I keep wondering if lemmy itself could do a decent job of this, and that being native to a communities style platform is a good thing for a blogging platform on the fediverse.
I'm a big fan of tools made for purpose. Lemmy has some fantastic features and continues to improve, but it was never designed as a blogging platform. Even when I duplicate self text posts, it doesn't merge. In the timeline. I like Lemmy and want to see it succeed. Though that's not easy with the ML administration team going rogue or the overt centralization fostered on world, but neither of those are software issues.
A short while ago, Jimmy Secretan posted this response on everything that happened today:
"We have paused everything related to our Fediverse ingestion for now and we are removing everything ingested.
To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly."
Make the world a better place, bully your local tech bro today!
"Happy to remove any of your posts from Maven and cease ingestion from those servers going forward"
So, after the fact, individuals on Mastodon have to contact you personally and ask you to stop?
Is that your position?
Reminds me of Byron Miller (@Supernovae@universeodon.com) and his since-deleted "In four months of having full text seach [we haven't heard from anyone who has be directly harmed]..."
That last is a paraphrase because Supernovae has pretty much removed any mention of himself from the Fediverse, right down to deleting his involvement with Mastodon on Github, causing renchap to opine:
"I suspect that @Supernovae closed it because they do not want to be involved with Mastodon anymore."
"CEO Ken Stanley is an expert on open-ended discovery in both AI and human systems and ... (most recently leading the Open-Endedness Team at #OpenAI )."
At: "Is Maven part of a larger company?"
"No, Maven is an independent startup."
But
"Here are a few of our investors, who also commented on their reasons for supporting Maven:
-- Ev Williams, co-founder of #Twitter: “Maven lets you follow your deepest curiosities instead of the trends of the day.”
-- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: ”In Maven, there is a chance for AI to play a role in fixing much that is broken in our online discourse.”
Is it closed source? What are the community rules? Beside the obvious content being not allowed, does it censor political speech? Define what is considered hate speech, etc?
Maybe private DMs on Mastadon aren't as private as everyone thinks... that, or the open nature of Activity Pub is leaking them somehow?
Edit - From the article:
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
From what @delirious_owl mentioned below, it sounds like this shouldn't be very shocking at all.
?
Did you mean that the other way around?
And if you did... forgive me, I don't really use Mastodon. I was never much of a twitter fan. I don't really like how all of my likes are public (although I guess I have had to get used to that with Lemmy).
PM never implied any form of end to end encryption. It only ever meant people couldn't see it apart from site operators. I genuinely don't believe people thought it meant otherwise.
What @delirious_owl seemed to be implying is that direct messages on Mastodon should be considered "public" rather than "private".
I'm assuming that's along the same lines of how Lemmy users generally think that their upvotes/downvotes are private when in reality, if you know how to look for them, you can see them.
To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.
Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not milquetoast mastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?
I have concerns about the success of this platform. I am convinced what makes TikTok great isn't necessarily the algorithm (its good, no doubt) but the volume of content. There are so many users producing content that the amount of content you find enjoyable is always more than you could scroll through in a day.
A platform like this will be boring pretty fast when you scroll through the 100 new videos uploaded that day in an single hour, and you skip many of them. It's tough to generate enough content without enough users, and most of the content will likely just be aggregated from the other short-form sites. Of course that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a more privacy-friendly way to browse that content, which is a plus.
Also, not particularly a fan of more brain-rotting short form content. It's crazy how addictive it is and I'm wanting less, not more. But if I had to choose a "shorts" platform I'd sure like a federated, free one to be the one to succeed. But it's got a long way to go
I recon bots that are scraping other platforms content might be a way to get things going. What we need to be doing across all federated media is make it profitable for all the content creators to post to federated media as well as mainstream bs. Perhaps we need a standardised donations model I would recommend monero as the currency totally anonymous proven to be a relatively stable currency, and its easy for anyone to implement without all the bureaucratic bs.
Would be nice if it would pull short vids from PeerTube or other fedi platforms.
