[kwlug-disc] The Fediverse is complicated

[Doug Moen]

Tumblr is adding ActivityPub support.

Jack Dorsey, founder of twitter, has created Bluesky Social as a successor to twitter. He's creating a new federation protocol <atproto.com> which will have advantages over ActivityPub, including account portability between instances (your ID doesn't hard code your instance), plus better content discovery and search. Right now it's in private beta. Maybe it will be good.

Mastodon could "win" if we end up with federation between the traditional mastodon network and larger commercial social media sites. Realistically, I think that a huge, profitable, top-tier social media site has no motivation to federate with the little guys. But the little guys have motivation to federate with each other, even when some of the the little guys are for-profit and ad-funded. Because in this context, interoperability with your competitors is not a zero sum game -- everybody gets a bigger slice of the pie. Tumblr is doing it, for example.

On Wed, Nov 23, 2022, at 1:57 PM, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 10:05:25AM -0500, Doug Moen wrote:
>> Mastodon is very nerdy and tribal. It is built by nerds, for nerds. The
>> complexity of joining and using Mastodon is part of the nerd appeal, but
>> for this reason I think it won't be a dominant mass market medium like
>> Twitter. Hive Social touts simplicity as its selling point, so I expect
>> it or something like it to capture the bulk of users in the long term.
>
> It kinda reminds me of the gold rush of video conferencing during the
> early days of the pandemic.  Quite a few open source projects had
> a great opportunity, from matrix to jitsi, but it was zoom that won
> in the end.
>
> I will be very impressed if Mastodon wins this time too.  Not impossible,
> but I will be impressed.
>
> - Chris
>
>
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