Notices by Jon (jdp23@neuromatch.social)

@anildash Excellent post! There are quite a few people I'll be sending this to

Yikes ... it's like a stereotype of a stereotype, except it's real.

Fortunately I'm happy to say that none of the clubs I go to in SF have ever asked for my LinkedIn -- or any other social media profile.

@skinnylatte

@tchambers oops sorry, I hadn't seen that post -- thanks! Something that I don't think anybody (including me) predicted was that active usage of both Bluesky and the non-Threads ActivityPub Fediverse would decrease over the course 2025.

@tchambers Interesting as always! I'm curious, what grade would you give yourself on your 2025 predictions?

More aurora, 11/11, 5:40 pm. It was darker by now, and the clouds were coming in (2/N)

#aurora

Aurora, at Snoqualmie Point Washington, November 11 - 5:20 pm It still wasn't fully dark! And a good thing too because the clouds were coming in! (1/N)

#aurora

This was just a bit after the previous picutre, so maybe 5:45 or 5:50. It's amazing how the colors change ...

#aurora

I appreciate you pointing out that even a majority of tech people who believe LLMs have utility think that the loud voices over-hyping and forcing people to use these technologies are counter-productive.

That said, this article strikes me as using the rhetorical trick of positioning centrists as the "reasonable majority." For example:

What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology"

Really? A fair number of tech people I think are very reasonable don't see "AI" that way -- for example, viewing it as primarily a political project and/or a technology whose purpose is to reify and magnify discrimination and oppression.

So while it's true that that this more radical view isn't currently the majority, your framing winds up erasing it completely. Instead , you suggest that "reasonable" people see the utility of LLMs ... and since you didn't mention any of the ethical critiques, you also imply that "reasonable" people aren't concerned with any of those issues.

@anildash

@HauntedOwlbear great post. I saw him in the 80s, he was great live but you could also tell he was somewhat on auto-pilot on the persona.

@cwebber Also, a question about your preference. The first time I mention you in that section, I refer to you as "Christine Lemmer-Webber". After that, do you prefer "Lemmer-Webber" or "Christine"? I currently have Lemmer-Webber, but am fine with whichever you prefer. Others in the article are a mix, basically whatever people prefer.

@cwebber thanks for everything you do -- including sharing this history. It's very interesting to me, and I'll be updating the "Mastodon partial history" to link to this thread! Looking forward to a few years from now when Spritely has a history that's as long and as rich.

@cwebber done! I included a quote from the blog post at the start of the ActivityPub section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#activitypub and linked out to the thread for history and artifacts.

@fancysandwiches sounds adorable!

a few years ago birds started flying into one of our windows, and people who have lived in the neighborhood for a while suggested we put up a fake owl to scare them away. somewhat to our surprise, it works quite well. but yesterday, a hawk who's just started hanging out here took umbrage ... and yellled at the owl for like 20 minutes straight.

Harassment is a problem even if the person being targeted doesn't directly see it. This is why we have blocking in addition to muting!

@tchambers @osma

It’s not that it prohibits it, but there’s no way for a bridged aunt to subscribe to Bluesky blocklists or labellers
@tchambers @osma

Thanks @tchambers ...

but the protocols themselves the platforms use must support privacy moderation by other members of the Open Social Web.

That's very different than your earlier definition of "respects your privacy".

Agreed, though, that with this revised definition, ti's clear that privacy-violating apps like Threads and non-consensual ActivityPub search engines which are built on top of protocols that allow others to respect privacy if they want to, are part of the Open Social Web.

(On the other hand, AT Proto is all-public and doesn't support privacy moderation, so this revised definition seems to rule out Bluesky.)

Mastodon.oneline and mastodon.social aren't the whole Actiivtypub Fediverse

True but your definition says that the Open SOcial Web is made up of independent communities, and they aren't independent from each other. I guess you could change the definition to be just "connected communities " whether or not they're independent.

But do you really want to define it in terms of communities? Communities by definition involve multiple people, so this rules out single-user instances. And what about an instance that only hosts bots, not people?

For indieweb.social: all users on that platform can move to others that have moderation policies they prefer or start their own.

Again I think you've changed the definition here, from "users decide socnet interactions" to "users can create accounts on some other site."

XMPP if it bridges to open social web

No, I'm talking about just XMPP on its own. XMPP is an open protocol that supports privacy. XMPP servers are independent and connected. People who don't like one XMPP server can create another. So even if they don't bridge, it seems to me that by your definition XMPP servers are part of the Open Social Web. And the same goes for email, RSS, etc.

Which is fine if that's your intent, it's a coherent definition, I'm just not sure that's how most people use the term. Flipboard's Surf has one of the broader defintiions I've seen

Surf gives users the power to search the entire open social web and quickly add favorite sources from Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, community hashtags, RSS feeds, podcasts and YouTube channels to their own custom feed.

and it does include RSS whether or not it's bridged, but it doesn't include XMPP or email

Three things: enough of an understanding of the way various people use the term to be able to talk admit the implications, an idea of whether or not there’s any agreement on what it means, an idea of the boundaries (if any).

@jenniferplusplus @tchambers @fediforum @ben @laurenshof

I don't think any of those are definitions. Look at what happens when you try to use them to determine whether or not something's part of the "Open Social Web"

• Threads doesn't respect my privacy. Does that mean it's not part of the "open social web"? What about non-consensual search engines which ignore Mastodon's opt-in search settings? What about Bluesky, which is all-public -- including blocks?

• mastodon.social and mastodon.online aren't independent (they're both owned by Mastodon gGmbH), does that mean they're not part of the "open social web"?

• indieweb.social blocks a lot of instances, which is good, but it means that people there don't have complete control over who they interact with ... does that mean indieweb.social isn't part of the "open social web"?

• XMPP's an open protocol, and anybody can write anything on top of it, so is everything XMPP-based part of the open social web? What about OAuth? HTTP?

• A farmers' market isn't run by a single company, is it part of the "open social web"?

etc etc etc.

@tchambers @fediforum @ben @laurenshof

That was one of Ben’s articles I was thinking of, but it doesn’t really define the term.

@tchambers @fediforum @ben @laurenshof

What definitions are people using for "Open Social Web"?

@fediforum is about ""Moving the Open Social Web Forward" and @laurenshof is doing a session on the Open Social Web. And @ben you've had multiple posts about it. So maybe I've just missed it, but at least so far I haven't been able to find any definitions.

#OpenSocialWeb