friendica.eskimo.com
For all my English reading FedeFriends, here is Part 1 of my Case For Fediverse As An Environment For (Not Only) Polish Social Sector.
Machine translator at deepl.com is doing great job and now I feel I can start publishing in English again without doubling my writing time 😀
Better network infrastructure for the social sector.
Communication, information and cooperation under social control.
Technical interoperability for social interoperability.Part one:
How oligopolistic corpomedia works (using Facebook as an example)
and why the social sector needs to take action to create its own social networking
space.
Also how Fediverse works and why it is a better environment for social initiatives.Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
CC-BY-SA Petros Polonos & The Society For Mutual Aid
Your feedback will be appreciated as always. If you think this work can be useful as an educational aid, I will gladly make any adjustment you'd suggest and may it help others.
https://tepewu.pl/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/02/Fediwerse2021PLGeneralPart1Eng-en.pdf
!Towarzystwo Pomocy Wzajemnej !Informacja techniczna Fediwersum !Fediverse
#fediverse #community #networking #education #advocacy #interoperability
Part 2 of presentation.
https://tepewu.pl/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/03/Fediwersum2021PLGeneralPart2-en.pdf
In his 1875 writing, Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx summarized the communist philosophy in this way: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” By contrast, socialism is based on the idea that people will be compensated based on their level of individual contribution to the economy.
More or less that's it.
Another aspect is the state. There is a serious chasm between statist communists or socialists and anarcho-communists or libertarian socialists.
So, as a very imprecise map looks like this:
Assuming of course that we agree on the definition of state, being involuntary association, based on monopoly of violence.
And usually most fights go about differences in definitions.
- Federation means that there is no "Fediverse view": what you see very much depend on where you connect, and you may miss stuff by using a wrong place
- Federation also mean there is no "global public stream", you can't "post fo the world": nobody will notice it
- Facebook algorithm handles huge amounts of information, sort it, order it, filter it and present to the people. Fediverse does not apply such things. It means, however, that people would choke and die when the amount of information grows exponentially, since they have to do all the algorithmic processing manually, wasting their time. Fediverse can handle a few hundred connections with low amount of traffic, it cannot handle multiple thousands of connections all generating dozens of posts daily, especially in extended length.
- Facebook is much more like Diaspora* or Friendica and very much less than Mastodon; Mastodon (and basic AP) is Twitter, not Facebook.
- People want and need the tight integration of various Facebook services: posts, reactions, comments, polls, groups, pages, chat, address book; they are all in once place, using the same data backend. In fediworld all services exist bu they are not interconnected, they are not integrate well and most of them have separate interfaces.
- There are limits how much abuse the Fediverse can handle. Imagine 10% of Facebook users start doing what they do there, posting harrassment, porn, life threats, terrorist propaganda, whatever. It sounds simple that facebook filtering is evil, but it is easy until you are firmly asked by the police to do something, or else. The life under the radar is very different from the life under the spotlights.
- It is still an open question how fediverse could handle, say, 200 million active users. My guesses aren't quite optimistic. Think of celebs with many hundred thousands of followers and the tracffic they generate. Multiply by many.
- I believe FB was right to fight back the australians thinking that they can take money from a rich enough private company just because.
I have numbered them; I'm still not sure how it looks through AP…
Ok, by the numbers. 😀
1. Yes.
2. Well, your "village" will and someone may decide to share it with their friends, who would share it with theirs and so on.
3. Actually not, because of #1 & #2 -- my exposition to external news is limited and filtered through people who share content. So my contacts (on the mutual basis) are my content curators.
4. I would rather think that users are not interested in back-end. Front-end integration is what an average user experience. As for having it or not, there are platforms that are designed for it (#hubzilla and, while crudely, #friendica) and those that are not. And people choose according to their diversity of needs.
5. You sound vague here. In #fediverse, the abuse and inappropriate content is handled at the instance level. Rules are defined and enforced there. If an instance is perceived (by others) as a regular and intentional source of inappropriate content, it simply gets ostracized through blacklisting. Police-wise, it only concerns the instance, where the content is generated. No central choke point, no problem.
6. The question is open indeed, and interesting. I hope to live long enough to see it becoming a practical problem. As for now, do not think it will, for three reasons:
6.1. The majority of users will still be happy with centralized and AI-driven media. Simply because of carefully crafted habit/addiction.
6.2. I do not expect celebrities to be very much into fediverse, exactly because it is not suitable for their kind of PR.
6.3. Finally, my frame of reference assumes that we are experiencing the All-crisis and within next decade or two we will see Internet "Balkanized". Even having 200 million users will then mean that they will mostly communicate in local/regional clusters, with global communication ratio dropping.
This is, BTW, the reason why I am also working on various topics related to #NetCommons and low-power/low-speed networking for local communities.
999. I respect your perspective, even if I do not share it.
2. My problem is the huge gap between theory and practice. In theory the mass of people re-share stuff and it become "global", while in practice people only echo their opinion #bubbles which leads to more segmentation, not less. #Global streams would have the positive effect of multitude points of views.
3. Yes, the question is moot when there is no way to pull information, only to subscribe and wait for it to be "pushed" (while I know the pull/push analogy isn't true, but the results are like that). If there was a way to follow thousands of people it became a problem. (Happened to me on #Diaspora where some people were moderate in the beginning then they started to push dozens of posts daily. I had to unsubscribe, since there was no way to auto-prioritise them.)
4. That is, again, just the theory of possibility. There is no such #UI existing, and most of the "AP" services aren't pure AP, and they need specific UI features. I do not see any system trying to get them together. Users can't use a system planned to be started to be written in the non-specific future. The system is capable but it's not been done anywhere.
5. This does not work in reality and does not scale in practice. Admins have different thresholds of rejection and different speed of reaction, and instance admins don't have the granularity to handle this: they either accept high level of abuse or reject whole instances with huge amounts of users. Apart from that there are no useful admin tools or coordination around despite the network exists for quite long time now.
6.1 You are biased against #Facebook and this makes you ignore the possibility that people actually find the feature useful. Automatic filtering and prioritising is not a demon to be killed, indeed it's being used in open systems all the time. (My peertube would be filled to the rim with porn and fake news without it.) Trending_whatever is the same "AI", used even in mastodon.
6.2 This is a limited viewpoint. #Celebs need viewers and when there are enough people they start using a service. When paid services are expensive for them or they get restricted (like maximal hits or traffic amount) they may move over somewhere else.
What is true, however, that they actually earn money from the business structure of those services provided by these companies, and they are not incentivised to do it for free, unless there's some feasible micropayment connected to it. There exists no such thing as of now, and the "not so feasible" payment operators are closed source and scattered all over.
6.3 I respect your perspective, even if I do not share it. 😉
But indeed local/regional communities will became more and more important. It's just AP does not seem to be the fitting format for it.