tl;dr I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
The only way to stop Meta taking over the Fedi is by making better apps than them. Defederating from threads as the sole defense mechanism is a fools errand. They are migrating their Billion+ users from instagram to Threads, the couple million mastodon users defederating from them won’t hurt them. Yes we might think who cares if they have billions of users on Threads we will stay on mastodon servers that defederate with them but realistically there will be times we need to check stuff posted there if the biggest content creators, journalists, gamedevs, artists, youtubers, are posting their work there which they will do because they want to reach large audiences and because Threads will provide a way to monetize their work.
Threads is also being designed to take over Reddit\Lemmy next. Something no one has talked about is the fact that only one # is allowed in a post on Threads. This seems small but its actually huge because once launch their Reddit\Lemmy view every post on Threads with a # will be shown as a post on the subreddit/community with the name of that # and every like will be an upvote. Once this happens there will be times when specific niche communities and useful information will be stuck on their platforms. (like sometimes we still have to google for something with the word reddit to find useful information for something specific)
The only actual way to compete with them is to, well, compete and do a better job. Compare the official Mastodon app with Threads or any other mastodon app. The official app STILL doesn’t have grouped notifications, threaded replies, or quote posts. It is barely compatible with any other ActivityPub service (Mastodon basically EEE activitypub but thats a thread for another day). The Mastodon devs are very hostile to the broad activitypub community. They don’t work with devs of other services, they don’t accept PRs, and they’re deadset on sticking to Ruby and being nothing more than a Twitter clone. Mastodon is by far the biggest activitypub app which makes them essentially lead the rest of the space.
We need a Fedi Union where the developers of the different services work together so the services are fully compatible and so the community can fund the Fedi Union so devs outside the official team have the money to focus on development. The Mastodon team is getting around $30,000 a month and they haven’t added a new feature in months (years?) meanwhile:
The sole developer of Phanpy (a mastodon app) has launched everything mastodon has and more (instant translation on home feed, boost carousel, threaded replies, Catch Up ui, new media focused view)
The sole developer of Pixelfed (an instagram competitor) has also developed Loops (a tiktok competitor), Sup (a WIP whatsapp competitor), and PubKit a toolkit for activitypub developers.
the two (main) develops of Lemmy have made the second largest ActivityPub service that is already a fleshed out competitor to reddit and has a huge community of developers making frontends and apps and now a WIP wiki as well.
I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
Phanpy, a mastodon frontend is somehow going to co-lead a battle against Meta? I’m not at all against unionising, but it sounds like you’re cherry picking whatever you personally happen to use as representative of the fediverse.
Defederate Threads. There is no way the Fediverse communities survive a 100 million users platform joining.
Lemmy is 50k monthly active users
They already survived it lol, nobody even noticed it happening. Probably because to post here a threads user has to format a post in a specific way for it to even render here
Did you read the OP? Defederating won’t solve anything theres barely 1 million monthly active users on the fediverse. We have to make better apps than facebook so people want to leave from threads to the open alternatives
Defederating won’t solve anything
[citation needed]
We have to make better apps than facebook so people want to leave from threads to the open alternatives
[citation needed]
The apps are fine, it’s content quality and quantity which can only happen organically. You can’t force an increase in quantity and keep quality high. Plus the fediverse is a fairly new concept with new issues that arise as it scales up. By it’s very nature the fediverse cannot react and change quickly so a slow growth allows for communities to try their own solutions and eventually settle on a more universal fix.
We have to make better apps than facebook so people want to leave from threads to the open alternatives
We already have them. That’s not the problem. The only thing that will make people join is a hundred million dollar marketing budget that we’re never going to have, and fills Meta’s pockets anyway.
3 hour mandatory meetings 3 times a week
Good idea, but It would hard to cooperate efficiently when there is money involved. And I don’t think that Mastodon devs would join this union.
On the other hand, I believe that separate organisation focused on interoperability, long-term goals, defending from Meta, etc. would be great.
This seems a lot more achievable - joint fundraising is just guaranteed to go wrong but an ActivityPub Oversight Committee focused on what the whole ecosystem would need to work seamlessly together seems a good thing.
Exactly!
It could see where issues lie and direct attention to solving them. If it raised it’s own funds it could create bounties to crack specific issues.
So I just posted this and it seems like a single ActivityPub login is doable through the API, no-one has implemented it. That seems like a good target.
Interesting to see your comment about Mastodon EEE ActivityPub. I would love to know more about your thoughts. It’s funny to see people worried about Threads making breaking changes yet Mastodon has done it from the beginning. Look at recently with the quote post situation, Misskey has had them forever, Threads used Misskey implementation and an FEP, Mastodon announced yesterday they got a grant for quote posts. They are doing their own thing yet again
Meta is taking over the fediverse now, uh huh. Thought we all blocked it?
No, Mastodon Social, the flag-ship has not blocked Facebook’s Threads. And Gargron is very happy with that. Imagine being the main developer letting your flagship instance turn into a huge “silo” and then happy that a corporate privacy invading giant federates with your instance :/
Or they might just be quite into the open and federated concept, above all else.
