Notices by Bob Wyman (bobwyman@mastodon.social), page 3

Facebook's exemption from fact checking of statements made by or about Trump, simply because he is now a candidate, is pure insanity.

It is intolerable that massive, privately owned platforms are permitted to have such a great influence over public discourse. There is nothing that Facebook provides that can't be provided just as well, or better, via ActivityPub and Federation.

The Twitter exodus should be joined by a Facebook exodus.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/facebook-fact-check-donald-trump/index.html

How should Twitter respond to Mastodon?

"The Innovator's Dilemma" claims incumbents are frequently displaced by innovations that are "not as good" at doing things valued by incumbents but are better at helping some important class of users satisfy unmet needs.

Being "not as good" is very important since incumbents will often ignore such challengers long enough for them to become "good enough."

Will Twitter ignore Mastodon? Should they?

@blaine @evan
https://www.christenseninstitute.org/books/the-innovators-dilemma/

@evan Developers of federation systems, who believe that ActivityPub cannot address their needs, should explain why that is and give others the opportunity to propose conforming solutions.

The primary ethical imperative should be to avoid publishing a new protocol unless it is certain that ActivityPub cannot be reasonably extended to address the unmet need. In the unlikely case that a new protocol is appropriate, all should be done to ensure maximum reasonable interoperability.

@evan We should neither rely on technological determinism nor ignore it.

I am concerned that relying on instance level content filtering or blocking by admins shifts control of the scope of visible content from individual readers to intermediaries. But, relying on intermediaries is necessary if individuals have insufficient curation tools.

A system that did more to empower individuals' ability to curate would reduce individuals' need to subordinate themselves to others' value judgments.

@evan What "social or cultural mechanisms" are you considering?

@evan Nation-states may act against specific platforms, but it is less likely that they would ban a protocol -- a whole way of interacting with the network.

One might block a website, but banning the use of HTTP would be dramatically different. One might block Gmail, but not email (SMTP, POP, etc). Similarly, Mastodon.social might be blocked, but banning ActivityPub use seems much less likely.

@evan The folk at Twitter should be tremendously proud of the service and community they built. But, they should also be acknowledge that what they did was fundamentally flawed in that it enclosed a space that should have been open and federated, in much the same way that email and the web are. These two conflicting ideas should be held simultaneously.