Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #moveslowlyandbuildbridges, aggregated by home.social.
When I interviewed him, Rochko reiterated this argument. “While I’m not a fan of Meta, and I don’t think anybody should be using a Meta platform..., I think it’s a step in the right direction for them to be going into interoperability,” he told me....
Porvir otimista is not just simply a sunny disposition. It also addresses a shortcoming of degrowth thinking. As its name implies, “degrowth” is anti-growth. While entirely necessary in times of climate disaster, even degrowth thinkers admit that the idea does not get a lot of traction, particularly in the world of politics....
There is a danger when something is easy, however. We can forget about struggles to make these “easy” tools. The history of harassment of people on Playvicious can be forgotten as we go about engaging on social media....
Declaring early on that racists weren’t welcome – even racists who were good at coding – drew Mastodon to the attention of queer and trans developers in particular. As I discussed in chapter one, these queer, trans, disabled, and furry folks pushed Rochko and Mastodon to be better than Twitter....
The lack of corporate social media involvement in the SocialWG’s work was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the group was free to conceptualize social media in any way they saw fit without having to address the particular concerns of Facebook or Twitter. As SocialWG member Bengo told me, “I’m glad people from those orgs didn’t get involved....
Guy was curious about the groups that make W3C standards....
Today, the argument for defederation to protect the covenantal fediverse is strong – so strong, in fact, that Mastodon’s developers built the capability to easily block entire swathes of the fediverse into the code. This wasn’t always the case....
Degrowing federated social media will require cutting through clouds and imagining futures past the current way of thinking, finding alternatives to the dominant, corporate social media approach....
GNU social, as I have argued elsewhere, is an example of “critical reverse engineering,” ...
There were debates about the wisdom of implementing such a feature....
These patterns have happened on Mastodon and the fediverse for years. In 2022, during the height of the Elon Musk-provoked migration from Twitter to Mastodon, philosopher of technology Johnathan Flowers observed this pattern and summed it up: “Mastodon is a very white space. It is not unlike other tech spaces where whiteness is predominant....
In 2015, there was a tremendous amount of anger over Facebook’s emotional contagion study. Facebook researchers partnered with academics at Cornell and the University of California—San Francisco to study how emotion-laden phrases might affect the emotions of Facebook users....
But at least for now, every Sunday, I have a way to escape my worries: watching terrible monster movies with my friends on the fediverse....
But Playvicious is no longer online. In 2020, its administrator, Ro, shut it down. His reason: racist harassment....
All the while, Twitter users continued to discuss what to do about Musk’s autocratic regime, and would-be Mastodon members watched their conversations for suggestions about which instance to sign up on. One of my interviewees, an artist named Nina, found Mastodon.art this way, reading deep into Twitter threads on what to do about Musk....
Overall, Musk’s regime has disturbed many former Twitter users over the course of its first year. Twitter/X has fired many employees, thus leaving the site’s security and content moderation vulnerable. X now responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji....
In the absence of shared blocklists during that seven year period, Mastodon and fediverse admins have relied on organizing via hashtags. The most important of these is fediblock. One of its creators is Marcia X of Playvicious.social. “I started [fediblock] when I was still on PV,” she told me....
Before I go further, I need to say a bit more about Ro. He’s not only willing to tackle any digital technology and master it, he’s also dedicated to working on his social interactions to become a better, more thoughtful and kind human being. In our interviews, he talked to me about the importance of seeing a therapist and exercising....
At that time, there was growing discontent with Twitter. Since 2014, Twitter had been reeling due to #Gamergate, an online campaign against feminists, ostensibly to defend the honor of video gamers....
Finally, I stored the interview data and notes on a self-hosted Nextcloud server, and I transcribed interviews myself....
In April of 2023, not long after Elon Musk bought Twitter, I asked ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou how he was feeling. I assumed he’d be feeling triumphant. After all, he had been working on federated social media for 15 years....
However, Rowbottom also hedges her bets by posting to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok....
While the fediverse has grown in part through the radical solution of code of conduct-driven covenantal federalism, it also has had moments where instances have been radically isolated. Isolating an instance can be controversial, and until recently, it required a concerted campaign by many admins....
One November morning in 2022, Del woke up in her home in South Africa and saw an astonishing number: 2,000....
Those who championed federation were often reminded of its optional nature. Going through the meeting minutes, I’ve observed multiple moments where members of the SocialWG said, “federation is optional. Federation might not happen” – especially as the group struggled to reconcile its different factions....
As should be clear, this genre of science fiction is “an uprising of hope against the daily despair that these times bring.” It’s unabashedly about porvir otimista – an optimistic future where inventors and activists work together to create independent, sustainable communities that aren’t bent to the will of global capitalism....
I myself might become nostalgic for Mastodon and the covenantal fediverse’s heyday – for a time when people around the world established our own social media as a viable challenge to corporate social media, banding together with shared ethical values....
Overall, this is a work of Internet studies. Scholars in Internet studies now analyze technical details, such as algorithms, conduct “walkthroughs” of the interfaces of applications, and examine digital infrastructures. However, they also place these things in relation to the compelling and often wild range of practices users coax out of digital media....