Audio for morning commutes:
Thanks to the open web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of their work, their audience, and their livelihood. No one knows this better than Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer. This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2025.
Still a bit more than halfway through it, listening on, it's safe to say I enjoy this one also because I agree with a lot of her points, but some things still leave me slightly unsettled. Maybe three issues for now: At first, "we are all content creators" with every piece of stuff we post anywhere on the 'net. Really? There's a reoccurring quote out there I end up with then and now which is more or less like "we tell stories to join the conversation", and in many ways I can relate with this much more. Never seen myself as a content creator, let alone publisher of anything valuable out there - just a mere nerd writing stuff on the interweb to maybe get into this or another conversation. Focussing on ones own role of a content creator, of trying to keep followers and an audience, despite all my agreeing with the idea of digital sovereignty in there, feels way too much like a one-way, like basically being focussed on my own stuff and ensuring people can read all of that easily everywhere - rather than considering the other way 'round and focussing on also making sure I can read stuff others wrote. Then, she somehow lost me with still posting to Twitter even while it sucks and she might be banned there sooner than later. No criticism on my end, I get her point but I just very much disagree with that perspective for a whole load of reasons, digital sovereignty included. And maybe finally, however, talking the other way 'round and practically handling this idea: Hoping for the (AP) Fediverse to somehow get more serious about that. Not just as in being able to somehow move accounts and contacts between instances of the same software but actually by being able to, like, move all my content and conversations and contacts seamlessly from one server to another without losing anything or causing a lot of friction for either myself or server administrators or my friends (refusing to call them readers or followers or contacts at this point). There's still room for improvements here, and I'll now shut up, stop ranting and be listening on. There's a lot of valuable stuff in there anyway.
https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/molly-white-sxsw
Audio for morning commuters:
[...]And, you know, Bluesky, they're, they're paving the way for a billion people on the network, like a Facebook size social network, and I think the fediverse is very focused on, you know, couple hundreds, 1000s of folks, but this, this space of a few million is, is, I think there's lots to explore there.[...]
I repeatedly have proven to be torn about ActivityPub vs ATProto, still considering the Fediverse to in its current state be better from a global governance and distribution of power point of view while ATProto, for multiple reasons, seems a better choice for actually building tools for larger communities, and this is what made me listen to this episode very cautiously. There are some things in here of which I wonder whether they should be red flags immediately. But still I very very much applaud the idea of putting people communities and their needs first, not technological ideas and requirements. That's something I am sometimes missing in the AP Fediverse that just all too often gets lost in its own internal frictions of implementations, interoperability issues and essentially tech-centric communities gating themselves against each other.
via https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/rudy-fraser
Interesting find, picked from one of my timelines
Cara.app is a relatively new social media platform: a kind of fusion between an Instagram timeline with a share button, and an Artstation portfolio layout on the user's profile. Almost every artist I know is opening a Cara.app profile right now and posting about it on every social media site. Some influencers, like industry veteran Bobby Chiu, even praise the platform and openly urge everyone to move to it.
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1032/a-critique-of-caraapp-the-no-ai-instagram-and-artstation-copycat-child
As cara.app hit my circles before, too, I found this worth reading. Specifically I agree with most of the things mentioned in (8). Though this focus on "having instances" of something and "decentralization" (...) in an ActivityPub understanding of things to me slowly seems to show all of its technical and conceptual drawbacks, introducing yet another platform that is essentially a walled garden with data stored on one system of one legal entity doesn't seem what one would expect in 2024.
Listening recommendation for the morning:
There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview
There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)