Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?

† Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

...coming back to this, now. ...

It's been fine for years! I understand the intention behind informing readers of what the onboarding experience is like at this very moment, but if you're going to be part of this absurdly latent, dense wave of folks suddenly giving Mastodon a try, I think it's important you be very explicit about your lack of experience before the most intense influx of users in the history of the Fediverse.

Are you sure about this argument, Janus? Are you sure you comprehensively tried all methods of onboarding?

What in the God's name of the fuck are you talking about??

t Laurie Voss's crowdsourced set of examples of things that have structure & control in the form of the following: - centralized - hierarchical - federated - distributed - decentralized

Picture below: Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1486563446099300359?s=20&t=C6z9xUF_YBkOFmfcjfjpUA

Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance

Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.

AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).

In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")

Well... I can't seem to get this webpage to render with the Hypothes.is sidebar alongside, so I'm going to have a go at just including entirety of the content in markdown format, annotated and presented in this same note.

Eugen Rochko Time Interview

["Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands. Its Founder Has a Vision for Democratizing Social Media."]

Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging site named after an extinct type of mammoth, {I'm sorry... what??? You didn't even fucking ask, did you?} recorded 120,000 new users in the four days following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, its German-born founder Eugen Rochko tells TIME. Many of them were Twitter users seeking a new place to call their online home.

Those users, whether they knew it or not, were following in the footsteps of Rochko, 29, who began coding Mastodon in 2016 after becoming disillusioned with Twitter. “I was thinking that being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation,” Rochko says. “It was generally related to a feeling of distrust of the top down control that Twitter exercised.”

Mastodon, which proudly proclaims it is [“not for sale”] and has around [4.5 million] user accounts, is pretty similar to Twitter, once users get past the complicated sign-up process. The main difference is that it’s not one cohesive platform, but actually a collection of different, independently-run and self-funded servers. Users on different servers can still communicate with each other, but anybody can set up their own server, and set their own rules for discussion. Mastodon is a crowdfunded nonprofit, which funds the full-time work of Rochko—its sole employee—and several popular servers.

The platform doesn’t have the power to force server owners to do anything—even comply with basic content moderation standards. That sounds like a recipe for an online haven for far-right trolls. But in practice, many of Mastodon’s servers have stricter rules than Twitter, Rochko says. When hate-speech servers do appear, other servers can band together to block them, essentially ostracizing them from the majority of the platform. “I guess you could call it the democratic process,” Rochko says.

The recent influx from Twitter, Rochko says, has been a vindication. “It is a very positive thing to find that your work is finally being appreciated and respected and more widely known,” he says. “I have been working very, very hard to push the idea that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow.”

TIME spoke with Rochko on Oct. 31.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What do you think of what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter?

I don’t know. The man is not entirely comprehensible. I don’t agree with a lot of his behaviors and his decision-making. I think that buying Twitter was an impulse decision that he soon regretted. And that he basically got himself into a situation that kind of forced him to commit to the deal. And now he’s in it, and he has to deal with the fallout.

I specifically disagree with his stance on free speech, because I think that it depends on your interpretation of what free speech means. If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.

I think that is a very uniquely American idea of creating this marketplace of ideas where you can say anything you want completely without limits. It is very foreign to the German mindset where we, in our Constitution, our number one priority is maintaining human dignity. And so, hate speech is not part of the German concept of free speech, for example. So I think that when Elon Musk says that everything’s gonna be allowed, or whatever, I generally disagree with that.

How do you ensure on Mastodon, given that it’s decentralized and you don’t have the power to ban users, that the space is welcoming and safe?

Well, this is the kind of strange dichotomy of how it’s turned out. On the one hand, the technology itself is what allows basically anyone to host their own independent social media server, and to basically be able to do anything they want with it. There is no way for Mastodon, the company, or anyone really—except the normal law enforcement procedures—to really go after anyone specifically running a Mastodon server. The way that you would shut down a normal web site is how you would shut down a Mastodon server, there’s no difference there. So on that end, it kind of turns out to be the ultimate free speech platform. But obviously that’s basically just a side effect of creating a tool that can be used by anyone. It’s kind of like cars. Cars are used by everyone, even bad people, even for bad purposes, there’s nothing you can do about it, because the tool is out there. However, I think that the differentiating factor to something like Twitter or Facebook, is that on Mastodon, when you host your own server, you can also decide what rules you want to enforce on that server, which allows communities to create safer spaces than they could otherwise have on these large platforms that are interested in serving as many people as possible, perhaps driving engagement up on purpose to increase time people spend on the web.

