I don't think it's helpful to imply that usernames are equivalent to real names by lumping them all together as "personal data". If you go down that path, it provides cover for privacy-invading services to claim that they're the same as privacy-respectful services.
Most servers just require you to make up a username (it can be anything, a meaningless string of characters) and a password (again a meaningless string of characters), and provide an email address (can be throwaway).
@faduda You don't need to be a lawyer: GDPR is written in plain English (plain a-lot-of-languages, actually).
The legal definition is found in Article 4: "Definitions".
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
> an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as […] an online identifier […]
If I sign up on a server and choose the username i9024jinsiujfiosjfioesj, and I never use that username anywhere else, how can that be used to identify me?
I really don't think it's wise to start saying that this is in the same class as real names or addresses or phone numbers, which obviously make it easy to identify someone.
It lets apps which do collect all kinds of dubious unnecessary info claim "well all apps collect personal data" and try to normalise it.
The Fediverse is owned by the people and communities that use it. A basic server costs $5 a month all inclusive, anyone can make one. It's ad-free, made by volunteers, funded by donations, servers are independent.
BlueSky is a for-profit corporation funded by VC money. Its technical structure makes servers dependent on expensive corporate-run relays. BlueSky's business setup is eerily reminiscent of Ello: https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
I’d started using Ello when it first became a rumor. I got an early invite and was happy with it. Some time after they started getting more users they asked the “community” what they wanted to focus on and art was the general consensus. I thought it was just fine as a general social network, but as art became the dominant matter, I moved on since writing wasn’t a part of the art scene on Ello. Oh well.
it’s kind of ingenious that they’re offloading the costs of hosting and to lesser extent moderation onto the individual users while still reaping the benefits of a centralized feed.
Yeah, the PDS idea is neat, but what people are really using are the relays, indexers, labelers, and the apps. I can't believe how much personal data people are offering up when they subscribe to or create those custom feeds.
If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable. Eventually VC-owned networks enshittify because the VCs want to see a return on their investment, and we end up with another Twitter/X or Meta/Facebook situation. Once they stop growing users, they start trying to squeeze more money out of each user etc etc, or else sell the company to someone awful.
The entire point of the Fediverse is to do things differently, to have slow sustainable growth so that enshittification doesn't happen.
@askans Bluesky’s a drag, but you’re mad at it for the wrong reasons. Most users don’t care about this stuff. All these Brazilians are only leaving Twitter now bc it’s being shut down. Consider why they’re not flooding into Mastodon.
I'm not mad at anyone, I'm concerned about history repeating itself if we keep using social networks that have dangerous structural and governance problems.
Most people don't care about this stuff directly, but they do care about the practical effects. Brazilians are having to leave Twitter because it is a centralised network with bad governance, for example.
that is a fair point, even though looking back, those types of social networks have quite a long shelf life. My sympathy for the Fediverse is very high, also for FOSS, still the "other" models are much bigger. I do not see it changing.
Seeing federation with many flavors becoming a new business model is more than interesting.
This is a false dilemma: you can have commercial alternatives that are neither VC-owned nor "community owned", and you can have plenty of profit-based service providers that will be completely happy to serve a large-but-limited number of customers.
Give me 10-15k paying customers, and I will be able to run communick forever, even taking some of the profits to reinvest into development of the underlying projects. None of the "community owned" instances can do that.
There is a world of difference between making a sustainable stable profit and taking VC money.
If you receive enough money to keep a business going, that's great. You have built a sustainable business. 👍
If you take VC money to run a business at a loss in pursuit of growth, you will eventually have to start enshittifying in order to keep the VCs happy because they're partial owners of your business now. They don't just want profit, they want growth of profit.
If you look at the Ello article linked in the original post, it goes into detail about the problems of accepting VC money.
BlueSky isn't just for-profit, it's taken VC money and will therefore have to provide VCs perpetually growing profits. This will eventually become impossible unless they enshittify.
