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Federation is cool. I have the feeling it needs its "Ubuntu Moment". Mastodon and Plume are interesting technology wise. But it seems there are no instances wi

• slipstream- 8y ago
  there are a few alternate web user interfaces that work with the Mastodon client API (which Pleroma also implements); halcyon and pinafore being two of them. To be more specific, Halcyon's UI is Twitter-clone.
  • TekMol 8y ago
    Urls? Tried to google these, but did not find anything.
    • slipstream- 8y ago
      https://halcyon.toromino.de/ https://halcyon.toromino.de/ https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/
      • TekMol 8y ago
        Halcyon: That is supposed to be a Twitter clone? First page already looks way more complex and flimsy then Twitter. Then I click on 'or create an account' and I am redirected to mastodon.social. WTF? Pinafore: I don't understand what I am supposed to do with it.
        • WorldMaker 8y ago
          Brutaldon is even more pared down skin (and offers an even more Web 1.0 brutalism beyond that): https://brutaldon.online/ https://brutaldon.online/ Most of the skins redirect to mastodon.social on the Create Account link because they don't host the accounts themselves, they just offer views for whatever account(s) you do have.
          • TekMol 8y ago
            Sorry, but that is not brutalism. That is just a badly designed page. Small grey font is pretty much the opposite of brutalism. So are small pastel colored buttons with rounded corners. It looks like a bootstrap theme but with all spacings done wrong.
            • WorldMaker 8y ago
              Brutalism is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and any talk of Brutalism on the web is an exercise in analogy given that the core mantra of architectural Brutalism was to stay "true to the materials" and for pixels it's hard to be "false" with them. The variation of the theme that just uses HTML2/3-esque TABLEs and table borders is definitely more directly evocative of that spirit, stripping away CSS for just the brutal truth of classic HTML design. I tried to find a direct link to that version of Brutaldon's theme, but am not sure where to find one, and searching one's Mastodon feeds from weeks seems to be tougher than I expected.
        • msaharia 8y ago
          My exact reaction. I have tried using Mastodon, but that thing is designed by engineers with no common design sense. Just sticking to browser defaults would be a huge improvement. It looks like something I should use to impress 15 year olds with.
• jjrh 8y ago
  > Federation is cool. I have the feeling it needs its "Ubuntu Moment". When federation is done 'right' you don't even notice it. Email for instance. In my opinion social networks being in silos is as silly as something like email being in a silo. Really what we need is user buy in and that probably means figuring out how to interoperate with the various social networks like facebook and twitter. It would be cool if the big social networks started thinking about breaking out of their silos and instead trying to be the gmail of federated social networks.
  • TekMol 8y ago
    The big ones have no reason to break out of their silos. FB is worth $500B. They want to build walls around that. Walls as high as possible. It's a chance for small players. If there is a future where federated social takes over the silos, then betting on it now would be a once in a lifetime opportunity.
    • jjrh 8y ago
      You're not wrong, but if history is any indicator: tech companies need to innovate or die. I'm not convinced facebook is here to stay.
  • mgummelt 8y ago
    What's a "silo". My emails exist on gmail's servers. Is that not a silo?
    • eat_veggies 8y ago
      They exist on gmail's servers, but you can send and receive emails from protonmail, yahoo, or self-hosted email addresses.
      • e12e 8y ago
        And receive email relayed via smtp servers - others don't have to connect directly to gmail/Google to send you mail. (modulus aggressive spam filters).
• andolanra 8y ago
  Several of these things are being actively worked on. For example, PixelFed is an Instagram clone built on top of ActivityPub that currently looks like this https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/100229934638171208 https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/100229934638171208 (screenshot, not a link to a live instance) and Aardwolf is an in-development federated social network that's intended to have a Facebook-style interface https://github.com/Aardwolf-Social/aardwolf https://github.com/Aardwolf-Social/aardwolf They're not there yet, but people recognize their necessity and they are in the works!
  • TekMol 8y ago
    Super interesting. I am eager to try those out.