It’s not your instance, so what do you care? Again, half the point is that you can run your instance however you want, and talk to whoever you want or do not want. Federated. Mastodon or Lemmy aren’t distributed systems, they’re federated systems.
I almost did not care about replying to your comment but let me just share this with all of you. Mastodon can be called a success but quite a few people have not been too happy about the behavior of the Mastodon developer Gargron since years. Not defederating the flagship Mastodon instance which has right now apparently 242K active users from Mark Zuckerberg’s product is another nuisance for some. Maybe not for you, but for me it is.
But it’s his instance. The whole point is that you run your own if you want a different approach to administration. Like, sure, you disagree with an admin, but that’s the thing about the federation instances, everyone is essentially free to run their instance however they want. You defederate them if you dislike their content spilling into yours, like many do - understandably - with Threads.
And the same goes for the software. Mastodon can federate with other similar microblogging services. Again, the whole point of the federation thing, you’re bound neither by admin nor by specific developer. In turn everyone is free to do as they wish, and you are free to allow or block them as you wish.
But it’s his instance. The whole point is that you run your own if you want a different approach to administration.
You seem to keep looking at this as the admin of your self hosted instance with only you as the only user. With large instances there comes the responsibility of moderation and that is a thing that Gargron has been lacking with years ago. And keeping the door open for new sign-ups while the idea of Federation is to decentralize, and people repeatedly asking you to show new users to other instances but not doing so is just plain horrible imho.
With large instances there comes the responsibility of moderation
Sure, so long as it comes with the responsibility of the users to pay, they get to have a say in moderation.
Otherwise, they get to vote with their browser: Use the site if they like it, do not use it if they don’t. And the same for the software. Don’t like Mastodon, use another microblogging software.
This is the key underlying idea behind the federation of activitypub. Do not undermine it. This is not Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever. This is not a central place, it does not need central evolution, vote by abandonment.
(and I’m not saying I agree with Mastodon’s dev, seeing how I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about microblogging in general, but again, it’s his instance, everyone is free to use whatever they agree with)
Why is it a nuisance for some? They could defederate from Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online. This place is supposed to be about freedom & choice. People can use different software, move to a different instance so I’m confused at the hostility toward Eugen.
If you have not followed any of the conversations on Mastodon in the past then it could be more difficult to understand. Let me just try to summarize this a bit. I give credits to Gargron to pulling off Mastodon and being an example for other to give a boost to Fediverse development (Before Mastodon there were a few things but all a bit niche kind of. Mastodon then profited from a few Twitter, Tumblr and what not Exodus moments to get more popular). But other than that Gargron should have taken responsibility. As far as I remember the Mastodon app was just pointing to dot social at some point, nice for masses of new users, but not in the spirit of decentralization (Going from one silo to another ? And yeah, simply migrate to another instance, not every person will do so) You cannot point confused masses of people to just your flagship instance, and do no moderation. This has all improved by now. Now imagine that your own nice instance got several thousands of users (I think I remember that https://social.tchncs.de/explore went over 20k users in 2018 with the first Twitter Exodus causing some initial server troubles. Today the same server shows 4K active users). What would you do ? In case of the Mastodon social flagship I believe they eventually hired moderators. Ironically Gargron is quoted here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#Content_moderation
Like i said in the OP that doesnt mean anything. Theres barely a million monthly users on the fediverse as a whole currently. They have a billion users just on instagram. They will dictate how the space runs if we try to rely on just blocking them
I don’t get it. By that account, what would everyone… “pooling their resources” do? Nothing, correct.
It would help make the apps compatible with eachother making them better so people would actually care to switch from threads to open platforms and it would help fund them. Like i stated in the OP
It would help make the apps compatible with each other
Why would they need a union for that? The union is called ActivityPub.
How so?
Thought we all blocked it?
Everybody who cares did — everybody who counts.
+mbin?
Pixelfed developer deserves a raise. Dude is the developer that every ADHD developer wishes to be. I could never focus on more than one project at once.
As for Phanpy, it’s one of the rare apps that has 10/10 user interface and 10/10 user experience. Very rare these days where people focus lots on just user interface but have no clue about user experience.
Interesting ideas
A thread about a Lemmy instance going off line and how to back it up got me wondering if tools could be built to automatically back up Lemmy instances to Arweave.
Limitless Peace
I doubt it would work, the piefed dev seems pretty hostile to the Lemmy Devs (who run .ml, iirc) https://mander.xyz/post/12037820
I didn’t read that thread as indicating hostility, more like he noticed a pattern of users being banned from a community on .ml and being confused as to why, so stuck a warning on it. One community on .ml has a warning, in the same way communities on beehaw have a warning that the instance has higher standards.
It’s not like they refuse to co-operate (e.g. PieFed already has a place to put image alt texts, but will move it when Lemmy releases support for them; and it uses the ‘audience’ field that was originally proposed by Lemmy Devs)
Which is kinda the point of the federated stuff: run your own instance.
If we just all pool shit together again, we might as well launch a company and hey, in a few years do an IPO and cahs out. 😛
From being on Lemmy for quite a while, I can say quite some people share that view. We don’t enjoy moderation on the basis of a political agenda.
