped networks by downloading & matching contacts from email. Twitter, and everyone else, did the same.

Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.

@mconnor @rigo @Gargron totally. Linux is a clear exception here, because "Debian" definitely isn't "Linux" but also it is.

I think Mastodon is going to be more like that, so my original (now deleted) point is (imho) pretty important. Either we're going to end up with "Mastodon" as a generic term that refers to the network of federated social software, or we need to intentionally stop using "Mastodon" in that way and replace it with a generic term (e.g. fediverse).

@Gargron @jaredwhite @peepstein removed. I'm not looking for an argument over miscommunications. ?

I do think the trademark issue is real, and disagree with your assessment that people understand the difference between "Mastodon" and "the Fediverse"; you have a lot of power in this space, and your words carry a lot of weight.

@jaredwhite @peepstein @Gargron I think the point is that it doesn't matter what any of us think if common usage overrides our intent or understanding.

All that matters is that we correctly assess how terms are used and understood, and work from that basis.

My OP was calling out the need to disentangle "Mastodon" from "the Fediverse" if (and only if) the intent of Mastodon GmbH was to assert trademark control against "non-conformant" forks (or, indeed, non-derived fediverse software).

@Gargron @peepstein my heartfelt opinion is that that perspective is stifling to the other possibilities presented by the fediverse. ?

Mastodon is the, err, elephant in the room. I sincerely believe that we'll all be better off with more diversity, and right now the terminology is a real barrier to that, for everyone involved.