You can have communities that have much stricter rules than Twitter has. And in practice, a lot of them are [stricter]. And this is part of where, again, the technology intersects with guidance or leadership from Mastodon the company. I think that, through the way that we communicate publicly, we have avoided attracting a crowd of the kind of people who you would find on Parler or Gab, or whatever other internet hate forums. Instead we’ve attracted the kind of people who would moderate against hate speech when running their own servers. Additionally, we also act as a guide for anyone who wants to join. Because on our website, and our apps, we provide a default list of curated servers that people can make accounts on. And through that, we make sure that we curate the list in such a way that any server that wants to be promoted by us has to agree to a certain basic set of rules, one of which is that no hate speech is allowed, no sexism, no racism, no homophobia, or transphobia. And through that, we ensure that the association between Mastodon, the brand, and the experience that people want is that of a much safer space than something like Twitter.

But what happens if you hateful people do set up a server?

Well, obviously, they don’t get promoted on our “Join Mastodon” website or in our app. So whatever they do, they do on their own and completely separately, and the other administrators that run their own Mastodon servers, when they find out that there’s a new hate speech server, they may decide that they don’t want to receive any messages from the server and block it on their end. Through, I guess you could call it the democratic process, the hateful server can get ostracized or can get split off into basically, a little echo chamber, which is, I guess, no better or worse than them being in some other echo chamber. ::The internet is full of spam::. It’s full of abuse, of course. Mastodon provides the facilities necessary to deal with unwanted content, both on the user end and on the operator end.

What made you want to go into building a service like this back in 2016?

I remember that I was just not very happy with Twitter, and I was worried where it was going to go from there. Something very questionable was in its future. That got me thinking that, you know, being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was actually very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation that can just do whatever it wants with it. I started working on my own thing. I called it Mastodon because I’m not good at naming things. I just chose whatever came to my mind at the time.(fn) There was obviously no ambition of going big with it at the time.

It must feel pretty special to see something that you made grow from nothing to where it is now.

Indeed, it is. It is a very positive thing to find that your work is finally being appreciated and respected and more widely known. I’ve been fighting for this for a long time, I started working on Mastodon in 2016, back then I had no ambitions of it going far at all. It was very much a hobbyist project at the start, then when I launched publicly it seemed to strike a chord with at least the tech community and that’s when I got the original Patreon supporters that allowed me to take on this job full time. And from then on I have been working very, very hard to make this platform as accessible and as easy to use for everyone as possible. And to push the idea forward, that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow.

SO... y'all tech media folks finally willing and able to acknowledge Mastodon's existence now?

I shall always love you, StarPterano. NEVER DIE.

This seems illustrative of the idea that some of the most interesting things in life or living systems exist at the chaotic borders.

There seem to be differences between more rigid structures like the Dewey Decimal Classification system or Paul Otlet's Mundaneum and less rigid branching systems like Luhmann's version of his zettelkasten. Is this really a difference or only a seeming difference given the standardization some of the systems. There should be a way to do both. Maybe it's by the emergence of public standards, or perhaps it's simply through the use of subject headings and the cross linking of emerging folksonomies.

What does the use of platforms like the Federated Wiki or the early blogosphere and linking and discovery methods enabled by Technorati indicate?

Luhmann's system may seem intrapersonal, perhaps as a result of the numbering system, but it becomes highly penetrable by the subject index and the links from one idea (card) to the next. Use over time makes it even easier.

Scott, I'll spend some more in-depth time with it shortly, but in a quick skim of topics I pleasantly notice a few citations of my own work. Perhaps I've done a poor job communicating about wikis, but from what I've seen from your work thus far I take much the same view of zettelkasten as you do. Somehow though I find that you're quoting me in opposition to your views? While you're broadly distinguishing against the well-known Wikipedia, and rightly so, I also broadly consider (unpublished) and include examples of small personal wikis and those within Ward Cunningham's FedWiki space, though I don't focus on them in that particular piece. In broad generalities most of these smaller wikis are closer to the commonplace and zettelkasten traditions, though as you point out they have some structural functional differences. You also quote me as someone in "information theory" in a way that that indicates context collapse. Note that my distinctions and work in information theory relate primarily to theoretical areas in electrical engineering, physics, complexity theory, and mathematics as it relates to Claude Shannon's work. It very specifically does not relate to my more humanities focused work within intellectual history, note taking, commonplaces, rhetoric, orality, or memory. In these areas, I'm better read than most, but have no professional title(s). Can't wait to read the entire piece more thoroughly...

https://app.element.io/#/room/#fedwiki:matrix.org

https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/interlinking-wikis

Interesting to see this same sort of contextual background here as in TiddlyWiki which calls the space a "river". TiddlyWiki does this in a vertical scrolling space where as Federated Wiki does it horizontally.