VC money is incredibly corrosive to the online world and real life world, because it demands that everything grows all the time, it's impossible to just stay at a steady state.
Any kind of ownership model is possible on the Fediverse because it is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to start a server, including individuals, non-profits, for-profits.
BlueSky is different. It has been designed to depend on corporate-owned feeds that have a much higher barrier to entry. In an interview, BS mentioned they might have ads in the future. Combined with their VC ownership, these are all the ingredients for another Meta/Facebook or Twitter/X.
I am responding to your "If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable" statement. This is the meme that needs to die.
I'd actually think it's the opposite: aside from instances that require payment from all members, I'm yet to see any service that can call itself sustainable.
I'd mean continuing to operate over a long period without exploiting users ("enshittifying"). There are plenty of instances that have done this, some of them date back to 2016 or before.
VC-backed services tend to demand growth within such a time frame. Continuing to exist in a stable state is incompatible with VC ownership.
What about the other side of the equation? How many instances disappeared due to moderator and admin burn out?
How many instances were created by enthusiastic people who were simply not able to manage it properly and shut their instances down when got their first wave of spam? How long do you think regular folks will be willing to keep hopping around because they picked an instance ran by amateurs?
That's a totally fair point, maybe the biggest challenge for the Fediverse. I just don't think that VC is the answer to it.
VC tends to turn a service to crap while the VC people walk away with the money and don't care what happens to the service itself. They just wanted the money all along.
Again, doing things for money is not the problem and it is not something that only "evil VCs" do.
I don't expect to get food on my table out of goodwill of a "community-focused" farmer. I don't expect electric power in my home out of the community. Why should I expect social media services to be provided out of "community"?
If developers still go to VCs for funding projects, it's because "the community" is not valuing their work.
Ideally we need this to be publicly funded, and a lot of Fediverse development has been, but obviously not enough. This also doesn't cover the running of servers.
I agree we have a funding crisis for developers, but VC money is not the answer because it causes developers' work to be used to do horrible things further down the line.
Please, "public-funded" is just a masturbatory idea that only appeals to people who never created anything. Or worse, armchair analysts who refuse to put any Skin in the Game.
The bureaucracy alone would grind innovation to a halt, and if you think that corporate-controlled communication networks are bad, imagine if they were controlled by politicians.
You are stuck in the VC-community duality and refusing to acknowledge an alternative that does not require infinite growth, but does require more than feel-good promises of support.
Let me try a different approach... If VCs are not acceptable, what would be best:
- commercial providers like communick, or omg.lol, or mastodon.green (all charging 20-30 USD per year?) from all members?
- donation-based instances that historically never get to 2% of the user base to contribute?
@Liberapay thanks for the hint, good to see solutions popping up. I never came across these solutions on a Mastodon account or similar, have I overseen it?
Okay, this is just a silly coincidence: I just searched *yesterday* to find out whether Ello and Diaspora still existed (after having forgotten about them for 5+ years)
If you've been happy after having left twitter, why should you be happy to be connected to another product of Jack Dorsey, who sold a manipulative corporate medium to another manipulator, to fund his next manipulative project?
@RenewedRebecca @ArenaCops I don't know what were the terms of the later investment round, but a few months ago Jay asked about who owns the company said "me and the team", which implies that at least outside investors don't have any controlling share
I've experienced data loss and corporate manipulation enough to be thankful I put the effort in to pitch my own instance this time. It will be well worth it.
that's a minimum of R$28 per month in a country where average monthly wages are like R$ 2979 (IBGE 2023), so even a small amount to Americans and Europeans can actually be a significant amount to others based on income and exchange rates.
And a lot of fediverse servers cost waaaay more than $5 / mo to operate.
"And it's only anyone that has the technical knowledge and the free time to install, configure and maintain a cloud service."
No, this isn't true any more.
