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Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about, but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success. This style of
by uabstraction 9y ago
Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about, but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success.
This style of federation is the future of the web - and the only alternative to the corporate walled garden and advertising surveillance hell it has become. When the users have the power to vote with their feet, they become emancipated. When the administrators have the power to take decisive action in the interests of their communities without pleading their case to a greedy board of directors, our ability to freely conduct civil debate in good faith is protected.
I am looking forward to a handful of other projects taking up the same model, in the same spirit as Mastodon. It is truly one if the few remaining rays of sunshine available on the net.
- progval 9y agoMastodon itself isn't a new network, it leverages existing networks (OStatus and ActivityPub).
- OrganicMSG 9y agoI only just found out about these. What are they and how long have they been running?
- progval 9y agoOStatus is a collection of protocols, which was known for powering StatusNet (now known as GNU Social) since 2010. ActivityPub is a lot more recent, and is a "consolidated" protocol designed to replace OStatus. It's fairly recent, so Mastodon is one of its first implementations, and Gargron (the main dev of Mastodon) contributes to the W3C Working Group in charge of the spec since ActivityPub support was added to Mastodon.
- synchronise 9y agoActivityPub is only two years old though in its current form, and the previous ActivityPump protocol really wasn't used at all so it can be considered a new protocol in the grand scheme of things.