See federated machine learning for a discussion on how we might avoid some of these challenges.

Short overview of federated machine learning.

Just ran into someone using FedWiki as a commonplace book via a random search.

Reply to Nick Milo:

Ward Cunningham may have been using a similar UI prior to it for other projects, but he unveiled the Smallest Federated Wiki at IndieWeb Camp 2011 in late June: https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki. I don't have a receipt to prove it, but I have to suspect that Andy's version was certainly influenced by Cunningham's work.

Mike Caulfield, subsequent author of the influential The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, Iterated on the Smallest Federated Wiki and created a WordPress-based plugin shortly thereafter called Wikity that used some of the card-based UI that Obsidian comes with out of the box.

Both had some early influence on the UI-based research that the IndieWeb space has done since. For those interested, there's also a sub-group within it focusing on digital gardens, commonplace books, Zettelkasten, etc. that can be found here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

There is some work being done on federated learning, where the algorithm works on decentralised data that stays in place with the patient and the ML model is brought to the patient so that their data remains private.

Lemmy is a great open source federated and privacy respecting alternative to Reddit. Nodes can be self-hosted and posts will sync between them.

The meta-problem with PGP is that it was designed by crypto-engineers in the 90s and it is horribly outdated, yet due to its federated architecture, difficult to update.

Although the option to host your own email offers you freedom, it's precisely this freedom that makes change more difficult and the reason why email isn't yet end-to-end encrypted.

Centralized architectures, like whatsapp, allow you to roll out end-to-end encryption to the entire network with 1 software update.

Because the ecosystem around software application is quickly evolving, you need to be able to adapt in order to be competitive.

Once you federate your technology, however, you lose this ability to adapt quickly, as is evidenced by the relative stagnation of federated standards such as IP, SMTP, IRC, DNS etc.

The implicit threat of federated architectures is also emerging in centralized services. It emerges there because the core of the social network, the address book, is saved locally (i.e. federated). This makes it easy for users to switch networks, and this ease keeps the providers honest.

The implicit threat of federation

In a federated architecture, most users tend to coalesce around one provider. Few actually want to run their own server, but the fact that that option exists, acts as an implicit threat which keeps the current host honest.

Mobile device's notification centers are federation points for communication apps

The notification center in our phones acts as a hub where messages show up from WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS etc. analogous to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple networks.

A federated model requires some type of consensus to form to accept changes. This is great to promote consensus, but reaching consensus takes time and results in an inability to adapt quickly.

All of these also apply to writing in federated wiki.

There is a thing which we call Federated Wiki, that challenges how we produce knowledge : http://federated.wiki/federated-wiki-introduction.html

Federated Wiki is a place of friends.

Though licensing issues may be less of a focus in Francophone work on Open Educational Resources, this portal mostly focuses on material under Creative Commons.

You mean it’s not just about the price of textbooks??

This resembles the federation of Plugins for different (federated) wiki activities in the log. How could we standardize around oEmbed (+ rich JS Web/Service Workers/Components?), Twitter Cards, Facebook OpenGraph, JSON-LD, RDFa, microdata et al. for sharing "widgets"?

Like teaching, music is sharing. In both cases, the impulse for generalized reciprocity varies quite a bit, but musicians and teachers who know to get together can help shape a world of deep insight and learning.

Useful examples. Could imagine something like Wikity, FedWiki, or other forms of content federation to work through this in a much-needed upgrade from the “Personal Home Pages” of the early Web. Do see some connections to Sandstorm and the new WordPress interface (which, despite being targeted at WordPress.com users, also works on self-hosted WordPress installs). Some of it could also be about the longstanding dream of “keeping our content” in social media. Yes, as in the reverse from Facebook. Multiple solutions exist to do exports and backups. But it can be so much more than that and it’s so much more important in educational contexts.

Sounds like a job for Wikity.

Dreams of federated content.

Mike Caulfield is working on WordPress software to make Federated Wiki concepts accessible to a wider audience. http://wikity.cc/ is the most recent result.

Thanks in part to David Wiley… Could be a neat thing to show off at WPcampus.

The underlying graph model is not explicitly mentionned here nor in the README of the plugin.