Flipboard Begins to Federate
flipboard.medium.com
flipboard.medium.com
I've been on Mastodon for just over a year now. It works really surprisingly well, especially considering it's stitched together from so many independent, non-profit open source instances.
But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.
I'd love to see efforts from organizations like Flipboard, and Threads, and Automattic make an impact here. I want to be able to follow interesting content from the kind of people who are put off by language like "first, select your federated instance".
Also noteworthy: in the Verge article about this at https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24006062/flipboard-fediv... there's this quote:
“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing
our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,”
says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think
Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream
consumer service that existed in a walled
garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”
But not put off by language like, first select Threads, Flipboard or Automattic?
Can these people fog a mirror?
I made several attempts to get onboard with Mastodon about a year ago when I stopped using Twitter. I used a tool to copy over as many people I follow on Twitter to Mastodon.
Technically, it's fine. The issue I have is that it felt exactly the same as Twitter, and I always disliked Twitter.
However, Twitter had reached a network effect threshold where most of the news in my industry was shared exclusively there, so I was... well not quite forced, but strongly compelled to use it.
Mastodon doesn't have this. It's just noise and thoughtless hot takes, much like Twitter, but without most of the news I used to use Twitter for. I hope it doesn't become another Twitter where I feel compelled to wade through the mess to get my industry news.
To sum up: for me the reason I don't use Mastodon is not technical. It's because it feels useless and I dislike it. I had hoped for a more thoughtful arena of public discourse, but Mastodon is not it. All the interesting tech aside, it's just a Twitter clone using different technology.
Or to put it another way: You interacted with people who post hot takes on Mysterious Twitter X, you went to the Federation of Mastodons and followed the same people who post hot takes. Now you're saying all you get are hot takes on both of them. Is anyone supposed to be surprised?
You can't really say that Mastodon is a neutral network, like all networks it has a vibe. The vibe on Mastodon is progressive orthodoxy, doomer-culture, endless dunking and virtue-signaling.
It sucks. Even if you look beyond its depressing culture, it doesn't deliver for news, sports, or frankly anything popular.
I’m not an online personality by any means, so no followers makes sense.
I think Mastodon is great for people who exist online, just not so much people who exist in real life. I don’t mean any insult by that, just the way it is right now.
Now I believe it's possible. There's a hundred ways it can go wrong, but dang it I'm excited about the possibilities if we help it go right.
(no affiliation)
I’ve been a big fan of ground news in the past few years as a way to at least try to minimize my filter bubble. You’re still limited to mass media, so there will be some bias, but I’ve found it helpful.
I'm always a bit leery of things like this when massive companies begin adopting open source things such as this. Google Chat embracing XMPP, only to end up abandoning it (as Google does). Slack having an IRC gateway, only to end up abandoning it. There are probably other examples, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
These technologies still exist, but in their own bubble. I doubt that Flipboard adopting and dropping ActivityPub support would have a significant impact in the long run. But I'm hesitantly happy about this.
There was a time that Facebook messenger was XMPP and Google chat was XMPP, so there was a time it was gaining a lot of traction. Most people just think their email is email. They don't see it as using SMTP/IMAP/POP3.
The only way that negative effect is muted is if the 50m users is only a small fraction of the platform's reach. Say, under 2%.
Really the XMPP part didn't matter so much as open APIs and third party clients. XMPP was just a natural rationalization of that status quo.
The layout was awesome though. It was kinda like a RSS reader you could follow a bunch of topics, twitter feeds, blogs...
Glad to see it's still around and doing something like this. Will be checking it out again.
Flipboard aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites and presents it in magazine format.
Also, if an author wants an article to be eligible for inclusion in aggregated publications, they have to put it behind the login wall. It’s quite possible my info is outdated; happy to learn what the current state of affairs is if things have changed.
Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".
This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose of ActivityPub, have no choice but to move to instances that do federate.
...which will be the large instances, like mastodon.social. It's already the default instance and by far the largest. For maximum connectivity and the biggest chance that it doesn't go under, it is the primary choice for most users. So this dynamic of too much instance-level moderation effectively undermines the idea of the fediverse. There will always be tiny for-purpose instances, but the idea that many small instances will grow the fediverse to Big Tech scale is invalidated.
Come to think of it, one might as well create a Threads account. It's a community almost a 100 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. So if you just want to connect to people and find content, Mastodon offers few tangible benefits to normies.
Also, the people who have accounts away from the big instances have actively declined to use them, so they are clearly more likely to move to some other mid scale instance if they need to migrate than to head for the big ones.
It could be that as an instance user you like this decision, but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself.
Or you just create a different account on any one of the several Mastodon instances out there.