Anyone can use managed hosting services like https://masto.host which do the techy stuff behind the scenes, it's included in the price. (Installation, configuration, upgrades etc.)
I have a whole website trying to encourage more non-technical people to use managed hosting services at https://growyourown.services
@jannem @thisismissem you don't mention elest.io on your site, which I think is also very good. They have services like Mastodon, PixelFed, and sharkey. Not to mention many more.
@jannem @thisismissem Technical and financial burden is one thing, are we educating people about the legal burdens as well? Are people being made aware of the need to register a DMCA agent if in the US, even if merely a single-person instance? Not to mention the additional moderation and legal responsibilities for a multi-user or open sign-up instance?
Yeah, that's fair comment, and in my site's guide (https://growyourown.services/making-your-own-mastodon-server-in-10-steps/) have tried to emphasise there may be legal requirements in many countries especially if you're running a public server, that people should get legal advice for their jurisdiction about this topic. Also encourage people to start out on a private single user server, not a public one.
(But this isn't any easier on BlueSky or anywhere else though.)
@oblomov ypu still have the moderation, learning about trust and safety, understanding community management, covering costs for your community, understanding harms and how to deal with them, legal compliance, financials, etc etc.
A lot of work goes into running any instance that's more than a few people, and anything less and you're suffering through all that alone.
I disagree. vivaldi.social, bbc.social, and me.dm are all part of the fediverse despite being run by corporations. Flipboard, Wordpress, Ghost, and Discourse are all part of the fediverse,
There's plenty of historical precedent for this too -- Evan Prodromou's StatusNet (which evolved into GnuSocial, the basis of the early fediverse) took VC funding in 2009. Diaspora joined YCombinator for a while. etc etc etc
Yeah, those examples you give aren't really the same thing.
On BlueSky there aren't just corporate servers, but the infrastructure itself is designed to be run by corporations. You are forced to pipe your content via corporations, in effect.
On the Fediverse, you can completely ignore or even block corporate servers, there's no need to have anything to do with them. Every server is totally independent, and connect to each other directly.
@oblomov agreed that if any of these corporate-run servers controlled the entire network that would be a different thing, but they don't, and neither does Bluesky. Flipboard controls Flipboard, Wordpress controls Wordpress.com. viviadi controls vivaldi.social. Bluesky controls bsky.social. Why do you see that as different?
@FediTips I'm suggesting that Bluesky is one of those indendent servers. People on other fediverse instances can ignore it or block it; people on Bluesky can ignore people elsewhere in the fediverse. How does that as different from people on Flipboard or Wordpress.com who are also forced to pipe their content via the corporations that run them?
And in terms of the infrastructure itself being designed to run by corporations, that's exactly why StatusNet got funding, and it was clearly considered part of the fediverse.
BlueSky is its own network, it isn't part of the Fediverse.
Flipboard is a website which is part of the Fediverse, no one is forced to use it or have anything to do with it. Some publications choose to have accounts there, but they aren't forced to.
WordPress is a bit more complicated as there are two things: wordpress.com and the WordPress software. The software is free open source, anyone can install it on their own servers, they don't have to use wordpress.com.
Thanks for the response ... I guess we just see it differently. To me, both Bluesky, and Flipboard are all their own social media sites. Nobody is forced to use them or have anything do do with them. Some publications choose to have accounts there but aren't forced to. Reasnable minds differ, I guess!
@thenexusofprivacy you either have no understanding of how BS operates or are intentionally misrepresenting the situation. The Fediverse is built on top of ActivityPub, which is a W3C standard. No corporation controls the network. BlueSky has complete control of the AT protocol, which is what it uses for federation.
The Fediverse is defined by independent interoperable projects. The AT network is defined by what BlueSky decides.
@thenexusofprivacy to appreciate the difference, nobody on the Fediverse side can make the BS bridge inoperable. BlueSky can change the protocol at any time to break it.
