I am @humanetech at Mastodon, #FOSS and #Fediverse advocate, mod at SocialHub, and facilitator of Humane Tech Community.

I help fight tech harms and “Promote Solutions that Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society”.

  • 18 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 6th, 2021

help-circle






  • Dating-like apps come up in fedi discussions quite often. They have interesting aspects, for instance where obviously privacy is a big concern and where current generation of federated apps aren’t adequate for dating. And how do communities / instances establish their trustworthiness? There are kinds of ‘dating’ were the requirements can be less severe. Like “Meet new Friends” kind of services where e.g. you seek folks for collaborative gameplay in some MMORPG or something.


  • One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?











  • SocialHub has an association with the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG). The SWICG is a continuation of the Working Group that standardized ActivityPub as a W3C Recommendation. So technically this organization exists.

    In practice it is really hard to organize in an all-volunteer grassroots movement, and many people for various reasons don’t like to participate in such organization. “Herding cats” is a term that is used. Being grassroots has pros (resilience) and cons (stalled evolution). Personally I have come to think that decentralized development of the Fediverse probably works best when it is split into different domains (e.g. Microblogging, Podcasting, etc.) as long as there’s also a community working on the core common denominator in the protocol. That is currently the SocialHub and Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process.









  • The question is whether the project should be forked into multiple separate projects at all. An alternative would be to have a generic “Directory Platform” and have modules to make it a Book Review platform, a Movie Database, or whatever-you-wanna-collect platform with another module. The modules would mostly be templates and data structures + user interface widgets to present them nicely.