Mastodon doesn't have the ability to ban you from all of the fediverse. It doesn't take away choice, it simply gives an additional option to the instance admin. Don't like it? Start your own instance.
It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do.
This attitude is exactly why there's a trend towards ever larger instances.
We only have problems when large instances get block-happy. There's some weird stuff going on in fedi admin circles, but so far, it hasn't been as harmful as (… think of a non-Facebook example…) Tumblr's centralised moderation decisions. This is mitigated by small instances, where heads are cooler and tensions are lower because you don't have everything to think about all at once, and individual moderation decisions are less impactful.
Saying that the larger instances are poorly moderated is highly subjective. Most social media users want to connect to people and content without limitations.
On the contrary, decentralization is exactly neutral. It just feels hostile to users who've simply accepted a centralized vendor as the default, and now may need to consider an alternative.
Most decentralization in practice is messy: homeschooling, homesteading, private health insurance, or rolling your own email server. That is because the majority of the population will have a preference for not doing things this way.
Uh, instance mods don't have more power than admins on other platforms. dang can Thanos snap you from existence on this platform at any moment: how is that for having a say on what you can do?
What you complain about is that you hear a lot more about the moderation on the fediverse than you do on HN or Youtube, despite Youtube moderation practices impacting a lot more people than the sum total of what happens on the fediverse.
False. Instance mods have 100% power over you, which is not true for other multi-community platforms. HN is not a multi-community platform so a poor comparison.
To compare with Reddit: a sub admin can ban your account from a sub, but it cannot do anything with your account at network level. A sub admin cannot decide what you see or do not see outside of the sub. A sub admin cannot nuke your account. A sub admin cannot nuke your followers.
A Mastodon admin can do all of those things to your account.
So on the fediverse your choices is: endure, switch instance, leave service. This is one more option than on other platforms.
I don't think most instance owners will block them. The larger servers I've paid attention to don't plan to at this time, though many people have expressed concerns about it being an attempt by Meta to embrace, extend, and extinguish the Fediverse. A few people are very loud about not wanting a Meta presence and are trying to convince others to block them.
I think the opportunity outweighs the threat. There's a chance for Mastodon and others to show their software to a mainstream audience which has already shown a willingness to try out new social software by joining threads. Ideally, some projects will have a better pitch than just "we're not corporate".
I think the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" fear is hilarious. The Fediverse is tiny and useless to Meta. Threads as a really crappy Twitter clone is just launched and many times the size of the Fediverse. By federating, they're losing algorithmic control and monetization possibilities. Honestly, I think it's just a "do good" afterthought for the sake of PR.
> I agree that it's a loud minority complaining about Threads but that loud minority is quite powerful in the Mastodon community.
That “loud minority” is largely composed of sociopolitical minorities. To the extent that they're powerful on the Fediverse, it's because the Fediverse is a place run by and for them.
The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.
At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do.
So I don't see the threat, really.
"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.
Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.
ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social media networks are interoperable over a common standard similar to mail. And from recent history the period we are in is one in where governments are looking for open standards as a hedge against big tech.
The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard, shut down competition and invite anti-competition investigations is far-fetched.
and Telecomms. Don’t forget Telecomms, an area where the EU hasn’t been shy about dipping it’s oar in.
Note that this is a counterpoint to web browser protocols (especially CSS and JS), which Google has managed to extend to the point where they are now nearly the only viable browser engine vendor. They don't need to extinguish it because they completely control it.
If you trust Meta to not follow a similar playbook with Threads, you are much more optimistic than I am.
I run a small Mastodon instance, and have preemptively defederated from Threads because I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views. I've informed my users of this and so far everyone with a reply has praised this decision. They have made choices.
In fact lately there have been waves of spam from the big open-registration instances. I and a lot of other small instance admins I know have responded by limiting our federation with these instances. This creates a slightly worse experience for our users, in that they're likely to stop seeing media from big-instance accounts they follow. And it creates choice - do they talk to their friends on the big instances and say "hey can I persuade you to move to an instance that isn't a spam gateway?" Does the friend say "yes" and acquire an invitation to a closed-registration instance that's well-federated to their friend network? Eventually we end up with multiple networks all on ActivityPub that have very few connections. And this is fine. Because people can also do things like choose to have multiple accounts on these multiple networks.
Do I trust Meta regarding federation? No. But I'm thinking it's an afterthought for them. The Fediverse isn't a threat to them at all, just like RSS never was.
I totally understand that some instances have strong opinions about this and self-isolate to a degree. And that will cement what Mastodon is: a set of small for-purpose communities.
It will not compete with the scale of Big Tech and maybe it shouldn't. Mastodon is to stay in their marginal role, a niche network. For sure exactly those strong-willed instances will agree to that.