Never really used tiktok, partially because I don't get addicted to video like I do reading text. Video is too slow for my ADHD brain, and you can't choose your content beforehand.
But I'd still pick up this platform to help it get traction.
@notnotmike@yogthos the addictive characteristic of Tiktok isn't about a massive amount of quality, but quantity hidden among mid quality content. Just all grade-A content wouldn't set off the dopamine that getting dud, after dud, after dud, jackpot, dud again, dud, dud, dud, dud, maybe jackpot no, dud, dud, dud... is a clear path to dopamine
Much like a slot machine, the algorithm can intersperse jackpot and near jackpot amongst mostly dud content that makes it very addictive.
It depends. what purpose should this platform serve? What functions/features are you looking for? If all you're looking for is a light(er)-weight microblog fedi platform, maybe gotosocial.
Perhaps a schools network may benefit from an ActivityPub platform that not only allows social posting, but also includes features like cloud storage, and integrated groups (public, private, moderated) among other relevant features. I suggest taking a peek at streams.
Will check out streams. Is it lightweight? I wonder if gotosocial is a good choice for a multiple account instance, as AFAIK it is meant for single user ones
I previously ran a small streams instance on an older 32-bit laptop at home for a couple people. It ran fine. It can also run on shared web-hosting platforms. So I'd certainly say it's lightweight. Though, of course, it all depends on how much usage it will get (number of people, how active they are, how many contacts on other instances, etc). It can use either MySQL or PostgreSQL for db.
As for GoToSocial, you're right, looks like it's intended for no more than a small number of people.
So how many folks are you intending on hosting at this instance?
I have no idea how many people will end up using it. If we get lucky, we probably could even get to a number of 500 or so in some years... Hopefully...
I think once groups land in Pixelfed and the new app is released on the official app-stores, which will hopefully both happen this month, it is probably the best option if people are used to IG and Facebook.
It's written in php Laravel, so it should be somewhat more lightweight than Mastodon, but not massively so.
Mastodon also has a bit of an unjustified bad reputation for that... yes for very small instances it is a resource hog, but it scales reasonably well to larger number of users after that initial bump.
Semi-related but I was thinking about this earlier this year, and I was wondering about the feasibility of posting bus cancellations via the fediverse instead of via a bussing company’s website or email.
I think updates like that would do well on Mastodon, it's the most popular right now so it has a wider reach / support. Similar to what would have been posted to Twitter before
It definitely seems like a good idea for education services, weather services, local municipal services, and basically all important government institutions to make important announcements and updates via a service they can host themselves or is more distributed, instead of via Twitter where they have to obey the whims of people like Musk.
Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways. For example geology.wiki/article/Mountain may be completely different different from poetry.wiki/article/Mountain. There can be Ibis instances strictly focused on a particular topic with a high quality standard, and others covering many areas in layman’s terms.
I don't think something like this exists yet(?), so it'll be cool to see how this will be like.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia's attempt at impartiability over a "wikipedia" destined to just devolve into islands of "alternative facts"
You won't find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don't want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don't mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here... - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different "alternative (sets of) facts" at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
Everyone has implicit biases. It takes a huge amount of effort to work past them and write content that is considered unbiased. The latter is a group effort to achieve consensus, which even in the hard sciences is often difficult, but Wikipedia has had fantastic successes there - e.g. look at any controversial subject (someone mentioned BP, and how half the page was about their "controversies", which does not say that they are true, nor false, but acknowledges that they exist all the same - most people, with the exclusion of the BP execs I am sure - would consider that to be a state that is unbiased).
In fact, the OP brings up a major source of bias to begin with: if someone wants to federate a blogging website, why would we even talk about it - just DO IT!:-) However, the name "Wikipedia" was mentioned b/c it is popular. This introduces a bias whereby the rest of the discussion will be predicated upon the lines of what Wikipedia is vs. what it is not. Even though the OP made it clear that "Wikipedia" is not the goal of that project at all. Even dragging its name into it has thus introduced a source of bias, rather than allowing everyone here to discuss the merits of this proposal on its own, as if made from scratch rather than a Wikipedia-clone ("good" connotations?) or Wikipedia-wanna-be ("bad" ones?) or Wikipedia-whatever.
