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The Wikimedia Foundation joins Mastodon and the Fediverse
- jheriko 3y ago[flagged]
- WolfeReader 3y agoThe same comment could be made for the majority of articles on HN. Maybe look up the words you don't know, and learn something new.
- riffic 3y agocool, it's an opportunity for you to discover something of interest then.
- Invictus0 3y ago[flagged]
- luuurker 3y agoAll you need is a domain and a server to host your own Mastodon instance.
- dragontamer 3y agoSome of the largest Mastodon instances are run on $100/month class servers (ex: mastodon.world). Its actually ridiculously cheap.
- riffic 3y agoyou don't even need to use the Mastodon software to be a participant in the wider Mastodon ecosystem. A WordPress site with a plugin can be part of the Fediverse.
- jfghi 3y agoIn addition to being the most useful website ever made.
- consumer451 3y agoAgreed. The librarians of Alexandria would be bereft in a tempest of envious tears. edit: Upon review it may not be clear that I am being 100% genuine. Wikipedia is one of humanity's greatest creations. I donate, and will continue to do so.
- Jonnax 3y agoIt's only on this site, ironically a forum run by a venture capitalist firm, that I've seen so much anti sentiment about Wikipedia's funding.
- wpietri 3y agoJust to put it in perspective: Even if every dime given of the $150m raised by the Wikimedia Foundation this year were wasted, something am sure is not the case, the amount of money set on fire by WeWork is more than 100x larger.
- scrollaway 3y agoYou can buy 1/293rd of Twitter with that $150M!
- LegitShady 3y agoWework never begged me for money though.
- wpietri 3y agoWikipedia only asks for money from its users. I promise that if you had used WeWork, they would also have asked you for money eventually. They're bad at business, but not that bad.
- marksomnian 3y agoSome background at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586
- Kye 3y agoI've heard the process inside organizations of getting approval to do a new social media thing can be involved. It's interesting to see one of those discussions out in public.
- ploum 3y agoImagine for a second what the discussions could be for the official European institutions to open their own instance? https://social.network.europa.eu/explore https://social.network.europa.eu/explore (and yes, it was created early 2022, before Musk takeover of Twitter)
- Kye 3y agoThey also have a PeerTube instance. https://tube.network.europa.eu/videos/overview https://tube.network.europa.eu/videos/overview
- aaronharnly 3y agoYes, I take some solace from the fact that most of the comments on the ticket are in the nature of: - “Wait, I don’t think Team X can do this, it needs to be approved by Team Y and then handed to Team Z”, followed by - “I thought our policy was not to do this?” - “No there’s no policy not to do this” - “Well maybe the policy was that we do do not this” - “Does Team Z even get notified about tickets here?” etc…
- neilv 3y agoHow I try to avoid most institutional knowledge and communication problems like that is with... a trusted wiki. They should ask around, see if anyone in the organization is familiar with wikis and could help them get started.
- riku_iki 3y agoI guess "joins" means created account..
- als0 3y ago...and their own server...
- jayknight 3y agoWell, they're running their own mastodon instance at wikimedia.social.
- WolfeReader 3y agoMore than that, in this case. They're hosting an entire instance.
- thewataccount 3y agoBeyond the fact that they created an entire instance - > I guess "joins" means created account.. I do think this statement would be accurate, you are "joining" if you create an account. At least I don't see an argument for how creating an official account wouldn't count as "joining" - although it's admittedly boring if that's all they did.
- Kye 3y agoThat's what I had in mind when writing a suitable title. They joined the Fediverse by making their own instance, then joined Mastodon by creating an account on that instance.
- riku_iki 3y ago> I do think this statement would be accurate, you are "joining" if you create an account. I personally was confused, and initially thought Wikimedia joined corresponding orgs, became codebase contributor, etc. But maybe that's me not familiar with his topic.
- libraryatnight 3y agoEven if that were the case, and others have pointed out it's not, what would your point be?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blisterpeanuts 3y agoThe Wikipedia Twitter page has a lot of followers, but engagement is very low, and most of the tweets are random topics. What advantages does a mastodon feed provide? In my opinion, if Wikipedia is seeking more social media engagement, they should focus on the big platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
- Kye 3y agoThe same reason the EU does, among many other organizations and companies. It's a backup and alternative, not too much work to run if it's only for people on the inside, and cross-posting is as simple as checking a box in a growing number of social media management tools.
