A new project launching today aims to capitalize on the momentum seen within the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which describes interconnected social networking services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing policymakers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.
“The fact that Threads has joined the space has made it really interesting for other companies,” Prodromou says. “Threads is bringing a really big audience, as well as big names — like @POTUS is on the fediverse … So that makes this process a lot more interesting for other organizations — both for publishers who want to reach those audiences, as well as for existing social networks who want to have those influencers and celebrities available to their users.”
So this is just about piggy-backing on Threads, not any real support for the principles of open software.
Good. The death of corporate social media can’t come soon enough.
I would like to see more investment in informative media. Social media has been one of the best sources to get information about local events, news, and alerts.
Speaking from an American’s perspective, I would like to see federated networks organized similarly to the United States. There should be one main federal instance, then a sub instance for states, eventually down to micro instances for neighborhoods or zip codes.
My complaint about “corporate social media” has been its need to make money from advertising driven by engagement. This means I miss tons of posted information by family, friends, businesses, bands, restaurants, record shops, farmers markets, city council members, police departments, reporters, etc.
I still want to connect with these users but getting them on board with the fediverse is an uphill battle if they’re only in it for the memes. Creating a platform that makes some tangible sense to people, I think, would drive more adoption. If you want to connect with your city, join cityname.state.US.verse. This wouldn’t exclude the creation of other networks like I dunno… nestle.corp.verse or tiktok.social.verse.
Just Like Mozilla and Google. 🤔
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Can you extinguish a protocol nobody owns?
Google pulled it off with GChat. All told, those of us who run our own XMPP servers aren’t even a rounding error when compared to everybody who uses Google Chat, FB Chat, Slack…
Interoperate with it. Add proprietary extensions faster than other implementations can keep up with (at least two orders of mag). Render software that isn’t yours unusable by suddenly cutting over to something else internally; let connection attempts continue for a while to frustrate users while simultaneously releasing your own. Then cut away all points where legacy connection attempts could be done.
