Fediverse
Mastodon et al
August 12, 2019 — August 30, 2023
Fediverse: Volunteer-run Twitter.
This is kinda fun, but not something I’m passionate about. The Fediverse is not owned by megacorps which is a plus. OTOH it has a high maintenance overhead (running a server), and because it is not owned by megacorps, has a shambolic design process.
It does not help paranoiacs, as is not cryptographically strong, and thus subject to censorship and surveillance etc. But also it’s cute and friendly and evokes early-internet nostalgia, which is sweet.
tl;dr actually my blog is my social media so I am banning myself from the fediverse.
I might be tipped ove the line by a social network which solved more problems at once, for example a decentralised p2p one, such as Nostr or scuttlebutt.
1 Mastodon
As I call it, cosy twitter. Maybe it should be hyggr or something. This is close to what I imagined social media would be like in the year 2000, for better and for worse. Lots of local communities, peer-recommendation friendly, hard for a corporate overlord to influence, cute and customisable… That said, it is a lot of work and the communities I want are not so easy to motivate into participating. 🏗
You want to have it without hosting it? there are businesses which do it. One obvious contender is Librem Social which hosts Mastodon and some other handy things. USD2-USB8/month depending on your options. Not sure how the pricing scales per user.
Simon Willison’s intro is helpful: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon.
- Pinafore
- Introducing Pinafore for Mastodon | Read the Tea Leaves
- Wellness settings · Pinafore
- How much I’ve spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS: Quite a lot of cash before even accounting forlabout.
- Mathstodon
- christianp’s mathstodon
2 Peertube
PeerTube is a federated video sharing system, with a structure much like Mastodon and using the same federation protocols. Written in Typescript, if you are curious. I am curious how well this scales. Video is hard.