- nunobrito 3y agoThat's the easy route. The reason why those platforms are avoided is mostly because of the Wikimedia/wikipedia commitment to promote open source and privacy respecting platforms. Arguably none of those are world-famous with a positive note for those attributes.
- WolfeReader 3y agoEach of those platforms you mentioned is corporate-controlled. The "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is probably more interested in engaging with open-source, non-centralized tech when possible.
- rsynnott 3y agoAs you say, they have a Twitter. Twitter could, at this point, vanish up its own arse at any moment. It was largely unusable for about three days recently. It remains pretty broken for non-logged-in people. Backup plans are hardly surprising. Frankly, anyone who uses Twitter for anything more than entertainment should be looking at backup plans at this stage.
- CSSer 3y agoIt's even really sad to see that there's a lot of embedded Twitter content around the web that has been either breaking or disappearing for one reason or another too.
- nunobrito 3y agoPlus points for running their own server. Now just missing to add Nostr to make sure those texts continue to be available one day in case the server goes down or gets censored in parts of the globe.
- Angostura 3y agoI’d be interested in seeing what they do with https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/ I don’t feel like it has gained a lot of traction. Perhaps it could be migrated to a Lemmy/Kbin/Their own ActivityPub implementation
- riffic 3y agowt.social isn't a Wikimedia Foundation site: > WT.social is owned and operated by WikiTribune Ltd (“we”, “us”) https://wt.social/terms-and-conditions https://wt.social/terms-and-conditions
- egor-zhgun 3y agoIt's interesting whatever they'll federate with Meta or not.
- honest635 3y ago[flagged]
- pornel 3y agoThis makes a lot of sense for organizations. They control the servers. They own the domain. This is how the Web is supposed to work.
- goodpoint 3y ago> This is how the Web is supposed to work. More like: this in how the Internet is supposed to work. ActivityPub is hardly "web" because it's not trying to attract traffic on a specific website.
- riffic 3y agoActivityPub is inherently web because it's a recommendation by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- stasm 3y ago> They own the domain. It seems like a wasted opportunity to set up a new domain (in this case: wikimedia.social) rather than use an existing one with a subdomain, e.g. social.wikimedia.org or social.wikimediafoundation.org. With a new domain I still have to do the work to verify whether the domain is indeed owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Kye 3y agoIt can accrue reputation the same way Wikipedia.org did while providing a spot to add other things like PeerTube without worrying about the security peculiarities that led to them choosing this route in the first place. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8920625 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8920625
- fluxem 3y agoWhy does Wikipedia need Twitter/Mastodon?
- nologic01 3y agoThere are potentially intriguing synergies down the line, beyond establishing a social presence. Fediverse platforms could integrate links to wikipedia content in a native way, somewhat similar to openstreetmap. The reverse is more speculative but potentially more groundbreaking. It would be a parallel "fedipedia" platform that would somehow distill, organize and preserve the various bits and pieces of useful information and knowledge that is being generated in social media platforms. One of the sadest outcomes of the adtech based walled garden era is how decades of human interaction and information exchange ends up in a sort of digital landfill. We need to think more boldly about the next web and the shape of the digital commons.
- robjan 3y ago99% of what's posted on social media belongs in landfill anyway. It doesn't all need to be archived a it's probably not worth the effort trying to find the signal from the noise.
- pygar 3y agoOn a semi related note, WordPress recently acquired an activitypub plugin that does exactly what it sounds like. [0] So as a corporation you don't really need a mastodon instance to broadcast your stuff. I think most organisations will go this route. (and i suspect threads hopes to piggyback of this for content). [0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
- Kye 3y agoI lost track of the conversation, but the developer is working on a full integration with WordPress so you can use it on a WordPress.com blog without the expensive plan that lets you use plugins.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoLet me know when not tech people/companies join, then it’ll look promising. Did more people adopt Twitter to hear from John Carmack or Kanye West?