How does this relate to the Fediverse?

There's a nascent movement within the Fediverse precisely to experiment with 'insularity', building smaller opt-in-federation-based networks.

The Social Web by naming itself thus reduces social web to fediverse and then to AP only.

Moderate people, not code by [[Ryan Barrett]]

https://betula.mycorrhiza.wiki/

Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web. Use it to organize references or maintain a linklog.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-are-having-a-fight-that-could-shape-the-next-generation-of-social-media/

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/10/11/activitypub/

Good job Matthias!

Reddit : Fediverse :: Decentralized-by-policy : Decentralized-by-architecture

Good point! It makes me think that fediverse instances can look to subreddit governance as models for their own governance structures.

Rozenshtein, Alan Z., Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media (November 23, 2022). 2 Journal of Free Speech Law (2023, Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4213674 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4213674

Found via Nathan Schneider

Abstract

Current approaches to content moderation generally assume the continued dominance of “walled gardens”: social media platforms that control who can use their services and how. But an emerging form of decentralized social media—the "Fediverse"—offers an alternative model, one more akin to how email works and that avoids many of the pitfalls of centralized moderation. This essay, which builds on an emerging literature around decentralized social media, seeks to give an overview of the Fediverse, its benefits and drawbacks, and how government action can influence and encourage its development.

Part I describes the Fediverse and how it works, beginning with a general description of open versus closed protocols and then proceeding to a description of the current Fediverse ecosystem, focusing on its major protocols and applications. Part II looks at the specific issue of content moderation on the Fediverse, using Mastodon, a Twitter-like microblogging service, as a case study to draw out the advantages and disadvantages of the federated content-moderation approach as compared to the current dominant closed-platform model. Part III considers how policymakers can encourage the Fediverse, whether through direct regulation, antitrust enforcement, or liability shields.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18Pi1AeQezbTdjjPcb6ol0Rxwx-hq5JkA4RoPsTapPqw/edit#gid=2069391068

Lists of Fediverse projects, details, follow lists, etc.

https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox

Soapbox, a front end product running Mastodon.

Found via this user's instance: https://social.arinbasu.online/notice/AR6oc4sUUpwBPfApHs

https://fedifollow.glitch.me/

For following my WordPress website from the Fediverse: https://fedifollow.glitch.me/follow?account=%40chrisaldrich%40boffosocko.com

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>codefoodpixelsLuke Bonaccorsi</span> in Luke Bonaccorsi: "Because sharing follow links i…" - Indieweb.Social (<time class='dt-published'>12/22/2022 11:41:16</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/

https://rhiaro.co.uk/2022/11/fediverse-culture

https://fediverse-webring-enthusiasts.glitch.me/

https://social.yesterweb.org/explore

A mastodon instance for the OG web and design folkx.

https://hcommons.social/@amisamileanded/109466986626984098

Apparently sometime within it's first month of existence hcommons.social had a server meltdown of some sort. The admins addressed and hardened their set up.

Describes how to move from a Mastodon account to micro.blog. also provides details about "move" activity in ActivityPub.

https://www.manton.org/2022/12/02/moving-from-mastodon.html

Details for moving from one instance to another.

[https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

https://snarfed.org/2022-12-03_bridgy-fed-updates

https://catgirlin.space/posts/moving-to-the-fediverse-and-indieweb/

https://dolphin.town/about/more

A social media service for dolphins where you can only send messages with the letter "e".

compare with https://oulipo.social/about which elides the letter e

https://tldr.nettime.org/about/more

https://github.com/aaronpk/Nautilus

Fediverse should mean engaged citizens

https://github.com/mwt/apfollow/

Code and buttons for creating ActivityPub Follow me interface

https://odd.blog/2022/11/06/how-to-add-your-blog-to-mastodon/

https://tomfinley.co/wordpress-fediverse/

https://hcommons.social/about

The humanities commons has their own mastodon instance now!

Interesting point, as a lot of Mastodon's design decisions are focused on reducing risk of violence. This is an argument that it does not work.

Distributed verification, or "What is Journalism?"

The admins of the journa.host server are now taking on the verification task. The example Davidson uses is a beer blog; the blog is more than opinion, so for the moment that person is added.

So what is the role of professional organizations and societies to create a fediverse home for recognized members? This doesn't seem sustainable...particularly since people set the dividing lines between their professional and personal interests in different places.

Spit-balling here...this reminds me somewhat of the Open Badges effort of Mozilla and IMS Global. If something like that was built into the Mastodon profile, then there would be transparency with a certifying agency.

A similar dynamic can now be observed in the mass migration from twitter to mastodon. People who were successful at using the big "homepage" of twitter are likely to be a bit thrown by the fediverse but it represents an opportunity to connect with a smaller but more specialised audience.

https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/

https://lucahammer.com/

https://fediverse.space/

https://fediverse.party/

https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/

https://the-federation.info/

An aggregation site with data about the broader Fediverse and projects within it.

"Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter." That is pretty accurate, microblogging and following does what feedreading does too. In this case commenting is put at the exact same level as the orginal blogpost, akin to how I can reply to posts with a post of my own (like old trackbacks, now webmention)

https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

@manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

You can change the framing and gain new insights.