• mgummelt 8y ago
  > I wonder what would happen if ActivityPub was used to build Twitter/Instagram/FB alternatives with less aggressive advertising. But with the same user friendly interfaces. What path would lead to less advertising? Email is federated, but is still dominated by a few vendors who rely on advertising.
  • TekMol 8y ago
    That is a very interesting question. My assumptions are: 1: Running a ActivityPub server is much much cheaper then building a hyper growth company like Facebook. So less revenue is needed. I would expect that an AP server running on a cheap VM for less then $100/month can handle many millions of monthly users. I know admins of other systems, serving a million monthly users with a $10/month VM. 2: Facebooks valuation per user is insanely high. The company is valued at over $200 per monthly user. The average site owner would be happy with just 1% of that. I know people who built communities with a million monthly users. And they are not worth millions. Let alone hundreds of millions. 3: I think there is a better way of advertising then the aggressive approach we see on FB, Twitter etc. It might not work for super big companies. But I have the feeling that a site owner who caters to say 10 million users could get a few sponsorships and make 5 figures monthly with very very lean ads.
• ArtikBanana 8y ago
  You might like Pleroma then: https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social Instance example: https://pleroma.site https://pleroma.site One of the nice things about Pleroma is that you can "plug in" different interfaces to it. Each instance already comes with the option of both the Pleroma frontend and the Mastodon one. One of the devs is also working on a Facebook-like frontend.
  • TekMol 8y ago
    Just tried it. Looks much better then mastodon.social Experience is a bit strange. When I toot something, it does not appear in the timeline nor does my statuses count go up. Both only happen when I reload the page.
    • ArtikBanana 8y ago
      You'll see a button appears on the top right corner of the timeline when you have new messages, with the number of new messages. You can press that to load them. Alternatively, you can go to the settings on the top right corner and change it so that it automatically loads new messages when you're scrolled to the top. The instance has a "get started" link on the left that explains some stuff. And you can ask the instance admin kaniini for questions (who is also a Pleroma dev).
• oelmekki 8y ago
  > Federation is cool. I don't want to undermine the hard work of other people, but for the sake of completeness, know that federation has its critics on the decentralization scene. I discovered that around the ssb community a couple weeks ago, the argument being that in federation model, people always end up choosing the same node, be it because it has more users (like diasp.org for diaspora) or nicer interface (like gmail for smtp), and it just ends up in centralization again. Here is an article discussing it : https://secushare.org/federation https://secushare.org/federation The alternative is to forget about the client/server model entirely, and have distributed database hosted by clients and synchronized through p2p. Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb) is an attempt at that, through the gossip protocol ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol ). The idea being that clients can synchronize with each other directly, even without the internet, using only local network, and transport encrypted data meant for other people (so the data propagates). From what I understand so far, ssb makes this possible by implementing a database inspired by blockchains : each user has its own append-only database on which you can add an encrypted entry only by signing them with a private key, that people can verify and decrypt using your public key (and their secret key, if it was a private message meant for them). The networking part still use federated-like nodes (actually regular clients, but running on hosts without firewall) to workaround the fact that most people are behind firewalled NAT and can't listen to ports. The important part here is that one of those nodes (called "pub") can disappear, it won't affect you, even if you first accessed the network using it : your data is on your machine, the pub only help finding peers and can be replaced at any moment (you quickly discover other pubs after the first one), and even is not needed if your peers are on the same local network than you (perfect tool for a family private social network, btw). Now, while I find ssb cool and that's the project I want to work on, I find secushare article I mentioned above unnecessarily harsh and definitive. A problem has been spotted on in the federation model, it doesn't mean it can't find any solution. For example, a protocol based on federation can forcibly limit the number of users per node (although, the service could just spawn several nodes), or an other incentive for distribution could be created. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of smart people working on this.
  • eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    People should have learned the lesson from federated email VS Gmail: federation works only when people don't have a compelling reason to stick to one service provider.