Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/13/geert-lovink.html
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The source article is not hyperlinked, either
It’s like a zine!
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Finally a tool the alt-right can use to organize clan rallies.
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I’m a happy user of a few Mastodon servers for about a year now. Not sure what it’s doing here in relation to Facebook, as it’s much more an alternative to Twitter stylewise. I’ll be on the lookout for new users, and get my pineapples ready to hand out.
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I like MeWe. Mastadon was not good for my technologically challenged friends.
Mastodon? Might as well use email.
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Facebook obviously has some things a lot of people like. People ought to be thinking about what kind of design features would be good in an open alternative.
A few general thoughts:
Protocol, rather than specific organization:
Nobody who can get called up to be grilled by politicians.
Server-agnostic protocol: Makes censorship much more difficult. You should be able to see what people you follow post regardless of what server they choose to use, or what country that server is in.
Posts are hosted by the person posting them, on a server of their choice, and are there responsibility. Public posts are just like a blog, with comments done via the protocol, and privacy settings let you have lists of people who can see and comment on your various posts.
Good filtering: You control what you want to be notified of, in what order. Also, sophisticated blocking/blacklist capabilities.
Anything missing?
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more lately. I’m also a happy Mastodon user for a few months now and I agree it looks more like twitter then like Facebook, when you think about it though, what is the reason for this?
Just like on Facebook you can post things your friends/followers can see and you can look at the posts your friends make. Where is the difference?
Sure there is a character limit but at 500 that is not too restrictive, I don’t think that is what makes the difference. Intuitively this is what makes it feel more like twitter then like facebook to me though.
Facebook offers a lot more then just the posting, it offers event scheduling, it has a real-time messenger and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. This is really useful stuff but I don’t think that is what makes the difference between facebook and twitter.
What I think is the real difference between the two: On facebook you’re expected to use your real name and to connect mostly to people you know IRL. Twitter and Mastodon don’t have this, there you are mostly connected to internet friends or celebrities.
I think the difference lies mostly in the usage, less in the actual underlying code. Of course the code steers people to behave in a certain way, there aren’t really any limitations that force you to actually behave that way. I feel like you could use mastodon as a near perfect replacement for the “post writing/reading” part of facebook. You just won’t get the same experience because the audience will be different.
I do think we need to think about open-source alternatives. What I’m really going to miss from facebook, what I would really like a Open Source alternative to, is the events-feature and the “auto-updating contact list”-feature. I know all the roughly three hundred people in my friends list, but would never be able to remember them all let alone manage to keep up a database of their contacts. Facebook makes that really easy and more then once I’ve been able to get in contact with a old acquaintance that had just the right contacts to get me some valuable info or get me in touch with someone hard to reach.
I didn’t have any luck throwing Diaspora quick-install on a Pi. (Apt and Ruby were having package version fights.) It might have been minor problems, but a bigger time-investment to install step-by-step than I could make at the time.
I might give Mastodon a try. Someone did a recent how-to:
Mastodon and Pleroma on the Raspberry Pi 3 (Tip: If swap is going to be used, clone it onto a USB stick or actual drive rather than an SD card.)
It doesn’t have to be a Pi, but I like being able to throw stuff like this on its own fresh machine. For security if nothing else.
I hadn’t heard of Pleroma. It seems like it uses a JSONB class in PostgreSQL to run lighter, but now it federates with the rest.
Mastodon is, internally, based around the concept of “Statuses”. It uses ActivityPub to federate, but it has no internal concept of Activities, it just generates ‘fake’ Activities for message exchange.
Pleroma is ActivityPub even in its internal data structures. Activities are actually saved as JSON in the database, so the external and internal representations are the same.
Sounds cool, but time to dive in and find out what it means.
Free unlimited hosting, installation, configuration, backups, maintenance, security, system administration, spam protection, moderation and legal teams, scaling and DDOS protection.
If the comments are hosted on the commenter’s server rather than the poster’s server, then you’ll need some middleware caching layer that can pull in hundreds or thousands of bits and pieces of a thread from servers all over the world in different network conditions and build out the thread fast, in addition to dealing with missing or altered comments. (But on the plus side, you could get away with less on the moderation and legal side).
All of which needs to be as simple to set up and maintain as clicking on an icon and typing in a username and password. Oh, and needs to be free (gratis), of course.
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If you want a social media system that does not ever sell user info, is 100% ad free, and does not allow anonymous posting, try The WELL (www.well.com) which costs $15/month (or $150/year). You can find some boing boing founders there.
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