In the mastodon.technology shutdown post linked, the author describes a situation where the workload exceeds the capacity of an ordinary person, even a motivated one. (There's an argument to be made that this makes for someone who isn't merely an ordinary person—but that strengthens the point I'm about to make, instead of weakening it.)

How do we fix this problem? In other words, how do we ensure that the workload of an "instance" remains within the realm of feasibility for an ordinary person?

Answer: making it the responsibility of each person. A single volunteer admin should not be responsible for hundreds, thousands, or more other people. Getting each person to shoulder their own personal load is far more tractable.

What's absent, currently, is the means for each person to do so on their own in a way that we can realistically expect. That can be worked on. Software like Mastodon can be improved upon—necessarily drastically so—and infrastructure configuration can be improved to, to the point that it doesn't even feel like infrastructure configuration.

For people with very large spheres of influence, like Aral Balkan who recently disclosed that he's spending ~600 EUR per year for his instance, they can seek help, mining from the resources that are at their disposal that are a consequence of their wide reach. For ordinary people with up to a few hundred followers, they won't need to be exposed to this.

As for the sentiment behind the remarks about "dumping fresh content into our account for free", recognize that the fresh content has value, and there are ways to subsidize the resource use by parties with an interest in being able to capture some of that value for themselves. When you post a widely shared piece to your blog, then Google for example benefits from this, whether you're using Google Ads or not. It's the mere fact that there's something on the Web worth looking at that makes this beneficial.

Defederation to combat breaches of norms

I wonder if this sort of thing would happen if someone created an ActivityPub node that did exhibit some of these viral behaviors. Would that node be shunned by the rest of the fediverse? Will that answer be the same a year from now when the fediverse is more mainstream?

https://fediverse.observer/

Suggested Fediverse servers close to you.

https://pkm.social/about

Run by Nicole van der Hoeven

Page recommended by @wfinck. Seems @karlicoss is the author. This project seems similar to what I've been trying to do with Hypothes.is, Obsidian, Anki, Zotero, and PowerToys Run but goes beyond the scope of my endeavors to just quickly access whatever resource comes to mind (without creating duplicates). The things that Promnesia adds beyond my PKM stack is the following: - prioritize new info - keeping track of which device things were read and how long

This instance encourages their account holders to actively block for themselves. Pushing agency into their hands, also by providing existing blocklists to make that easier. After all it isn't pleasant to have to experience abuse first before you know whom to block.

Providing lurking opportunities for security reasons. Very sensible. Example of actively providing tools that create agency for groups to protect themselves.

Having the ability to see what known bigots get up to on social media is a security feature.

Blocking means your account holders don't see that part of the fediverse, you're taking away their overview. A decision you're making about them, without them. A block decision isn't only about the blocked server, it impacts your account holders too, and that needs to be part of the considerations.

There are M instances that block servers that don't block the same servers they do. That seems to defeat the entire concpet of federating (and the rationale isn't correct).

https://instances.social/

A tool for helping people choose an instance.

https://buzzmachine.com/2022/11/05/hope-for-a-post-musk-net/

Small town newspapers and libraries could set up Fediverse servers for their constituents as well.

See also: Hometown by Darius Kazemi

https://fedidb.org/

https://fediverse.info/explore/people

https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

Extract the fediverse handles of your Twitter followings or list members and import them on Mastodon to follow them all at once.

https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_instance%3F

Ben Werdmüller sees the Musk take-over as one of more signs that Twitter as we know it is sunsetting. Like FB it is losing its role as the all-in-one communal 'space'. I think the decline is real, but also think it will be long drawn out decline. Early adopters and early main stream may well jump ship, if they haven't already some time ago. The rest, including companies, will hang around much longer, if only for the sunk costs (socially and capital). An alternative (hopefully a multitude as Ben suggests) needs to clearly present itself, but hasn't in a way the mainstream recognises I think. It may well hurt to hold on for many, but if there's no other thing to latch onto people will endure the pain. Boiling frog and all that.

https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-smalltown/

Fork of Mastodon based on Darius Kazemi's Hometown

https://xabid.com/how-to-connect-wordpress-to-fediverse/

Nothing new for me, and potentially missing some parts.

https://socialhome.network/

A Fediverse project that does both articles, notes, and photos.

Link to https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1522267857169653761

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/12455-Indieweb-vs-Fediverse

♥

A list of webmention nodes that exist within the Fediverse

Pixelfed is one of the best privacy respecting and federated alternatives to Instagram. It's great that is also allows posting from a desktop browser.

This has some interesting research which might be applied to better design for an IndieWeb social space.

I'd prefer a more positive framing rather than this likely more negative one.

This is just one of the contradictions of having a global medium/platform of communication being controlled by a single operator.

It is extremely difficult to create global policies to moderate the conversations of 3 billion people across different languages and cultures. No team, no document, is qualified for such a task, because so much is dependent on context.

The approach to moderation taken by federated social media like Mastodon makes a lot more sense. Communities moderate themselves, based on their own codes of conduct. In smaller servers, a strict code of conduct may not even be necessary - moderation decisions can be based on a combination of consensus and common sense (just like in real life social groups and social interactions). And there is no question of censorship, since their moderation actions don't apply to the whole network.

Excellent way to add users and tags to the Fediverse (the federation of free networks) -- through Friendica's RSS functionality.