The Web has always been social. It's a network people use and communicate with. When I created my first website in the 90s, it had visitors. I didn't know who they were, except for those who sent me email. There has been forums, BBSs, IRC, since the 1980s.
So from the social perspective it does not really matter where your "instance" is, because it's already a part of a huge network. Your "instance" can be a website, a social media platform, or anything of a sort. It's a presence online.
The ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon, WordPress, Pixelfed and many other platforms online use, actually has endpoints called "inbox" and "outbox". The logic is very similar to email, but more real time.
So for those who criticize Mastodon or Fediverse as "difficult" or something that has no "reach" I want to say that any form of communication online (be it a normal website or Mastodon or whatever) has all the reach potential in the world. You just need to make yourself heard. We're too used to corporate platforms, money making machines and algorithms to do the work for us. It distorts the whole picture.
Centralized platforms have no future, but the social web is eternal.
[#]SocialWeb #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Internet #SocialMedia
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@rolle I think the key phrase in that post is "used to having the work done for us". Average non-techie User(tm) doesn't really think of the web this way, social medias are self-contained monoliths where you drop your stuff and people see it. The Fediverse, in contrast, LOOKS like this bunch of microcommunities that somehow sometimes seem to communicate with each other. People see an instance with, say, 500 users and just shrug and move on because it's not worth it, their friends can't possibly be part of those 500 people right?
And then along comes BlueSky or Threads or what have you which sounds exactly like what they're used to and the road of least resistance is now not even a competition.
You're not wrong, it isn't all that hard to figure out if people give it a bit of thought, maybe 20 minutes of reading... but people don't. And people's contacts don't. Hard to shake decades of indoctrination Iguess :)
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@rolle Thank you for this excellent sum up. 👏
Quite honestly, this activity around these protocols, federation, decentralization, for me, is making the Internet exciting again. Taking back the Web.
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@rolle Thanks I needed that! 👏
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@rolle The other day I was thinking about how many people use the internet vs how many of those people know what terms like “datacenter” mean? I feel like ppl are always taught to use the internet as “your device can talk to all these other ones anywhere!” But then we skip over what happens in between to allow that. So the idea of #decentralization trips ppl up because it brings to the foreground something they’ve never been required to think about: HOW their device was able to connect to the things online in the first place.
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@rolle My WordPress needs updating.
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@rolle I generally agree with what you write above. I started my personal site (although the url has changed a couple of times), I have traced back my sites to at least 1998.
But it's sad the world wide web is not only limited of the tools to reach the internet, it is also limited, forvidden, by governments. Even non-commercial sites are blocked for many persons around the world. That is a tragic development I did not think of when I went online. Also the social web is sadly limited.
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@rolle And the practical network-effect reason that it has little reach is that not enough people are on it yet - they're on other siloed platforms.
That's the magic of the Fediverse: you can federate with everyone and not give control to a monopolistic force... you can have choice in your platform (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Misskey, Sharkey, Pleroma, Akkoma, GoToSocial, WriteFreely, WordPress, Micro.blog, ...) without excluding friends, retaining this choice for the future!
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@rolle I must admit that the lossiness of comments is a bit irritating and is a problem that likely needs a solution, but wouldn't say that lossy federation in general is. It gives users content based on their interests in an organic, user-controllable way, and allows a truly federated platform that is actually practical as well, with relatively low resource requirements (think practicality, environment).
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@rolle Wow - I just infodumped a lot!
(I've been reading up on it. Maybe too much.)
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@WebCoder49 What do you mean by "lossiness of comments"? In where and how?
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@rolle That was quite unclear of me. I meant the loss of replies in Mastodon between different instances: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/22608#discussioncomment-4775167
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@WebCoder49 Ah yes. It will improve. In the meantime we can use FediFetcher (admins), Substitoot (browser extension) or remote fetch in apps like Mona.
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@rolle If it was unclear, I totally agree with you here that the Fediverse does not have little "reach" by necessity. Accounts can definitely become popular (by natural social processes - you can't pay for it).
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