@thenexusofprivacy BTW trying to insist that BS is a Fediverse server is a misrepresentation. BlueSky does not “speak” ActivityPub in any shape and form. The only reason why limited communication can happen between the Fediverse and BlueSky is because some third parties have set up a bridge: that doesn't make BS part of the Fediverse any more than Twitter because of the servers bridging Twitter to Fedi
First of all I strongly disagree with the idea of equating the fediverse with ActivityPub. The fediverse existed before ActiivityPub, and has always supported multiple protocols Yes, AP's been dominant ever since Mastodon did embrace-extend-extinguish thing and replaced OStatus with AP in 2017, but history didn't end at that point.
But, even taking the AP-centric view of the fediverse, I think Bluesky qualifies as a fediverse instance. Diaspora, Flipboard, Wordpress ... none of them are built on top of AP internally, but they're all considered part of the fediverse. And yes, any instance running any software can unilaterally cut themselves off from the rest of the fediverse, either by turning off all federation or making a change at the software level (disabling a bridge or plugin, changing to a new protocol). Until that happens, though, they're part of the fediverse.
But maybe we're just viewing things differently in general, so let's calibrate:
do you think Diaspora is part of the fediverse?
what about Wordpress?
Flipboard?
Threads?
For me the answer is yes to all. (On the last one, I think the fediverse would have been better off collectively blocking Threads just like they did Gab ... but that didn't happen.). But, maybe we also see those differently!
@thenexusofprivacy I do not consider Diaspora part of the Fediverse, and AFAIK it has never been considered part of the Fediverse, even in the OStatus days. WordPress is not part of the Fediverse as such. The WordPress installations that have an enabled ActivityPub plugin are.
@thenexusofprivacy Flipboard and Threads AFAIK do not implement full bidirectional federation, and until they do they cannot be considered part of the Fediverse proper, even though they're working to join (whether this is good or bad is an entirely different matter and OT for this discussion).
BlueSky isn't part of the Fediverse *at all* because it doesn't support ActivityPub in any shape or form (and no, the bridge doesn't count any more than the Twitter bridges do).
@thenexusofprivacy What the platform uses internally is not particularly important. The degree of support for ActivityPub they strive for (and thus the effort to interoperate with the rest of the Fediverse) is.
Friendica and Hubzilla are examples of platform that are part of the Fediverse despite having their own protocols (DFRN, Zot), because they also support ActivityPub, aiming for full interoperability.
@thenexusofprivacy BlueSky has no intention to interoperate with the rest of the Fediverse. It's entirely focused on its own protocol, of which they maintain complete control, with no intention to also support ActivityPub. Hence they cannot be considered part of the Fediverse.
Thanks for the clarification, I think I understand your position now -- your criteria is full bidiretional federation currently implemented, support of ActivityPub, and not using a bridge. Is that an accurate summary?
On Diaspora, btw, opinions differ. Wikipedia, fediverse.party, and fediverse.observer all include it as part of the fedvierse; FediDB did until sometime last year (when joindiaspora shut down). But others don't see it that way.
Diaspora cannot communicate with most of the Fediverse due to lacking ActivityPub compatibility. That doesn't mean Diaspora is a bad network, it just means it's separate.
My own take is that it gets a bit difficult for new people if we use the same name ("Fediverse") for two separate incompatible networks.
It is possible to be on both though if you use Friendica.
@oblomov @thenexusofprivacy I agree with your analysis. Could you explain further how the BlueSky infrastructure was designed to be managed by corporations, since the AT protocol is theoretically "open"?
The AT protocol created for BlueSky depends on "relays", which are expensive to run, which in effect means corporations would run them. BS servers cannot work without being connected to these relays, so BS is effectively forcing everyone to be connected to corporations.
@oblomov @thenexusofprivacy I know, but Relays help a lot. In any case, this information that the AT protocol restricts the federation to relays is what I really want to conform to. Thanks!
