Maybe I missed it but I didn’t see much about home brewing a social network. App.net was an amazing structure for a social network. It went way beyond micro blogging although that’s what most people associated it with. When it went offline a lot of it was open sourced. A group of app.net fans now hang out at
It is a solid micro blogging service that has an API developers can use to build different apps for. I use one for posting and use a web app for a weekly meetup to request and watch videos together.
Using tools like this can be used for anyone to make a nice “Homebrew” social media platform.
mastodon reminds me more of the hobby shell boxes of the 90s. where all the ex-bbs-sysops would offer free mail, webhosting and shell accounts to their friends.
that's cool, but it's not the same as like being a teenager at the dawn of the internet boom where you and a bunch of your irl friends all have shell boxes and you judge people based on their choice of os, configuration thereof and what cool or uncool stuff they're hosting.
also hosting is cheap and easy now and participating in internet mail seems like a terrible headache.
it looks at the referer field in the http request to see where you came from, and for the existence of a scarlet cookie. if it's a place they don't like, it drops a scarlet cookie in your browser that says they don't like you and then redirects. if the cookie exists, it redirects regardless.
Nice article, but the reason for the oscillation between de-centralized and centralized, public domain and corporation-owned systems is not because of innovation.
It's because private businesses at first invest and try to grow the user base, for the ultimate goal of consolidating the market into a pseudo-monopoly. Once that happens, then monetization starts in full steam, and the corporations try to extract as much revenue out of this situation as possible.
This is obviously painful for the users, because they are now forced to carry the weight of the profits extracted off of the business. The value provided by the service is counterbalanced very precisely by the revenue extracted from the user. The hypothetical pain of moving to an alternative platform is also taken into account. Using the system becomes zero-value or even net negative for the user in the median case.
The users start to evaporate at this point for obvious reasons. They will move to an alternative de-centralized, free and public domain utility, or lacking that, to some small scale start-up provided utility which is still in an investment phase, which provides roughly, if not perfectly for the same need.
The cycle continues until the need is provided by non-commercial and de-centralized systems, and no business sees a viable chance of gaining an exploitative pseudo-monopoly on it.
> Decentralized ones, by contrast, can be a mess but they democratize innovation
well that's an interesting take. granting that the fediverse is decentralized, is it democratic?
my instinct would be to say "no: i don't need to hold a referendum and get a majority vote in favor before bridging my site to the network: i just do it and each other site either federates with me or doesn't." that sounds more anarchic than democratic.
on the other hand, the vast majority of the network has all settled on ActivityPub as a protocol. one could say that users and developers "voted with their feet (or their actions)", coalescing around that protocol and now it's effectively legislated (in the sense that a democracy would legislate English to be the official language, or for Pacific Time to be the regional timezone).
but AP could still be displaced/improved without any appeal to authority. Misskey added all sorts of wacky protocol extensions and it didn't need to ask permission from anyone else on the network: whatever useful features it adds sort of disperse outward. i wouldn't describe that as "democratic". if someone really wanted to use a political metaphor, i guess you could say that decentralized networks federalize innovation? still feels like the wrong class of metaphor though.
Would that not be considered a meritocracy, then? That is: maybe not the best approach, but the best approach that most agrred to go along with...? As much of a fan as i am of the fediverse and especially ActivityPub, i'm sure there could have been other, better protocosl....but at the time, it was the best that most agreed to go along with. I think that's called meritocractic, no? Or, maybe there's a better word?
There definitely could be better protocols. I've seen plenty of complaints about AP from various corners regarding the protocol itself. But it's better than the OStatus protocol it supplanted, and one day someone will come around with something better that various fediverse instances will adopt.
Democracy doesn't automatically mean liberal democracy. Fundamentally anything that returns power from an "aristocracy" to the common people is democratisation.
thanks for that perspective. i’ve been interpreting the “democratize X” phrase in a fairly literal sense. it hadn’t occurred to me to think of it as an axis with “aristocracy” (or bureaucracy, etc) at one point and “democracy” at some point to the left and the author simply means “we’re moving things leftward along this axis”.
Unfortunately the Mastodon instance that Oxide decided on is flooded with leftist activists and SJW types. One of the rules is a leftist shibboleth, "no colonialism".
That rule makes no sense in the context of a social media site.
An interesting choice seemingly in opposition to decentralization.