Social networks are getting stingy with their data
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Why should we not take the broadest possible view? You own your likes, your comments, your amazon order history, your dental xrays, your histology reports, everything. One way to incentivize data consumers and processors would be to make them liable for mishandling, make the data so radioactive that they don't even want to hold onto it.
I have no faith that people will get clued in and make it happen. Everyone is merrily lining up to use the third-party face scanner at the airports.
Though I can also see how the incentives of social platforms encourage clamping down further and further on 3P access.
As a society, we understand that rights !== access. Just because you share your data with Facebook, giving them access to it, in the normal course of interacting with their servers does not grant them rights to that data.
When Netflix delivers a video to your device, society understands you can’t make a copy of that video and share it with your neighbor. That’s called “The Pirate Bay.”
Data on the internet is lacking equity: an ownership interest in property. As you generate data online, platforms accumulate equity in your data giving them control over that valuable property.
If, instead, you accumulated equity in your data the entire data broker market would be “The Pirate Bay.”
If USPS was made to ensure that all Americans can communicate, even making it explicit in the constitution. I don't know why this wouldn't also apply to cell phones and the internet. Are they not modern evolutions? Put the code on the gov's GitHub along with the rest. Other players can exist, but it sets a baseline standard. But any country can do this, doesn't need to be the US.
A couple month passed and the instance I had in mind, closed for good.
I've been told before in HN that Mastodon's solution is non-existent for these situations. Has the landscape changed or you're still f*d if you choose the wrong one? (aka. an incentive for centralization or always chosing only among the most popular instances)
I think this underlines the impression I had that Mastodon software is quite bad in terms of server resources consumption, feels like a very heavy service to host. Probably lots of performance improvements are still achievable, and hopefully hosting it becomes cheaper over time.
The problem is that Mastodon isn't really great for single-user instances (hassle to upgrade, slurps resources for breakfast, etc) but there are plenty of other ActivityPub-compatible software that is great for single-user usage, like Pleroma, Micro.blog, Akkoma and more.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...
I'm not trying to dissuade you from writing this - such guides are always appreciated by the community. It's just that I've seen a lot of inexperienced people try setting these things up with a guide and getting bit in the back a couple months later.
Self-hosting is the only way to really guarantee that it'll still be up years later. But you might get randomly banned from certain instances that blanket-ban single-user instances.
How are people who aren't already part of the community supposed to know what a stable, robust instance is?
And self-hosting is all very well, but if I wanted to join a community comprised exclusively of greybeard unix sysadmins, I'd use IRC :)
What are you worried about losing? You can download everything if it's a concern. Honestly though, the concern you're raising is non-existent on every platform, because the others only have a single instance.
A few of us should get together and make a 'backup your stuff service' that can pull from mastodon and any other service, and make 2 backups in two different places around the world.
Offer addons for storing BnW copies of pics maybe, addon's for other services.
Should login, add link to your thing, walk through authorizing whatever is needed, and getting an email or DM that backup succeeds every week or something.
If somehow I find out admin start not giving updates and updating the instance, or the donations are not meeting the goal I assume I would have time to startup my instance and or move somewhere else.
It really hurts me to know that I expected this to happen and didn't do anything about it. Oh well... One of many missed opportunities in my life I suppose(WAY more than I'd like to admit).
A cryptographic signing key is attached to each account, and they have been experiencing very fast growth over the past month.
A dashboard is possible to share because the data is open: https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
Either way I'm staying away from anything that's tied to a crypto coin. I know Ethereum is also contracts, but I just feel that crypto is tainted with scams. If a technology wants to use a block chain, fine, but why tie it to a monetary value? That's when you start stepping over the line of tech and into people's life savings.
Farcaster simply taps onto the PKI part, to assign an identity that the user can own. That seems to be pretty legitimate use case. And you don't get any exposure to a token. In fact, you don't need to know any of those technicalities. Besides knowing that your identity and social graph (who you follow, who follows you, likes, etc...) cannot be rugpulled from you. Which seems pretty neat.
It's the fact that people are investing money, losing money, gaining money with this coin, that is bothering me. As soon as there is money to gain people become very manipulative.
https://decrypt.co/resources/farcaster-explained-the-blockch...
Also not useless for just learning language.
The gatekeeper is always the mod who approves new user accounts. Focus on that part and we might keep the data hungry monopolies out of the fedi too.
Many small instances is much more viable than a few huge ones that let anyone in.
I guess every app and webpage is willing to sell your behavior to the highest bidder so it probably doesn't matter.
It was well known how much this stuff was worth before and that amount has been declining. With AI hype convincing people of unknown potential it becomes a speculative asset again.
Reddit was a financial failure and now it is trying to IPO again on the basis that your shit posts are the new NFTs. This issue will resolve itself I don't think devs are missing out.
And by selling the data to LLMers its fate is sealed.
Meanwhile mastodon is free as in freedom. If you want to, you can buy your admin a beer. People seem to like this arrangement quite a lot. You, an individual, are giving money directly to another individual for services they're providing to you with zero obligations. It feels more like buying your plumber friend a case of beer for fixing your sink and less like throwing money into a corporate void for no discernible benefit as the price slowly and invariably creeps upward.
The really cool part though is that centralized social media has to compete with the fediverse, but the fediverse does not need to compete. It's not interested in competing. It will simply continue to exist for as long as there are users. No one cares what percentage of the global population uses it, or about infinite geometric growth forever. It's just people talking to other people. It's not an experience that you get on traditional social media anymore.
AT Proto is more interesting than ActivityPub anyway, but I think BlueSky will eventually succeed because the signup is painless. You just sign up on bluesky, there's no need of discussion on which instance, etc. There's no worry about losing everything if the particular instance you're on goes down, or having to deal with migrations.
In other words, centralizing.
I haven't followed mastodon in some time but the account migration thing was a pain as well, which I feel that the AT Protocol addresses much better.
Meta just beat Q4 estimates by 10%. Just because you're seeing more traffic to your site from the fediverse doesn't mean that traditional social media is dying.
Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer support to basically zero. Bugs in the APIs sit around for years. The Groups API is just being discontinued entirely.
They're still doing well on PyTorch at least! Although they did drop GPU support for Windows soon after the WSL2 became usable (presumably because now users could just install the Linux version on Win)
Those sites are already spiritually dead in the sense that they're only tolerated and no longer enjoyed. But they've achieved too big a network effect to be replaced anytime soon.
I have option only to not use their service.
It's the same everywhere. "Thank you for helping us make the AppStore great, now give us 30% of your revenue."
There was no alternative. The old internet, frankly, requires people to pay. They don't if they can avoid it at all. This is what killed most desktop software before, and it is what's killing most internet software.
Probably because the most common model is a $5-$20/month subscription to some "premium" version of the site/app. Subscription fatigue is a monster of the industry's own making.
What's killing software is enshitification and growing your expenses past your revenues. People are paying for a lot of stuff and understand that products are not free to build.
Furthermore, „their data”.
like redundant hubs
check out farcaster.xyz or download the client on warpcast.xzy
This is such a silly concept. Users and 'influencers' use social media as megaphones, and they ll easily give their data to e.g. openAI if they ask for it. Social media have no moat there