These are some informal notes on setting up a full-network atproto Relay, using the bigsky relay software developed by Bluesky. This is the same software we run ourselves at https://bsky.network.
I've just started experimenting with hosting my own GoToSocial instance (hiiii!!!!) and it's great ... but hashtags and search only include posts from people I follow, and the federated feed is almost empty, so there's essentially no access to global conversations. So it's not a comparison.
(Although I also don't think hosting your own PDS is really an equivalent of your own instance either. There isn't really an equivalent of anything but flagship instances (a combination of AppView, Relay, and PDS) in the AT architecture.)
@nexus @laurenshof @skarnio @thenexusofprivacy search and hashtags only happen in content known to the server, and this is actually not that different in AP vs AT: the only difference is that AT has these huge relays —the effect is not that different compared to running a hashtag search on a large Fedi server like m.s,v except that AT basically requires that.
Well, even large fedi instances dont have access to the whole network. In general though I agree that there's a parallel to the way AT gives power to large Relays and AppViews and how AP gives power to large instances.
Relays seem like they'll be a lot cheaper to scale than instances, but it's early days so we shall see. There's a lot of experitmentation going on with smaller AppViews leveraging large Relays, again though it's hard to know how it'll work out in practice.
On the other hand when Threads looked at it they decided AP was a better target to exploit than AT, so I wouldn't assume that AP's more resistant to centralization than AT.
It's not so much that AP is more resistant as much as AT is essentially designed with it in mind. Yes, you can have a heavy centralized AP-based network, and you can have AT networks isolated from the BS one, but that's not what either of those is designed and intended for.
There's also the question of who is in charge. BS is run by a for-profit funded by VC money, this is a really dangerous combination. VC money almost always leads to enshittification in the long term, because VC-owned companies run out of any other way to grow profits.
Agreed that Bluesky shouldn't be trusted, they're VC-funded and are likely to go the exploitative and/or enshittification route once there's revenue pressure. In terms of the original question as to whether or not they should be considered part of the fediverse, that puts them in the same category as Wordpress and Flipboard. It's intellectually consistent to say none of them are; it's not intellectually consistent to say Wordpress and Flipboard are but Bluesky isn't for this reason. (Although other reasons for excluding them might be intellectually consistent, for example the Diaspora analogy -- I don't particularly agree with it, but it hangs together, it's just a different conclusion that flows from a different view of whether bridges not implemented by a platform count)
And @oblomov you're right that AP wasn't specifically designed for giving an advantage to large instances. I once asked Evan what scalability analysis had been done as part of the standardization process and he said "none!" Still, it's an obvious consequence of the protocol, nothing's been done to address that over the years, and Threads decided it's a good match for them. So I don't see as much of a difference on that front as you do.
I tried BlueSky a few months after I was on Mastodon and didn't like it. It was a wayyy different feel and community. Maybe it's more old Twitter-like? But I also wasn't on Twitter.
How do I exclude content from USA users, to prioritize regional connection? My fellow Australians are outnumbered by british users 3:1 and americans 10:1. I guess the same issue applies to other english speaking communities such as Argentina, South Africa, Colombia, Kerala, Kenya, Singapore etc.
There's no regional filter, as there is no location information collected about users.
However, some servers include an optional visibility setting that makes posts only visible to other people on the same server. So, if you were on a regional server with such a setting, that would be somewhat like a regional filter?
I recall friend feed, we shots, and other online photosites that closed down, sad but the server bills need to be paid and financial support was hard to find ...
VC money is not financial support, it's giving ownership to people who want constant financial growth. That's what the article about Ello goes into depth about.
That's why so much of the internet is enshittifying, the constant chasing of growth (not just profit but ever-increasing profit) at the expense of users' privacy and safety.
Yes, but that's because they've got money from VCs to play with so they can build up market share.
Eventually the VCs will demand something in return, and that's when the enshittification begins. That's why I linked to the article about Ello, it goes into detail about this, from Ello's birth to death.
