This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.<p>I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.<p>That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.<p>But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.<p>Federation might be a <i>part</i> of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
My concern with scholarship on the fediverse would be clash between academic cultures, and potential exclusion. Some fields of the humanities in some parts of the world do not have the absorbing interest in race/sexuality/gender/power that North American and Western European academia does; they look at those developments with bemusement or horror, and frequently complain about how funding gets tied to using Westerners’ magic words instead of things they feel relevant in their context.<p>The mainstream federated servers of the fediverse largely draw from those same North American or Western European circles. It is very common to see founding members of Mastodon claim that their own subculture’s values and concerns ought to be upheld across the fediverse even as new members sign up, and never diluted. How welcoming can the fediverse therefore be to academics from elsewhere with different concerns and views?
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse.<p>There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.<p>The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.<p>So while it's promising from a standpoint of shrugging off corporate driven issues in managing social media, the fragmentary nature is perhaps the opposite of what social media actually needs, which is less bubble driven optimization with regression towards extremist means and more broad exposure and interaction with regression towards the normal mean.
The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.
The Fediverse is something that we already tried in many different fashions and it was never mass-adopted because it doesn't have the features that people want.<p>It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough.<p>It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it, so if you want to do the hobbyist thing go ahead. Just don't be upset when nobody gives a crap about your federated platform and you're forever 5 years from being adopted by the masses regardless of the date.
The issue used to be the tech.<p>Today the issue for social media is curation, I.e. moderation.<p>Dreams of that freewheeling intellectual market place were inspiring.<p>However, reality trumps fiction. Results trump theory.
Success creates Business models.
Mastodon isn't for everybody just like Twitter never was for everybody. Millions of users joined Twitter and silently left, because they didn't know what to make of it.<p>But the Fediverse could certainly offer services that fit the needs of the sciences. Wordpress can be connected to the Fediverse. There are other, more long form services.
Fediverse has a wrong model of news aggregation - this has been talked here many times: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549218">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549218</a> My take is that it conflates what is <i>civil</i> and what is <i>on topic</i>.
I don't the answer to rent-seeking publishers is Mastodon. It's sites like Arxiv and libgen.<p>Mastadon is the answer to Twitter.<p>In general, I think a lot about hyper efficient marketplace companies. Like craigslist which is still have less than 50 employees.<p>Suppose we had a goal to connect consumer to producer and have the lowest fees, provide a well ranked marketplace that consumers and producers could trust.<p>1% fee w a $100 cap. A super app like WeChat - Umbrella to Uber, AirBnB, Expedia, MLS, Amazon.<p>With rise of AI, it could be possible. "The most efficient way to provide for human wants"
People are not led by learned individuals, they do whatever "influencers" (tell them to) do.<p>In a world influenced by Taylor Swift and Cardi B I'd bet anything federated will lose to a tiktok of the day every time.
How about not naming it the "Fediverse" .. sounds like some .gov thing nobody wants to be part of unless they have to pay taxes or register a car.
Folks, a perfect & ideal new way of life is not going to spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.<p>The main issue with the fediverse is the pervasive naysaying. Merchants of FUD are abundant. They all have their "the main issue" why it's hopeless. Few bother sparing even a second to contemplate the possibility of success - however faint it is against the meteor of doom which surely is careening through the sky right at us & will obliterate us all momentarily that they see.<p>There's so many criticisms & critiques, and so much lowly & pervasive nattering of fediverse & alternatives. I think though that what's important now isn't getting everything right & tackling each and every problem first. What's important now are strong solid bases for innovation. We need early adopters & innovators trying things.<p>We need to grow our capabilities, to figure out how to iterate again, after being well served by free with surveillance systems. The nattering can be constructive, once we have a base. I think we are losening things up, greasing into fluidity capabilities that have been ossified into place by titan sized ultra-captive industry. Making the connective online space <i>fluid</i> again is more important than anything. We can find wins, and the titans will keep stumbling & making errors. Innovation from the edge is going to shed some blood, but it will also allow iteration & evolution, will drive future wider forms of meta-moderation that will help us all suss & grok each other in ways that these highly centralized walled gardens can never be open enough to allow.<p>The paradigm here, of connectivity being participative and evolvable and changing: that seems like something we forgot a while ago, and in the hours of such discontent about so much being decided for us, I think the commonality should be more important than the quibbles. No one is leaping to defend the creaky status quo. We haven't figured out all the safeguards and onroading we need to get to the world scale that the titans are at now, but it sure seems to me like we have some viable starting places to work from now. We can iterate and change, socially direct ourselves, and that hope for iteration and ownership is what is at stake here. Scant criticism is on offer that has constructive alternatives, offers any rays of hope.
My opinion is that it's hard to make the Fediverse work content-wise. The Big Techs have very expensive systems to do content moderation. I (kind of) trust Instagram, or X, or whatever to prevent my daughter from seeing gore or weird porn stuff. It's hard to trust these other platforms. But I'll change my mind if good arguments come up :)
Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users.<p>Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscription models with what many now call the "blue check reply guys": low-quality replies from "verified" users being boosted when thos esame people couldn't otherwise get organic engagement.<p>What would be the benefit to a user of federation? Federation at what level? Is it just other companies? How do you create a feed with federated content? Are you copying it between nodes? Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?<p>All of those things are real problems/ Yet the value proposition for users is at best hypothetical. A service can still degrade. It can get swept away by whatever the new social network is. Will that be federated too? Most likely not because it's easier to scale that way.<p>Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-...</a>