Tumblr to join the Fediverse after WordPress migration completes
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It doesn't help that the CEO actively antagonized a large portion of the site not too long ago.
The public blog network is a minority of traffic. If you've never actually been a Tumblr user, you won't have an understanding of the product at all.
It's not that different from what Facebook is doing with Threads. They are not interested in making money from social media, they are just hoping they can become the main infrastructure provider.
- mastodon.green
- social.lol
- communick.com
- cloud68.co
- elest.io
x.com
abc.xyz
> TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.
https://aeracode.org/2023/11/06/life-critical-side-projects/
The repo is still being updated so it doesn't look like it's in too much danger:
Companies/agencies/media institutions are not interested in being trailblazers, so they will just go where they see their audience going, meaning Bluesky nowadays. On the other side, the absolute majority of end users still believe that (free) social media is not something worth paying for, and the most you'll see is people that contribute a few dollars per year "to cover hardware costs".
I love that this statement could apply to either Tumblr or WordPress. CEOs are such an expensive liability lately.
I don't think there are many platforms in which users are willing to give the platform money.
If you asked me whether I'd give money to support Reddit, I'd say just let it crash and burn.
Reddit gold is a pale version of this. Neither Twitter nor Bluesky show any signs of getting it.
If we're talking hypothetical right ways, I think what "social" media gets wrong is to envision an anarchy for its users. People are never equal in a society. A teenager isn't the same thing as an elder, nor is a doctor the same thing as a nurse.
I think I've read before that anarchy doesn't work because eventually people find someone who is reliable and naturally that person becomes their authority on the subject, creating an hierarchy.
Social media tries to put all users in the same bucket even when it's well-known that most users belong in the "never posts anything" bucket while very few users belong in the "power user" bucket. There are passive users and active users.
While hierarchies can become ugly fast, I don't think resigning on implementing them in any form is the right answer, specially now that everyone is on the Internet.
The article is saying the opposite though: they are not adding federation directly to Tumblr's own codebase. Instead, federation will come about from some planned future migration of Tumblr onto WordPress.com infrastructure, which already has that feature.
SOLID or ActivityPods, on the other hand...
Can you elaborate on this? I would think giving control to the end user is exactly what a federated model would do.
A truly P2P system where the end user has 100% control over what is blocked, and furthermore where they can't be shut out in the cold by capricious mods, would be the ideal social media vehicle.
I got banned from my city's subreddit for questioning why folks were against anti-crime (moderate Democrat) politicians running for the city mayor's office. Now I can't participate at all: I can't ask my community for recommendations, take up offers on free concert tickets that are frequently given out, etc. Where else do I go for that?
Social media is a common carrier, and unelected mods are unwanted and unjustified authoritarians.
It should all just be a protocol. No platforms.
A different subreddit. Make one yourself. If this censorship is truly so evil, won't people flock to join an alternative?
> Social media is a common carrier, and unelected mods are unwanted and unjustified authoritarians.
This is ridiculous. Other people's websites are not common carriers.
If network effects weren't a thing, there would be a million Facebooks and all of them would be popular. Because of network effects, we no longer have internet bulletin boards, and people congregate in few places rather than many. There's much greater utility in having folks together.
Similarly, subreddit /r/theModsOfMyCitySuckSoComeHereInstead will never gain traction. Once something is cemented as the default that the public uses, it's almost impossible to dislodge.
But you already know this.
> This is ridiculous. Other people's websites are not common carriers.
If they have a billion MAU, they should be. A billion MAU is more than the entire US population, which should more than suffice for "common carrier" designation.
Such websites are effectively public squares where everyone congregates, and because of aforementioned network effects, there are no alternatives. Banned individuals are effectively de-personed. It doesn't matter what the reasons for the ban are, the mere fact that it is possible removes freedom from the individual.
Unless someone breaks certain very particular rules (eg. raping children), they cannot be banned from the park, from the Internet, from email. If then, there's only one popular platform that has a monopoly on X, and billions of people are using that platform to communicate about it, then banning someone from said platform is the moral equivalent of removing them from parks or email.
Email is a perfect example of a protocol that succeeded before the platforms started to take over. It was early and everyone adopted it. We need a similar protocol for social media so your form of argument can't even be used. Preferably a P2P protocol instead of a federated one so that others can't impose their will onto third parties without their consent.
Just like the Mastodon folks lean hard left and want to censor conservative voices out of the mastoverse, the far right conservative folks want to step in and silence LGBT and non-WASP culture. It's the same thing, and the protocol should alleviate anyone from being a victim of ideologues on either side. Or from being a victom of capricious moderators that ban you for liking pineapple on pizza.
Every individual should be god of what they consume and publish, and everyone else is their own god of their own island. Nobody else should be butting in in front of two consenting parties.
You are saying that it's okay for people to put my name on a list just because they have certain prejudices, and that it then becomes to other users to verify if the accusation is true?
Luckily for me, my customers are sensible people who are not particularly interested in following these drama-seeking, HOA personalities of Mastodon. They just want to go on with their lives and support someone who is at least providing a service and support the open web.
No, and I don't care, to be honest. Use a website and email for your business. Social media should be for humans, not companies.
I also can't comprehend the idea of paying to use Mastodon. What do your users get out of that? Surely not robust moderation, if you think blocking and defederating is so awful.
