TL;DR: The web is entering a new era, in which communities can move independently through the digital landscape. Parallels with the book “Dawn of Everything” by Graeber and Wengrow sugg…
Running your own fediverse instance is really not that hard or expensive. Definitely easier than for example running a community garden or similar shared social infrastructure.
ATproto is the wrong model in so far as it further atomizes individuals and ultimatly forces them to depend on large centralized infrastructure.
Think of it like a community library vs. ordering books from Amazon. Yes Amazon gives you more individual choice and you don’t have to be invested into them and can easily switch to another large book store, but in the end your are caught in their commercial extractive logic.
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
Of course one could start a community on a lemmy instance too, and I’m happy lemmy is here for as a community tool. Should local only and private communities land I think it’ll be quite a useful tool for running online community spaces with the possibility of federating when/if desired.
All that being said, I’m not sure the flexibility and richness of the underlying technology is there yet to serve as a default foundation across the web for organic community growth.
While I understand your ATProto critique, I personally feel giving individual users the power to move around the protocol and its spaces opens up possibilities for organic community growth not possible on the fediverse provided spaces can be created by users and devs using the system. The signal’s I’ve seen so far indicate that they could be heading in that direction. IMO, the biggest problem ATProto may have from a community fostering perspective is it seems to have even less of a privacy concern than the fediverse.
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.
The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
Mastodon and mastodon.social are huge on the fediverse. No one really runs interesting forks of mastodon. And the whole large flagship instance is a pretty consistent phenomenon (eg lemmy.world).
Perhaps we’ve just gotta learn how to do this better. But the hazard there is that it isn’t clear what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I and I think many are sceptical that the whole instance thing is worth it all the time.
Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.
I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D
My personal opinion is that
We need to get more people in the Fediverse
We need to educate people in the Fediverse towards more digital agency
If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.
Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.
Running your own fediverse instance is really not that hard or expensive. Definitely easier than for example running a community garden or similar shared social infrastructure.
ATproto is the wrong model in so far as it further atomizes individuals and ultimatly forces them to depend on large centralized infrastructure.
Think of it like a community library vs. ordering books from Amazon. Yes Amazon gives you more individual choice and you don’t have to be invested into them and can easily switch to another large book store, but in the end your are caught in their commercial extractive logic.
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
Of course one could start a community on a lemmy instance too, and I’m happy lemmy is here for as a community tool. Should local only and private communities land I think it’ll be quite a useful tool for running online community spaces with the possibility of federating when/if desired.
All that being said, I’m not sure the flexibility and richness of the underlying technology is there yet to serve as a default foundation across the web for organic community growth.
While I understand your ATProto critique, I personally feel giving individual users the power to move around the protocol and its spaces opens up possibilities for organic community growth not possible on the fediverse provided spaces can be created by users and devs using the system. The signal’s I’ve seen so far indicate that they could be heading in that direction. IMO, the biggest problem ATProto may have from a community fostering perspective is it seems to have even less of a privacy concern than the fediverse.
But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.
The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
Mastodon and mastodon.social are huge on the fediverse. No one really runs interesting forks of mastodon. And the whole large flagship instance is a pretty consistent phenomenon (eg lemmy.world).
Perhaps we’ve just gotta learn how to do this better. But the hazard there is that it isn’t clear what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I and I think many are sceptical that the whole instance thing is worth it all the time.
Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.
I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.
I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D
My personal opinion is that
If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.
Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.