Starting with the posted link and in more recent discussions of Standardising on ActivityPub Groups I have been advocating for some time to make “Community” a native concept of the Fediverse. Something that better represents communities in the real world: groups and individuals with intricate social relationships between them.
Why?
The following toot by @cicatriz_jdr provides one reason:
“”… and these ‘instances’ are all on separate servers, so it’s totally decentralized. but posts on one instance ‘federate’ with other instances, except when they don’t, which basically half the time. now here’s where it gets tricky…“”
And the follow-up by @throwawaygiraffoid is more hilarious even:
“THERAPIST: And those ““instances”” are they ““federating”” with us right now?”
With a community-native fedi you can avoid talking on the INFRASTRUCTURE level…
Fediverse: Peopleverse!
“Yes, the Fediverse is an online world-wide social space where there are numerous communities where you can meet people. They all have different themes and activities and you just join where lies your interest. Or create your own community for your friends and family on whatever has your passion.”
To explain why the fediverse is such a nice place, I like to say that it is made up of communities that have their own rules and keep their own neighbourhood clean. That also explains why we have less problems with moderation than a global monopolistic platform, but that may not be a good opening sentence. The disadvantage is that you then have to additionally explain that you can still talk to (almost) anyone. For explaining how it works technically, the email system is really helpful.
Yea. I feel being able to clearly separate the parts of the discussion on why a typical traditional social media ‘user’ should consider to become a fedizen, and the follow-up to a still understandable and not-too-technical elaboration on how it works, and why it is important to make a switch.
The first part of your story is a good addition to the “Fediverse: Peopleverse!” storytelling, just like I also didn’t mention that all communities can interact with one another. But starting to talk about moderation is already part of the ‘deep-dive’ discussion. A typical user does not think “Let me check how it is moderated, before I install TikTok”. They are enticed by colorful screenshots and peer pressure of friends to install. And installing apps is a very low-barrier habit: “Oh, nice app” --> installs.
Maybe people I hang out with are different. Climate scientists and especially female scientists get a lot of hate. People I know tend to be fed up with the terrible atmosphere and harassment, but they are locked in.
The “moderation” part is a different aspect to the story, an important part that you can delve into afterwards. In your Peopleverse should be the people that you’d like to interact with, that add value to your life. And you should be able to have proper control on that. @deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml wrote a great article that highlights some interesting ways that might look like: Towards a Greater Federated Architecture. I wrote about Federated Moderation: Towards Delegated Moderation before, which is on similar lines and about making moderation more of a 1st-class citizen of fediverse capabilities than it is now.
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And they can create their own hell where the far-right is not criticized (“censored”). Although Trump Social will have to do some moderation, otherwise Google and Apple will remove them from the app store, which would eat into profits and Trump only cares about money.
I think we should still talk about infrastructure and the physical instantiation of the internet. People are usually encouraged not to think about the internet as a physical thing run by people at particular locations. Especially they’re encouraged not to think about the costs or time involved in running the physical infrastructure. The idea that it’s just some immaterial meta magic is one that needs to be dispelled.
Yes, I agree with that. And after a good intro the conversation can be steered to that, if its to an audience that understands. For tech noobs you can always say “This thing is much better than your social media ad platforms, but it is fragile still and needs your support. Here’s how you can help [… donate, spread the word, etc]”.
I have one suggestion.
The fediverse is run by communities. The distributed web is run by people.
We should call the distributed web the peopleverse.
Centralized web: Segregated web
Decentralized web and distributed web: Social commons
Decentralized web: Community controlled web
Distributed web: People controlled web
I agree. The Peopleverse should not be any kind of ‘reserved term’ and any online space that serves people well, and where they are in control can be part of it.
Note that in your division above there’s different interpretations on what “distributed” means. In general you might say that “decentralized” breaks down into “federated” and “peer-to-peer” and the combination of those where both are mixed is “hybrid decentralization”. Also they are technical classifications. Fediverse, while a technical-sounding name (too technical, imho), refers to a certain kind of Social commons (or “social fabric” as I also call it) already.