> Luckily for me, my customers are sensible people who are not particularly interested in following these drama-seeking, HOA personalities of Mastodon. They just want to go on with their lives and support someone who is at least providing a service and support the open web.
So then... this doesn't actually affect you at all?
If you don't mind being put on boxes, then you probably won't mind if someone adds a screenshot of your posts next to this: https://mastodon.social/@molily/113480811492965996
> I also can't comprehend the idea of paying to use Mastodon.
It's not just Mastodon. The service I provide also gives accounts at Funkwhale, Lemmy and Matrix.
> Surely not robust moderation, if you think blocking and defederating is so awful.
It's the other way around. Because the instance is only for paying customers, and because the customers know that they put money on the line and will be kicked out if they do anything that violates the ToS, everyone is super nice and the instance is incredibly civil.
My original complaint had nothing to do with "censorship", but with some moderators thinking that abusing blocklists is a legitimate way of pressuring peers.
> I don't know what to say other than people can run their websites how they want.
It's one thing if said admin just blocked my instance and went on their merry way. It's another thing to actively go around bashing me on a very shallow accusation.
Seriously, please take a deep breath. I know that everyone is feeling a bit on edge nowadays, but I just said "yeah, some people do get a power trip from the moderation" and you are reacting like I've attacked your child. Relax.
Gosh, I can't imagine why any Fediverse admins might think you're obnoxious and want to block your instances.
And why should the users of my instance be penalized because someone found some reason to dislike me? If someone wants to block me, fine. But having the influence to push a whole server out of the wider network definitely counts as "too much power".
How will they disagree, if they don't even get to know who is getting blocked?
Also I don’t want anything pro-crypto on my feeds.
> Also I don’t want anything pro-crypto on my feeds.
Then just don't follow them?
Also, can you maybe try to be a little less judgemental? Your attitude is a perfect illustration for https://mastodon.social/@molily/113480811492965996
You’re not entitled to an audience.
I wasn't. That's the point. It's been a long time since I stopped working with Ethereum and I always despised cryptocurrency as an speculation instrument. To take whatever I wrote about (ENS as an alternative for resolving identity without DNS or the handful of discussions about a guy working on ZK-proofs) as being a "crypto bro" is ridiculous, but I am sure that your prejudices will force you to disagree.
> in my community.
I wasn't chasing anyone around asking to follow me. If your server ended up getting some of my posts, go to the next HOA Mastodon meeting to complain to whoever in "your" community who did not toe the party line.
That's a lot to assert without elaboration.
When they changed it a lot of folks were unhappy https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
Threads was preemptively shitlisted just for thinking of connecting to Fediverse, because a lot of instance admins are ActivityPub or Mastodon maximalists[0] and believed that everyone would just flock over to Threads immediately.
Then it was shitlisted again because Mark Zuckerberg started zucking on Trump, and decided to take their already threadbare moderation team and tie their hands further. This is a more practical concern as most Fedi admins do not have the time or ability to deal with one mega-instance that happens to be both indispensable and willing to flood everyone with garbage.
I could see Tumblr getting shitlisted purely on the grounds of "fuck Matt Mullenweg", because Fedi admins are also hilariously petty[1]. But in practice, "just link Tumblr up to Fedi" is going to be just as much of a problem as "just link Threads up to Fedi".
There's an underlying tension between the Fediverse's technical underpinnings - ActivityPub - and the community of Fediverse servers that use it. The technology wants to be widely adopted, but the community wants to be small enough to avoid harassment and attacks[2], and these are in conflict. The Fediverse's structure is already a lot more centralized than anyone would like to admit, and scaling the network makes this problem worse.
[0] As opposed to general enthusiasm for federated communications technologies. See also the pushback Cory Doctorow got for backing Free our Feeds, a plan to make good on BlueSky's currently vacuous federation promises.
[1] This is why I self-host Mastodon even though it's a total pain in the ass.
[2] Like that one time a bunch of Japanese skiddies decided to spam literally every server from whatever accounts they could register
The problem is that it is expensive. Even if you host on a cheap VPS and put your media on some object storage like Storj (~$4/TB/month), you are problably looking at a minimum of $20/month for the server. If you get for yourself, maybe your friends and stay under 50 users, fine.
If you get more than that then you'll need a beefier server, and if any of users follows lots of media-heavy accounts and does not set it up to delete old posts, your object storage will be full very quick.
I delete posts mirrored from other servers older than 90 days with a cron job. It has a command to do this.
But I am still not happy with the idea that we should be deleting data from the server just to keep it manageable. It reminds of the before Gmail where people would get 5MB quota of Yahoo Mail and would have to go around deleting stuff from their mailboxes every other month.
> The Fediverse's structure is already a lot more centralized than anyone would like to admit
Hi, I'm "anyone", and: no it isn't? Technically and philosophically, no it isn't. Large instances are not a failure of decentralisation, because as you evidently know, their existence does not preclude you or anyone else setting up a server and federating. There's no universe in which "scaling the network" reduces decentralisation, in fact it's the solution to the "fuck Matt Mullenweg" situation you speculate about. The less homogenous fedi admins become, the more the network is sustained by people who don't even know who he is. Your comment is rife with generalisations about the motivations of people on the fediverse, but it's far less monolithic than you think.