They baited you by saying "wikipedia", but then they switched to what looks like the wikia software. Notice how they are from lemmygrad? I hope you get my point.
I can get why that user might have a pro-communist bias themself due to being from a pro-communist instance, but the articles they linked seemed to be an accurate enough representation of how the far left and far right see Wikipedia.
Maybe not completely accurate to how it really is in all aspects, but I don't really care enough about Wikipedia's biases to fact check each contradictory claim in each article. I barely use it as a point of reference anymore anyways. (Though I've found it tends to have a liberal bias, like both the articles stated. I seem to remember that during the past election, some sections of the articles about Trump or featuring him in some way used very emotionally charged language)
But accurate or not, I still find it hilarious to look at the articles side by side. One claims the articles are written mainly by teenagers and the unemployed and supports communism, and the other claims they're written mostly by privileged White men who hate communism.
I was pointing out how no, they are not the same website. The name of "Wikipedia" was thus improper as it lacked precision, compared to something like "the wikia software, following the WikiMedia protocols" (or whatever it would be).
The content therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, that was asking about the Wikipedia website.
And btw, none of this bodes well for the project imho. The front-end work is clearly lacking, as OP even admitted, but more importantly all of this discussion lacks the type of "precision" that usually goes into a Wikipedia article. Obviously any person or AI can copy the existing Wikipedia website's content, but if all of this is a reflection of what would go into that copy, then it looks to me like it will quickly fall behind.
I would have been much more likely to have read a blog post to read about the relevant issues relating to communism if it did not try to ride on Wikipedia's coattails and just stood all on its own. But... as you can guess, I would be more of a fan of articles that are precise in the terminology used rather than ones that are all over the place.
And keep in mind that b/c what is being discussed is a "federated" model, ANYONE, who writes with ANY degree of precision, from the highest to the lowest level, will be federated around to everywhere. At which point it will become too difficult to find worthwhile content, as opposed to it being in one central location. The entire point of an encyclopedia is to be a one-stop place to look things up?
Alternative takes on communism would have, imho at least, been more widely distributed if they were written on a blog website and linked to from the actual Wikipedia pages. If the Wikipedia is too restrictive then... I understand why that could not happen, but nevertheless it is still going to be a major impediment. Which is all the more reason why imprecise language, scattered throughout the entire world, does not offer much of a viable alternative to the great Wikipedia? But... prove me wrong, I guess!? :-D
Are you of the opinion that people don't already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other
educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically.
I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP's wikipedia page was corporate speak. The 'controversies' section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
Are you sure that you meant that to respond to me - and not e.g. the xkcd comic one below?
Fwiw I totally agree with you, and I think that's a fantastic example that you brought forth - kudos b/c I think a specific example really does add something to this conversation. Just as it does so on many wikipedia pages. There are ways to phrase most things that can be agreed upon by most people, by wrapping it in the proper context.
At a guess then, they do not think that the language describing communism is extreme enough, and so want to bypass working together to achieve consensus and instead strike off and make their own internet. But I could be wrong. Then again, the burden of clearly explaining what they want to do is on them, so if so, I don't take all of that blame.:)
Ik I'm late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.
Instead of being limited to Wikipedia's contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete "controversies" section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.
Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each "faction" has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.
Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it's likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.
It would be useful for the "what does X group think about Y" aspect alone.
There's also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there's actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia's scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others' views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone's view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people "feel" informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we're working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an "encyclopedia"?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.
So the people that would put it to the best use don't absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.
There's also a Fediverse plugin for WordPress if you already have a host. Caveat: I have only seen it on Fediverse directories. No idea whether it's any good.
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