If we want to break out of this cycle, we need to stop using social networks that depend on VC money.
p.s. Some misunderstanding of what is required to start a Fediverse server. You don't need to install software or do anything technical to create a Fedi server.
There are many managed hosting companies that do all tech stuff for you behind the scenes, including updates and maintenance. Using managed hosting is about as difficult as setting up an email account.
However, for those who are technically capable and also poor, you can save a lot of costs by doing it yourself. I would remind ppl throwing figures out on the interwebs that we don't know what currency they are using.
it would be beneficial if many such vendors wound exist. If it is priced correctly, demand could be high, especially if alternatives to the fediverse are becoming more annoying/worse. Just think about Twitter blue or however that is called now. People/bots already pay for that. People could be convinced that their own fedi server service would be more beneficial than this blue mark.
p.p.s. Another significant difference between the Fediverse and BlueSky:
- The official BlueSky app collects personal data.
- Most Fediverse apps (including the official Mastodon app) do not collect any personal data.
If BlueSky is already collecting personal data now, what do you think will happen a few years down the line when they're pushing for more profit growth?
You guys should also note that Bluesky recently partnered with Buffer, a company whose service is running on OpenAI tech, or, effectively very likely scraping anyone who uses Buffer to aggregate posts to Bluesky
i feel like that mastodon one is a little misleading re user content. The mobile apps may not but that That’s literally all the servers do: collect, store, and share people’s content.
Collecting is where a piece of data is taken without explicit consent. A user deciding to post something themselves using visibility settings they've decided is pretty much the opposite?
The core idea of privacy policies is to give users more control over what data is shared about them. If they're the only ones controlling the sharing, that means they have full control.
I dunno. "Contact info" is pretty common. Lots of reasonable reasons to ask for name or email addy, and it's almost always done with consent and needs to be called out in those data sheets even if it IS fully consensual .
If you click on "details", it turns out that the "contact info" on BlueSky means your phone number. Phone numbers are used by data brokers to discover people's identity across multiple data sets. That's why Facebook, Twitter etc started suddenly pushing people so hard to give their phone numbers, because it opens the door for a surveillance bonanza.
Once you give a corporation your phone number, they can usually find out your real name, postal address etc etc.
right, i fully agree about the data collection bad, BUT i was more getting at 2 things:
1. the mastodon disclaimer is misleading because mastodon servers do collect user content even if the mobile app technically doesn't. it just passes it on to the server. That's prolly true of the bluesky one too.
2. consent doesn't effect the requirement to have the label.
Yes, mastodon is radically better, but it doesn't collect nothing. it just collects nothing you don't want it to.
Data collection isn't the same thing at all as a user choosing to post something. If you say they are the same thing, it is just giving cover for privacy-invading services to claim they are the same as privacy-respectful services.
The only thing a Fediverse server knows about you is:
-Whatever email you used to sign up with (it can be throwaway or an alias)
-Whatever IP address you're using (which is true for any internet service)
yup. not arguing any of these points. just that the label on the mastodon app is misleading. The blue-sky app probably just funnels all the 💩 up to the servers like the mastodon apps do. By that logic neither collects anything, but they BOTH do.
WHAT they collect & what makes it acceptable or not it is a separate discussion.
The Mastodon app isn't sending any data back to its makers.
The BlueSky app IS sending data back to its makers.
That's why their labels are so different.
If I use the Mastodon app with a server that isn't mastodon.social or mastodon.online, then the makers of the app never hear anything about me. What the servers collect is separate from what apps collect because on a federated network you aren't necessarily using the app on a server that the app makers have any connection to.
@masukomi In the most literal sense any method that involves a user's data ending up in your possesion is collection. Far from providing cover it makes a hard line. When someone posts on your server they are explicitly requesting that data collection under the terms as set when they joined.