I'm fine with that as well. I'm just pointing out that an anti-growth mindset produces a small network.
RSS is still the best way to follow webcomics.
It is still possible to access the data just via the official Graph API.
...and then Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline, then one of the most hated feature changes. They also killed off any third party apps that dared to give you the FB experience you were used to.
Embrace, extend extinguish.
Companies will give you everything when they don't care about making money.
Unless your profile is private, they don't need Threads to federate to have access to your profile...
Actually, with Reddit, Twitter and Meta APIs being closed, would be a very good idea for AI companies to get some data from Mastodon instances to train LLMs....
Isn't this what Gmail and Microsoft do with their approach to spam blocking?
If I want to see "what's trending now" on Threads, I'll call them, they don't have to call me.
Will I be able to follow various users across the Fediverse and view all their posts in the Threads app, or will I just be able to sign in to their servers with my threads account?
If it's going to function like any other Fediverse app, which I assume for now, then yes. You can follow people across instances and have both a local and global feed.
Yes, using the Threads app you could then follow somebody from i.e. a Mastodon instance if that instance does not have the Threads domain blocked and the particular instance user also does not have it blocked. So it's going to be hit and miss.
And no, I don't think you can log into another server using your Threads account.
Also, the effect of Google's presence on XMPP was huge, see https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...
Interestingly it sounds like other implementors capitulated to some bad behavior on Google's part to the detriment of others, and there are probably some good lessons to learn there.
Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced.
But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media. They don't want to be tracked, spied on, or advertised to. The vast majority of accounts are pseudonymous and they like it that way. Privacy is a foundational core value of the fediverse in general.
Many people see the idea of allowing Meta into the fediverse as the antithesis of every value that the fediverse was built on. Which makes sense, as the fediverse was built specifically as a way to escape Meta, google, and their ilk. There is a very real fear that Meta will attempt to destroy federated social media; what possible reason would they have to not? There's absolutely no incentive for them to allow the status quo, and every incentive to destroy a competitor.
But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate. Fediverse users and admins are pretty split on this issue and argument and discussion happens every day. This is not something most people take lightly, and most treat it very, very seriously.
Personally, I run my own server because I find the endless debate tiring and distasteful. I'll block the meta domain based on their ToS because I'm on mastodon specifically for privacy and anonymity.
If you post a profile publicly on the internet, people/companies can easily scrape it. Regardless of what is in the threads ToS and whether you're federating with threads... am I missing something?
There is no way they kept that in the EU-Threads ToS.
I genuinely don’t see the problem here. If it’s publicly available, why can’t Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc scrape it? It’s like complaining that the wrong folks are reading the poster you just put up: well duh you put the poster up in public, of course it’s gonna get read!
This statement cuts to the heart of the matter and is at best a half-truth. "Most people" on Mastodon are Twitter refugees. Well over 80% only joined after November 2022. This is a fundamentally different group from the much smaller longtime users.
I do agree that the hardcore users dictate the culture and that this culture emphasizes privacy, safety-ism, is anti-corporate, and so on.
That's fine, but this same mindset pretty much ensures that the status quo of the Fediverse (or Mastodon) remains: niche, tiny, anti-growth.
That's a feature, not a bug
As a long time user, it's a great that they're put their eggs in the ActivityPub basket and I'm looking forward to see what they truly got in the coming months.
I think it should be opt-in. Users should be asked if their content will be distributed on new places. This is a deceptive UX pattern to push a new feature [1].
[1] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/automat...
But more seriously what is the monetization strategy for federated apps? Up front pay or subscription for using the app?
I worked on Netscape NetCaster in 1997, so Mike was my grand-boss. Months later, he provided key testimony in the US Federal anti-trust case against Microsoft.
I didn't interact with him, didn't get to know many people at Netscape; we were head-down on development. But I keep bumping into names that are familiar...
(I started using Flipboard when Google's RSS aggregator was shut down.
I collect stories there; collection are called "magazines". I have one about space up there that some people follow.
https://flipboard.com/@watersb/out-there-is-here-f6c9vfnez
No warranty :-)
)
There is already a bunch of "completely detached" networks out there, organized via wifi links. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are three examples of such networks, where you can basically avoid the current internet infrastructure as long as you get hooked up to the mesh network. Lots of interesting services deployed on these networks too :)
Really depends on the mesh, I don't know the specific answer for NYC mesh.
Seems like a good way to explain the meaning "network effect".
https://medium.com/@kaikoenig/samsungs-bloatware-disgrace-c7...
Here is a sample of text from it.
"Unwanted 3rd party apps from Microsoft or Flipboard."