5 ms·

I feel like Mastodon has the right idea. Decentralized, open-source and easy to setup.

riffic 7y ago
Media organizations (I'm looking directly at you nytimes.com) should be standing up their own Mastodon instances for the benefit of their writers and staff. ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational institutions, et cetera) edit: or, more generically, any implementation of ActivityPub will do. or write your own! https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub
- privong 7y ago
  > ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational institutions, et cetera) I like this idea. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Universities often don't even run their own email anymore (at least for students; faculty often have a local Exchange setup for them). I would have thought that Universities would want to run their own services for file synchronization and sharing (i.e., internal Dropbox), audio/video conferencing (i.e., internal but interoperable Zoom/Skype, perhaps set up with SIP), etc. This would enable them to better manage IP and sensitive student information (SSN's, etc.), but they don't seem to have enough foresight to offer those kinds of services until the faculty are already using a freemium service. Then, _if_ they roll out something, the University version is clumsy and error-ridden. Additionally, the network effects of other social networks likely means it would be a tall order to convince the sufficiently senior administrator that they should dump twitter and go to their own Mastodon instance. 20 years ago this might've been a possibility. That was back when individual departments ran their own email/web/whatever servers. So individual departments within universities that had more agility and flexibility might've tried something like that. But now most universities seem to be clawing that functionality and freedom away from departments and putting it into a centralized IT department. So email stays because it's already embedded in the culture, but it makes it hard to add something new like a federated social network (or even video conferencing, it seems).
  - riffic 7y ago
    Single example counterpoint: MIT runs a mastodon instance: https://mastodon.mit.edu/about https://mastodon.mit.edu/about
    - privong 7y ago
      Pleasantly surprising to see. In all the universities I've experienced recently, the trend is strongly in the opposite direction. One of the admins' bio on the MIT instance states that they're at math and comp sci major at MIT, so I wonder how "official" it is? If I'm interpreting the MIT IT page correctly[0], *.mit.edu hostnames can possibly be registered by students? In which case it's not clear if it's run by MIT or by some students who happened to request that particular hostname. [0] http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=152584629 http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=15...
sp332 7y ago
I'd prefer something that supports longer posts. By default, Mastodon only lets you write short posts. Changing the default would mean messing with the UI or changing the way it uses the underlying protocol. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7973#issuecomment-409179444 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7973#issuecomme...
Funes- 7y ago
I know you could technically say that Mastodon is a decentralized network, but I like to say that it just distributes the kind of power associated with centralisation. What I mean is this: each server in Mastodon is governed by a small group of people that decides upon the kind of content they will either host or ban; they will determine which other servers can communicate with them, as well, so your vision of the "fediverse" won't be exhaustive or complete. They also own your unencrypted data. That's not the case with most XMPP servers, for instance--to name another federated communication protocol.
- dublinben 7y ago
  Mastodon entirely fits the definition of a decentralized network, not just "technically." You're just pointing out inherent properties of decentralized network topology. The next step would be a distributed topology, where every user of the network communicates directly with every other user. Pure p2p communication protocols have failed to catch on with users for a multitude of reasons.
  - Funes- 7y ago
    >Mastodon entirely fits the definition of a decentralized network, not just "technically." You're just pointing out inherent properties of decentralized network topology. No. I am pointing out the sense in which federated networks aren't decentralized by the definition of the word "decentralized" itself, and not the topologic category--which gets its definition from the meaning of the word as well, of course, but is an umbrella term. They are decentralized in how servers communicate between them; they are not in how each server is organized, even more so in the case of Mastodon, as I already said.

Media organizations (I'm looking directly at you nytimes.com) should be standing up their own Mastodon instances for the benefit of their writers and staff. ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational institutions, et cetera) edit: or, more generically, any implementation of ActivityPub will do. or write your own! https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

privong 7y ago
> ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational institutions, et cetera) I like this idea. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Universities often don't even run their own email anymore (at least for students; faculty often have a local Exchange setup for them). I would have thought that Universities would want to run their own services for file synchronization and sharing (i.e., internal Dropbox), audio/video conferencing (i.e., internal but interoperable Zoom/Skype, perhaps set up with SIP), etc. This would enable them to better manage IP and sensitive student information (SSN's, etc.), but they don't seem to have enough foresight to offer those kinds of services until the faculty are already using a freemium service. Then, _if_ they roll out something, the University version is clumsy and error-ridden. Additionally, the network effects of other social networks likely means it would be a tall order to convince the sufficiently senior administrator that they should dump twitter and go to their own Mastodon instance. 20 years ago this might've been a possibility. That was back when individual departments ran their own email/web/whatever servers. So individual departments within universities that had more agility and flexibility might've tried something like that. But now most universities seem to be clawing that functionality and freedom away from departments and putting it into a centralized IT department. So email stays because it's already embedded in the culture, but it makes it hard to add something new like a federated social network (or even video conferencing, it seems).
- riffic 7y ago
  Single example counterpoint: MIT runs a mastodon instance: https://mastodon.mit.edu/about https://mastodon.mit.edu/about
  - privong 7y ago
    Pleasantly surprising to see. In all the universities I've experienced recently, the trend is strongly in the opposite direction. One of the admins' bio on the MIT instance states that they're at math and comp sci major at MIT, so I wonder how "official" it is? If I'm interpreting the MIT IT page correctly[0], *.mit.edu hostnames can possibly be registered by students? In which case it's not clear if it's run by MIT or by some students who happened to request that particular hostname. [0] http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=152584629 http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=15...

sp332 7y ago

I'd prefer something that supports longer posts. By default, Mastodon only lets you write short posts. Changing the default would mean messing with the UI or changing the way it uses the underlying protocol. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7973#issuecomment-409179444 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7973#issuecomme...

Funes- 7y ago

I know you could technically say that Mastodon is a decentralized network, but I like to say that it just distributes the kind of power associated with centralisation. What I mean is this: each server in Mastodon is governed by a small group of people that decides upon the kind of content they will either host or ban; they will determine which other servers can communicate with them, as well, so your vision of the "fediverse" won't be exhaustive or complete. They also own your unencrypted data. That's not the case with most XMPP servers, for instance--to name another federated communication protocol.

dublinben 7y ago
Mastodon entirely fits the definition of a decentralized network, not just "technically." You're just pointing out inherent properties of decentralized network topology. The next step would be a distributed topology, where every user of the network communicates directly with every other user. Pure p2p communication protocols have failed to catch on with users for a multitude of reasons.
- Funes- 7y ago
  >Mastodon entirely fits the definition of a decentralized network, not just "technically." You're just pointing out inherent properties of decentralized network topology. No. I am pointing out the sense in which federated networks aren't decentralized by the definition of the word "decentralized" itself, and not the topologic category--which gets its definition from the meaning of the word as well, of course, but is an umbrella term. They are decentralized in how servers communicate between them; they are not in how each server is organized, even more so in the case of Mastodon, as I already said.