Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone’s currently talking about. Disroot’s instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather “Soapbox”. Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? – it isn’t so clear). Anyway, for now, I’m squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin’s new effort, Streams, about which he says
From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures – including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).
and:
The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.
This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That’s always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.
The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.
Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.
Links
Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.