24 Dec
2022
24 Dec
'22
1:05 p.m.
On fediverse/mastodon etc.
As a person who studiously avoids social media in most of it's forms
other than closed family groups and/or very special interest groups etc
My experience of the fediverse and mastodon is very limited (Other
clients and instances apply,,,,, apparently).
I think social media should be there though for those that want it.
I did look briefly into Mastodon on behalf of a Hackspace or two I was
involved in, but as with such groups achieving any form of consensus on
moving to something when the end of the social world was not nigh was a
bit of a struggle, so it flopped. (Cat herding)
Mastodon/fediverse all felt a bit nebulous or vapour like, and clarity
on what was where and what the support and keeping needed to be was a
bit of a struggle too. There is certainly a lot of fediverse evangelism
though.
Email can be complex, very complex, especially for larger org's but is
at least a well defined and documented target free from the sort of
evangelism that hides (even if accidentally) what is going on really.
Its established nature also makes it a touch boring but dependable.
Perhaps why I like email as a mailing list/discussion forum.
On the discussion around this.
It feels like the federative protocols etc are a useful and desirable
thing. But that the requirement for a unique id tied to a single
instance that can not be cloned and fed from multiple instances is an issue.
It feels like you are constrained to take a punt on a.n.other provider
or run your own instance. So perhaps a +1 for making it look distributed
but a -1 for distributed content resilience. Surely a postings content
should be as valuable as say who posted it or whether they followed or not.
Hemingway observed the only way to find out if you can trust someone is
to trust them and see how it turns out. So if you are not going to run
your own home instance, flip a coin and go with it. Any decision without
full knowledge (perfect strategy) is to some degree or other a coin flip.
If you are not running your own instance then you run pretty similar
risks of becoming the product at some random future date as you do
sticking with twitter. See previous note about not being an advocate to
something I would never use anyway, except under duress.
I don't think anyone is about to fall victim to supposing that twitter
users in any way endorse the views of anyone else on twitter, and those
that run it are no different than any other user.
There are other social media platforms though where this could be argued
were not the case, Truth Social springs to mind as a potential case in
point. Your view point may vary though.
Which brings you back to the option of stay as is and wait to see what
happens with twitter, or run your own instance of the fediverse as a
closed membership for bitfolk, but able to converse with all else on the
fediverse. At least this reduces your exposure to becoming someone elses
product and means you can backup your own content in a way that you can
recover from failures.
Should bitfolk run it's own instance and then fail I think we would all
have more pressing concerns than preserving the content or list of
followers.
Maybe I value the content more than a list of followers though. But that
is not really saying much.
There is the counter argument that loosing the content at regular
intervals is a very good thing. It reduces the weaponisation of quoting
past content during flame wars.
The decision then when looking into a unique home instance, is
intrinsically the same one as why run your own mailing list compared to
say using a google group instance etc.
Just some thoughts for what they are worth
Cheers
Andy Kirby
--
andy(a)kirbyand.co.uk
www.kirbyand.co.uk