That all this is counted as collection means there are hard limits on what you can do with the data and you can demand that all data they have on you be deleted.
@masukomi This is absolutely true, but I'm talking about why GDPR doesn't allow sneakarounds for when a user submlits data rather than it being requested.
It's also possible that even though no data is being collected by the app-makers, it will be treated as a data processor on behalf of whatever servers it connects to. This would mean that it comes under 'sharing with third parties' or similar.
Blue Sky is constantly reminding you of their data scraping when they ask for permission for more permanent access to your photos every new day you post or save an image, so at least they are somewhat open in that regard.
I wish I visited Blue Sky more- I’m sorry I think they are failing despite having the most old school Twitter attitude and appearance. But people opt in to the more invasive meta ecosystem, because, numbers. Fedi can be a bit too preachy, controlling, in own ways.
Well yeah, but Meta is a lot further down the path of enshittification. This is the kind of thing we can expect to see in BlueSky's future, they've already taken the first steps.
In case this week hasn't made it super clear: people, in general, are willing to trade some data & privacy for not getting brigaded with racist/anti-trans/sexist/ableist crap.
I've mostly enjoyed using Mastodon, but I have many friends here & elsewhere who deal with & talk about the crummy user safety experience Masodon provides for huge swaths of users in minority/disenfranchised/vulnerable populations.
Their friends & colleagues are hearing loud and clear.
I agree Mastodon isn't doing what it should about safety, but Mastodon isn't the only platform on the Fediverse. There are others which have placed a much higher priority on user safety.
I'm particularly following @gotosocial which lets users decide who and how others can interact with their posts, and includes support for allowlist federation where all servers are blocked by default.
Once GoToSocial enters beta (which they've been saying is imminent) I'll be promoting it a lot more.
It's not a choice between Mastodon and VC-backed corporate networks. There are other options which avoid the dangers of VC corporate and also give users better safety features.
The danger of VC-backed for-profit networks is absolutely horrific:
If you follow any of the #GoToSocial developers you've probably seen this going around already, but 0.17.0 of #GoToSocial will be the first release that includes interaction policies, aka reply-controls.
In the first iteration of this feature, you'll be able to configure your account so that new posts created by you will have an interaction policy set on them, which determines whether your instance drops or accepts replies, likes, and boosts of your posts, depending on the visibility of the post, and whether or not an account trying to interact with you is in your followers/following list.
So for example, you will be able to create Public posts that can only be replied to by your followers and people you follow, or unlisted posts that nobody can reply to or like, etc.
GoToSocial interaction policies will be a superset of other reply control proposals created elsewhere (and already implemented by softwares like Pixelfed and Peertube), so your GoToSocial instance should recognize interaction restrictions set not only by other GoToSocial instances, but by Pixelfed and Peertube as well.
Please note that this feature is not 100% finished yet, and may be subject to change before release. We're aware of where the headaches and difficulties are, so please don't reply to this post griping about them; we already know (and this instance is still running on 0.16.0 so no interaction policies yet).
I'm not a big fan of VC-backed networks and understand the risks and problems. For many folks, though, the problems they and their friends experience are visible and visceral and truly affect them personally, while the problems introduced by VC-backed platforms don't directly affect their daily health and well-being, even if overall they are horrible.
I look forward to reading more about the other platforms and tools you're talking about here!
perdón por escribir en español. Estaba leyendo la historia de la caída de ello y note que en el fediverso podría encontrarme con un problema que los usuarios tuvieron. La desaparición de todos los contenidos generados. O sea, hay muchos servidores pequeños. es un riesgo apostar por ellos pues también son propensos a desaparecer y si lo hicieran, se van con todo y mis datos, no? creo que también corro el riesgo de no alcanzar a transferir mi cuenta si desaparece demasiado rápido. no?
that's all true. But since people don't care if a social media platform is owned by a fascist and one of the richest people on the planet, who supports one of the biggest threats to the planet, a far-right movement, what would stop the majority of users from going to an alternative that has the problems pointed out?
