Well I certainly didn't have "Tumblr becomes culturally relevant in 2023 after adding federated content cross-compatibility with foss platforms" on my bingo card, but here we are I guess.
Where are these bingo cards issued? I hear this often, curious what prize there may be out there. Sorry if a stupid question, I'm assuming it's a blockchain thing.
Yea, specifically that prop-bet bingo cards are usually constructed that every line you could make includes some rare thing so that you don't just easily win with 5 obvious things. So if something happens that's "not even on my card" then the implication is that it's so crazy that someone wouldn't have even put this down as a "this will never happen" option for betting.
You make your own! I may or may not be guilty of making a few in the time leading up to corporate town hall meetings at a former employer. Just pick out management's favourite buzzwords and projects du jour, randomize the layout, CC your office buddies and see who wins!
Federated platforms are definitely relevant right now, as a direct result of the current very public mismanagement of Twitter and resulting public freakout. I've heard Mastodon mentioned at work (where it's not a competitor) and in several different social circles. Maybe you just aren't tapped in?
Maybe I'm just not in with the cool kids but it feels like social media in general is just kind of dying in a lot of circles, outside of content platforms like YouTube and TikTok at least. Direct group chats via Discord, Telegram, Signal, etc are the main ways of communicating and beyond those do you really need - or have any desire - to communicate with random strangers?
It seems the like vanity and excitement of the early internet is dying out and more normal social circles are being established.
Your mainstream user doesn’t care about the underlying technology behind a product. They care about good UX/UI, good content, who’s on it and a supply of dopamine to keep the “must check social media” cycle going. There’s a separate group of people who use social platforms to stay up to date with the news. Think Twitter/HN. It’s not so much about dopamine but necessity to stay up to date on things/discovery. There’s really no shortage of platforms out there. I don’t know if we want to bundle general chat applications like Discord/WhatsApp into this as they’re more closer to SMS than Instagram or TikTok. All the talk about “federated” or “decentralized” infrastructure matters little to people outside tech people and the tech enthusiast crowd. Programmers wanting widespread adoption on a platform should be focusing on the product itself and value to content creators versus the nuts and bolts around the product.
I think you might be conflating what are the most profitable social media business models with what people actually want. It's the difference between a lucrative something that addicts or traps, and something people genuinely enjoy or believe in.
I think there is a growing amount of people who want to get out of the social media Skinner box, and there are also growing amounts of people who believe in new and alternative technology like this.
Sure, these platforms might not appeal to someone who uses Facebook like you would a slot machine, but I know plenty of non-tech people who use things like Linux, Firefox, Android/LineageOS/GrapheneOS, etc for moral and ideologically appealing reasons.
The problem is that there is also a steady supply of people coming in who don't give much of a damn about any of this, and just want to do what their friend group does. They might get more aware later, but by then there's already a new generation out there making the same mistakes.
Unless we can push ethical (and FOSS) software over the point of critical mass, it's a never-ending losing battle. And even if we get there, the battle for daily attention is much fiercer than, say, Blender or Godot permanently winning mindshare among professionals. Trends are fickle and even just by not being the next best thing, we can lose the masses to the next best Skinner box.
I think you're misreading the comment. It's not saying it's becoming relevant because it's Foss, just that mastodon is more culturally relevant and is Foss.
> as a direct result of the current very public mismanagement of Twitter and resulting public freakout.
I have to admit I don't fully get this. What part of Twitter is mismanaged?
If management thinks that 7000+ aren't needed to make single page web-app, is reducing the work-force mismanagement? I'd consider it a healthy step towards creating an actually profitable company. I mean, who benefits from the company going bankrupt? Certainly not the employees.
Is allowing more people get to exercise freedom of speech mismanagement? Or that the new management polls the actual twitter user-base instead of listening to a select few people, seemingly only on one side of the political spectrum?
Also, since the new ownership came in place, supposedly 90%+ of sexual-abuse material and tags has been cleaned out and banned, something which was allowed to go on for years during old twitter management. That's a good change, right?
Is all this just about some people you don't like being un-banned? If so, you can still individually ignore them or block them, and just move on with your life, right?
I really, honestly don't get what all this hysteria is about.
Musk founded SpaceX and bought Tesla when it had like 6 employees, so everyone working in those two companies is used to his management style.
Twitter was a huge and sort-of stagnant company, they must feel as if they were hit by a hurricane, and this filters out to all sorts of media including HN.
Also, Twitter is all about publicity. We don't see what's happening within SpaceX, but we all watch whatever happens within Twitter in real time.
Someone necro’d a facebook comment reply by me from 3 years ago. They were asking for a social network that allows you to uglyf… "improve it" like MySpace used to and I recommended Mastodon which they now remembered ;)
Outside my techie and Elon haters contacts I have not seen interest to the fediverse. It is as what is happening with people promoting Signal for "privacy" alternatives to Telegram (which I believe it is now more akin to Discord) or Matrix as an alternative to Discord. And as other social media platforms, no need to move to the fediverse until more than 50% of my friends and communities move in.
