@juergen_hubert these things are not really a replacement for *social media*.

but, actually, i think you have a point. get folks in here first, by hook or by crook. expanding these other activitypub services is fertile ground.

Jürgen Hubert

As for selling the Fediverse, we could do that in a more targeted manner. Identify the needs of specific groups of people, and then tell them which specific software, which specific instance is most suitable for their needs.

One of my long standing pain points with the fediverse as is is that no one seems to be able to look beyond “let’s spin up a general purpose microblogging website that exists solely to interface with all of the other general purpose microblogging websites”. The biggest promise of the fediverse is that you can have your pre-corporate internet style topic-focused community, and you can look over the fence at other things you’re interested in. This actually addresses a missing niche, while “8000 generic twitter-like fiefdoms” does not.

But if it’s not just aping the look and function of existing, generic, mass-market social media, with all of its dark patterns included, then people seem to turn their noses up at it. And I just don’t get it.

I've said again and again that I consider it to be of the utmost importance that the #Fediverse grows far beyond its present size. My reasoning is thus:

All major commercial social media platforms are either owned by #fascists , or by people who are only too happy to bend their knees to the fascists for the sake of profits - and thus are also fascists for all moral accounting purposes.

And they have used the power of these social media platforms to heavily promote fascists, or opened the door for fascists to promote their agenda. The resurgence of fascism we are seeing in the world these days was largely done with the aid of social media - outrage farming is an _extremly_ effective tactic for promoting fascism, especially when the social media algorithms actively support you.

I think we can all agree that fighting fascism is important (and if you _don't_ agree, go away - I don't want to talk to you). Thus, we need to attack the mechanisms that allow fascism to grow - i.e. commercial social media.

Now, maybe there is a future where we won't have any kind of online social media, but barring a complete collapse of civilization I am not seeing it - humans are a communicative species, and have always used the latest technology for that purpose. Thus, I don't see the concept of "social media" by itself to go away any time soon.

But replacing _commercial_ social media seems much more achievable - after all, the problem is #Capitalism, not #SocialMedia itself. Thus, we need to grow _noncommercial_ social media until can replace corporate social media. And as far as I can see, the Fediverse is the most viable noncommercial alternative out there.

The main objectiion to "growing the Fediverse" that I have heard is this:

"#X, #Facebook , #TikTok and the others are full of assholes. If the Fediverse grows as big as they are, all the assholes will come here as well!"

And I can understand that fear. We need to be careful about _how_ we grow the Fediverse, and there is much work to be done. Our moderation tools, for instance, could be much better than they are (just ask #BlackMastodon ...). However, of all the social media systems out there, the Fediverse alone actually has the potential to develop _better_ moderation in the long run - while commercial social media platforms see good moderation as _hostile_ to their business models (as recent revelations about #Meta have shown). Thus, fear of failure should not stop us from making the attempt.

Furthermore, while the (algorithm-boosted) fascists might be the loudest people on commercial social media right now, I believe that the majority of people using social media in the modern world are _not_ assholes, and we want to encourage these not-assholes to come to the Fediverse in large number. Or do you really think that the (predominantly white and European/North American) Fediverse bubble represents the only not-asshole group left on the planet?

And consider the stakes. Not only will the fascists become increasingly violent towards marginalized groups of people, they are actively hostile to any efforts to fight threats to Earth as a whole - #GlobalWarming first among them. We need to wrestle the microphone from them before they doom us all, and that means wrestling social media away from them - but we cannot do that without replacing commercial social media with non-commercial social media.

At least, that's what I think. If you have any better plans to fight the social media power of fascists, feel free to share them!

@kichae

Well, sure. That's true. But those other projects have to interoperate with Mastodon. That makes what they can do to change how the fediverse works limited.

@fishidwardrobe @kichae

No, both they and Mastodon have to adhere to the ActivityPub standard.

@juergen_hubert @kichae i rather thought that mastodon did *not* completely honour the standard — or that the standard was ambiguous — and misskey etc generally have to follow what Mastodon does.

Don't know myself; i've heard developers say that here.

Fish Id Wardrobe Yeah, Mastodon kinda does what it wants, and gets away with it due to market share. It picks and chooses what it wants to implement, and struggles to play nicely with many other AP platforms.

Even just as an end user of not-Mastodon, it’s really annoying.

@kichae thank you. so my point is, if you want to change the way the fediverse works non-trivially, you need to persuade Mastodon to change.

although to be honest i don't think the folks behind activtypub are any more open to acting on suggestions than Mastodon are. Partly that's for very practical reasons: they're both short on resources.

Fish Id Wardrobe Or, you leave Mastodon behind, and try to build a better garden that attracts people away.

@kichae well yes, but lots of people have tried tthat over the years, and really only Mastodon has ever suceeded. it's kind of a miracle.

Most of the other projects that managed to attract any users at all – friendica, Disapora, etc – quickly adopted some sort of interoperability with activitypub.

you can start again from scratch if you _want_, but…

@juergen_hubert
I feel like we don't have enough people.

@juergen_hubert
To be fair, it's been awhile since I've heard anyone saying we shouldn't grow the Fediverse. I think a lot of those people have had their concerns allayed or have seen the greater concern of these people controlling larger society.

I will also note, to your point of societal collapse or something, that the Fediverse is far more resilient to mass internet outages because the infrastructure is so spread out and 99% of the posts are backed up on most of that infrastructure, not simply on major services like Amazon AWS, but on smaller hosting companies servers, local to countries and communities, and even people's personal home setups.

In theory, the Fediverse could survive the total destruction of the commercially owned internet. (Though, hopefully, we will never have to test that)

@kichae

(a) #ActivityPub is not developed by #Mastodon.

ActivityPub - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

(b) Yes, Mastodon is the single most common #Fediverse application. But many of the others aren't exactly small, either.

(fedidb.com)

@kichae well yes, but lots of people have tried tthat over the years, and really only Mastodon has ever suceeded. it's kind of a miracle.

Most of the other projects that managed to attract any users at all – friendica, Disapora, etc – quickly adopted some sort of interoperability with activitypub.

you can start again from scratch if you _want_, but…

Fish Id Wardrobe “We need to support other fediverse platforms”

“But other platforms haven’t gotten support in the past”

Why TF do you think I’m saying we need to support other platforms, then? We don’t need to convince Mastodon to change, because the Mastodon folks have made it very clear that they see the ecosystem as beholden to them, and not the other way around. They’re not good actors. We need something better, made by better people, and then we to convince people to use it over Mastodon.

Fish Id Wardrobe “We need to support other fediverse platforms”

“But other platforms haven’t gotten support in the past”

Why TF do you think I’m saying we need to support other platforms, then? We don’t need to convince Mastodon to change, because the Mastodon folks have made it very clear that they see the ecosystem as beholden to them, and not the other way around. They’re not good actors. We need something better, made by better people, and then we to convince people to use it over Mastodon.