People will stay where their peers are. No matter what's involved. This is a good example of how many people will stand up if they see themselves in a table surrounded by nazis.
Very interesting article. When Ello came out and me and a work colleague got invited, we did not have a doubt. It seemed really nice to us at first and got engaged with some users as an underground alternative with high hopes and a creative focus.
Then came the fake users contacting with scam links, then those obscure news about its direction and finally the design contest ads... We got suspicious and just stopped using it. We made our posts backup "manually" 😮💨 but it was a letdown.
Going for "higher numbers" is exactly the problem, because it isn't happening sustainably or ethically.
If growth happens, it has to be sustainable and ethical, otherwise you're just stealing money from exploited people in the future.
Once you take VC money, going for higher numbers has to happen forever, even if it means exploiting your users and doing really immoral stuff. It's short term money for long term disaster.
What is the point of growing an alternative if it ends up as bad as the thing it's replacing? What has that achieved? What difference has it made?
The Fediverse is trying to do things differently in the hope of making something more ethical and sustainable in the long term. At the moment, no one else seems to be doing this?
@jose8 I see it possibly growing and then going down the path that all commercial ventures go - the one away from user freedoms and towards capitalist agendas
The reason it's so cheap is the economy of scale from a managed hosting company providing hosting for many different instances.
Part of the reason I run my accounts is to encourage more non-technical people to get involved in running their own internet presences, whether it's a website or social media instance or whatever.
It's not as difficult or expensive as people think, it's never been cheaper or easier.
@jose8 I love the growyourown.services concept. I have been expanding and improving my own self-hosted services for years for next to nothing (low power focus, on demand services, solar power, etc). I have stepped away from most of the major providers this way and only hold minor accounts as needed for access to certain services.
If the Ello story is typical (which I think), then the Fediverse should not try to out-compete BlueSky by growing faster than it: It must only survive. Sooner or later, any profit-oriented social media will go down.
True of so many things in real life unfortunately 😞
Hopefully there is some steady state possible, where you receive enough money to cover costs without wrecking the place trying to pursue ever-higher profits.
I think the biggest turn off with bluesky is the smuggy people of Twitter have made camp there. Almost all I see there is people telling.me how Important they are or this is way Twitter use to be. Twitter while had some good points before musk was still not the best place it was a marketing machine dream. People wanna look back with rose colored glasses. But it was getting bad before musk bought it. The pompous just were too self involved to notice
Farming out fediverse systems to some corporation is still supporting a corporation.
Beamship is running on a laptop with 1TB hard drive and 4MB RAM. Fiber ISP connections are practically everywhere. Our ISP blocks serving anything so, we bounce across a VPN.
MicroShit just bought GitHub and I have no doubt will decide all the programs on it is their property now.
All these corporations are using AI bots to steal everything. Gmail included.
Simon Zerafa
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •Gerard Cunningham ✒️
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •Fedi.Tips
in reply to Gerard Cunningham ✒️ • • •You're not identifiable under a Fediverse username unless you choose to make it identifiable. It could be a totally random set of characters.
I don't know what the legal definition under GDPR would be though as I am not a lawyer.
wizzwizz4
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •@faduda You don't need to be a lawyer: GDPR is written in plain English (plain a-lot-of-languages, actually).
The legal definition is found in Article 4: "Definitions".
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
> an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as […] an online identifier […]
Usernames are explicitly listed.
Fedi.Tips
in reply to wizzwizz4 • • •If I sign up on a server and choose the username i9024jinsiujfiosjfioesj, and I never use that username anywhere else, how can that be used to identify me?
I really don't think it's wise to start saying that this is in the same class as real names or addresses or phone numbers, which obviously make it easy to identify someone.
It lets apps which do collect all kinds of dubious unnecessary info claim "well all apps collect personal data" and try to normalise it.