Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.
Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.
And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.
That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.
I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.
I think about this when people say that contributing to Linux is difficult and they should adopt more user-friendly ways of accepting changes, rather than mailing patches from the command line.
The friction is a feature. You don't want too much, but no friction just invites the spammers and the trolls wasting everybody's time. If anything, as the Internet grows and machines compete with humans, you want even more friction than ever before.
That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.
The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.
he wants somewhat reliable news
and isn't getting them anymore from US news outlets
but found them (surprisingly) in the fediverse
----
putting that aside finding news on social media isn't really that absurd but it highly depends on you algorithmic bubble/followers. Through a lot of it can be people sharing links to new.
the think is many smaller independent news outlets have very limited means of reaching (new) people by them self, so like everyone else trying to reach people they will use social media
then there are people which share/retweet news. Prefilled by quality and relevance based on their expertise. If you have enough media literacy to be able to judge their expertise you can follow those which have it and even know what bias is involved in their choices.
And sure all of that only works if you yourself have expertise and media literacy. And tends to work best for specialized/expert topics, not for "simplified" everyman news. But you kinda need that media literacy for any news today.
A example around Twitter was in the past one of, if not the, best ways to get tech. computer security news (about vulnerabilities, attacks etc.). That is iff you followed the right people.
Ironically the dynamics for that where very similar to what he describes: "Proper" news outlets being hardly usable. But other people with expertise sharing relevant news for the sake of the information, not for cloud, ads, propaganda etc. (Just the reasons differ. For tech. security news the problem is a. lacking specialized technical understanding of outlets and b. also that most news are too specialized(i.e. boring) for most of their audience.)
I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.
That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.
I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.
Most prominent example is the Ukraine. Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.
So there is political censorship. And the fediverse is super political. The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.
Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.
Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
it's a manner of speech
a instrument of telling a story
a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.
But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people.
Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ...
It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades...
The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...
And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?
There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.
There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.
It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.
There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.
I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/
Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).
I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.
I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.
But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website (or go even lower level to reinvent), with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.
This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). (Mastodon was never one of these & is not now.) This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.
Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control (absolute authority, can-move/credible exit), that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.
It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies bring, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.
That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society. Both are expansive & space filling, but their characteristics are as far apart as I can imagine.
@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing (https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing), a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.
> It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit
I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.
Tl:dr: actual humans have lacked the means to explore and build the techno-social, and it is absolutely nuclear hot fire that I have all this from little apps a bunch of creative friendly awesome neat people built that lets me capture this stuff (https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso/). This is proof that we have a general social networking system right here today available for use, experiment, & play. Not proof, but imho the roots are strong & good. This is how we escape the capture-entrepreneurialism. We have lacked fertile soil & good foundation for new things to get started on. I'd characterize the distinction as alive, adaptable, usable systems, versus stagnant dead systems, and imo, stagnant fixed systems aren't serving us well now, and over time decay & en-badification to serve us worse. Hence my advocacy of aliveness & possibility. (And my disdain for Mastodon as barren anti-ecosystem.)
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
In 1986 I ran a FIDO server, which is like what the Fediverse is now, I guess. I had, maybe, 50 users?
I know how things used to be.
Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.
Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.
Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.
What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.
“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!
If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."
And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
(the rest of us edit and re-edit)
Wow.
If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?
-- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025
I stopped reading here.
This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases.
Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.
I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:
a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;
b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;
c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.
It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...
And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.
Besides:
> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.
Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.
I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle.
Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
Seems pretty cool TBH
Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,...
Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome.
Vent. Move on.
I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)
> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