Outside my techie and Elon haters contacts I have not seen interest to the fediverse. It is as what is happening with people promoting Signal for "privacy" alternatives to Telegram (which I believe it is nor more akin to Discord) or Matrix as an alternative to Discord. And as other social media platforms, no need to move to the fediverse until more than 50% of my friends and communities move in.
Its the second stage of social implants. First get society to communicate through a plattform, that allows for moderation, self-moderation and upholding of civilization even when states break down via panopticon effects. (Also show some adds, vision may be compromised)
Then make certain that hostile, powerfull actors can not capture those platforms and use them for surveilance, while the very same platform can not be used to coordinate violence.
Its all scenario-tree root hardening, basically not a investment into a specific future, but a increasing of all chances to recover should the branch your current scenario resides on give and you root back to a past-scenario with reduced capabilities.
Welcome to a disability-friendly planet, redesigned for your very special human needs, preventing self destructive riots when the good times end. All dangerous toys are removed, to prevent you blowing up nuclear power plants during times of strife. Its super depressing, but then so is the state in which we are.
A unmodified, unadapted primal creature, that by the use of tools has squeezed itself between a rock and a hard place. A technology roof, that if fully explored, ever amplifies the unstable individual until everyone has a red button. Meanwhile the facade of civilization does not even survive a day without those advances. Sucks to be a zookeeper right now.
Tumblr clearly has a good "soul" - if you will. We'll see if it lasts, but the website is definitely a certain kind of special. Glad to have been part of it for the last decade+
That's why news sites are writing articles about it. They always cover the most inane irrelevant stuff so that people don't read their sites. Great argument.
You don't get to redefine 'federation' because you prefer an approach different than IRC undertakes. It's very much federated and always has been. Data transfer is in the RFC:
2.3 Messages
Servers and clients send eachother messages which may or may not
generate a reply.
IRC has the ability to form networks of servers which share identities and chat channels. There used to be a few large networks and many popular servers were part of one of them. Back in the 90s "being on IRC" commonly meant having a nickname on one of these networks.
> Why can’t we run more things on top of email as a backend?
Security, speed, and lock-in.
Email is hard to secure without using out-of-band mechanisms, and at that point if you're already not adhering to an existing standard you might as well write your own.
Email is fast for what it does, but it's not fast enough to handle the low-latency and interactive environment of something like Twitter. We don't notice this as much because so many people are used to using the same 2-3 email providers (heck, Google alone probably accounts for most personal email), but in a truly federated environment there can be noticeable delays. SMTP explicitly allows for this and provides mechanisms to handle it.
And lastly, building on top of email makes it hard to achieve vendor lock-in, which makes it hard to make money.
How is adopting a niche tech standard being “culturally relevant”?
The vast majority of people outside of tech simply do not know about, or care to know anything about ActivityPub.
They only care about the value that these social platforms provide to them. It shouldn’t be surprising that the most valuable platforms (judging by usage) are centralized and proprietary.
I can see the parallels between this and crypto. Cool tech, but not what people want.
This isn’t being “culturally relevant”, quite the opposite. This is catering to a small niche. If anything, this smells like desperation from Tumblr who was once a juggernaut in the social media space.
Most of the culture is irrelevant, so being culturally relevant is overrated anyways. This is just smart.
I think when this all shakes out, most people are still going to be on a Meta-like platform run by a for-profit company, but one which has capitulated to opening up a pipe into and out of the garden so that those with the ability to manage their own data are able to do so.
Tumblr apparently believes the same (it's one of the scenarios where they don't turn into Yahoo's directory of internet websites and eventually have to sell their server room to Private Equity frat bros, so of course they do), and they have correctly identified that ActivityPub is the champion of this moment of upheaval. Implementing it with the resources of a full-on platform has always been trivial; it's not already there because they have all been playing the "move into our company town and use all our company services or we don't want you" game, and AP murders that model.
If someone points me in the direction of a bookie who will take the bet, I'll bet twenty bucks at any odds that within five years, AP (or something that does exactly the same thing) is either free or available as a premium feature on every social media site that is, as you say, culturally relevant.
> I think when this all shakes out, most people are still going to be on a Meta-like platform run by a for-profit company, but one which has capitulated to opening up a pipe into and out of the garden so that those with the ability to manage their own data are able to do so.
Reality has gone the exact opposite way: Facebook accounts used to accept email, and their chat used to interoperate with XMPP. Both features helped them grow, and were switched off once they'd reached a dominant position.
Twitter followed a similar path, with many third-party clients and other projects built around their API (plus native support for SMS). Once they grew, those APIs were removed or restricted, to funnel users into official clients (which display ads).
