Well I certainly didn't have "Tumblr becomes culturally relevant in 2023 after adding federated content cross-compatibility with foss platforms" on my bingo card, but here we are I guess.
That's an interesting idea. Build a smart contract which can issue bingo cards and keep track of it publicly.
It seems the like vanity and excitement of the early internet is dying out and more normal social circles are being established.
I have circle of acquaintances on Twitter and Facebook which are not strangers, but I don't feel like updating directly.
Sharing a wordle result with them and having an occasional exchange is akin to meeting them while walking on the street and exchanging a few words.
The chats with my family and friend groups are at a different level of communication.
I learned it by watching you!
I think there is a growing amount of people who want to get out of the social media Skinner box, and there are also growing amounts of people who believe in new and alternative technology like this.
Sure, these platforms might not appeal to someone who uses Facebook like you would a slot machine, but I know plenty of non-tech people who use things like Linux, Firefox, Android/LineageOS/GrapheneOS, etc for moral and ideologically appealing reasons.
Unless we can push ethical (and FOSS) software over the point of critical mass, it's a never-ending losing battle. And even if we get there, the battle for daily attention is much fiercer than, say, Blender or Godot permanently winning mindshare among professionals. Trends are fickle and even just by not being the next best thing, we can lose the masses to the next best Skinner box.
I have to admit I don't fully get this. What part of Twitter is mismanaged?
If management thinks that 7000+ aren't needed to make single page web-app, is reducing the work-force mismanagement? I'd consider it a healthy step towards creating an actually profitable company. I mean, who benefits from the company going bankrupt? Certainly not the employees.
Is allowing more people get to exercise freedom of speech mismanagement? Or that the new management polls the actual twitter user-base instead of listening to a select few people, seemingly only on one side of the political spectrum?
Also, since the new ownership came in place, supposedly 90%+ of sexual-abuse material and tags has been cleaned out and banned, something which was allowed to go on for years during old twitter management. That's a good change, right?
Is all this just about some people you don't like being un-banned? If so, you can still individually ignore them or block them, and just move on with your life, right?
I really, honestly don't get what all this hysteria is about.
Why participate in the hysteria if doesn't mean anything to you?
So I'm asking one guy who clearly has an opinion on it. Is that wrong?
Musk founded SpaceX and bought Tesla when it had like 6 employees, so everyone working in those two companies is used to his management style.
Twitter was a huge and sort-of stagnant company, they must feel as if they were hit by a hurricane, and this filters out to all sorts of media including HN.
Also, Twitter is all about publicity. We don't see what's happening within SpaceX, but we all watch whatever happens within Twitter in real time.
Thinking other people are not tapped in is a clear sign that you live in a bubble.
Then make certain that hostile, powerfull actors can not capture those platforms and use them for surveilance, while the very same platform can not be used to coordinate violence.
Its all scenario-tree root hardening, basically not a investment into a specific future, but a increasing of all chances to recover should the branch your current scenario resides on give and you root back to a past-scenario with reduced capabilities.
Welcome to a disability-friendly planet, redesigned for your very special human needs, preventing self destructive riots when the good times end. All dangerous toys are removed, to prevent you blowing up nuclear power plants during times of strife. Its super depressing, but then so is the state in which we are.
A unmodified, unadapted primal creature, that by the use of tools has squeezed itself between a rock and a hard place. A technology roof, that if fully explored, ever amplifies the unstable individual until everyone has a red button. Meanwhile the facade of civilization does not even survive a day without those advances. Sucks to be a zookeeper right now.
The vast majority of people outside of tech simply do not know about, or care to know anything about ActivityPub.
They only care about the value that these social platforms provide to them. It shouldn’t be surprising that the most valuable platforms (judging by usage) are centralized and proprietary.
I can see the parallels between this and crypto. Cool tech, but not what people want.
This isn’t being “culturally relevant”, quite the opposite. This is catering to a small niche. If anything, this smells like desperation from Tumblr who was once a juggernaut in the social media space.
I think when this all shakes out, most people are still going to be on a Meta-like platform run by a for-profit company, but one which has capitulated to opening up a pipe into and out of the garden so that those with the ability to manage their own data are able to do so.
Tumblr apparently believes the same (it's one of the scenarios where they don't turn into Yahoo's directory of internet websites and eventually have to sell their server room to Private Equity frat bros, so of course they do), and they have correctly identified that ActivityPub is the champion of this moment of upheaval. Implementing it with the resources of a full-on platform has always been trivial; it's not already there because they have all been playing the "move into our company town and use all our company services or we don't want you" game, and AP murders that model.
If someone points me in the direction of a bookie who will take the bet, I'll bet twenty bucks at any odds that within five years, AP (or something that does exactly the same thing) is either free or available as a premium feature on every social media site that is, as you say, culturally relevant.
Reality has gone the exact opposite way: Facebook accounts used to accept email, and their chat used to interoperate with XMPP. Both features helped them grow, and were switched off once they'd reached a dominant position.
Twitter followed a similar path, with many third-party clients and other projects built around their API (plus native support for SMS). Once they grew, those APIs were removed or restricted, to funnel users into official clients (which display ads).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...