Summary
A group of podcasters tried building a new social network using the Fediverse, a decentralized internet platform. The Fediverse lets people connect across different servers without big tech companies controlling them. Their experiment showed hope for a less addictive and more open social media future.
Highlights
id977316343
So this is the thing is because this is a federated social network, no one has to have an account on the Forkiverse for us to put their stuff in our feeds. Just to step in here to fully explain this, because it’s confusing and it’s important to understand. On normal social media, if Kevin had logged on to Instagram for the first time, he’d only have seen Instagram posts. Nothing from Twitter. Nothing from TikTok. [29:32] Most social media works like that, and there’s a good business reason why. Instagram wants a monopoly on Instagram content, so the site is closed. You have to sign up on the platform to follow the people there. But federated websites aren’t designed that way. They’re open. [29:48] So Kevin, the very first member of the Forkiverse, could already follow anybody who signed up for an account on any other federated social media platform. He could follow people on Lemmy, which is like Reddit, people on PixelFed, which is like Instagram. He could even follow some accounts on Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone. Here on the Forkiverse’s very first day, its first user already had a full feed. So when I go on to the Forkiverse dot com, I see something that looks basically like the old Twitter. [30:20] I see a reverse chronological feed of posts from accounts that I follow, including the two of you, but also a bunch of other accounts.
id977309228
So that year, I started talking to some of the people trying to build the Fediverse. [5:33] The story these people told me went like this. Basically, all of them, as different as they were from one another, had a shared view of what had gone wrong with our internet. The way they saw it, in the nineties, even in the early two thousands, our internet had truly been an open place. Infinite websites, infinite message boards populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of values, free to live how they wanted in the little neighborhoods they’d made. If you wanted to move homes on that internet, say, switch your email from Yahoo to Gmail, it was mildly annoying, but not a huge deal. [6:09] But then social media arrived. To access those platforms, you usually needed a dedicated account. Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible. And if you were able to build one, you never wanted to leave that platform since leaving would mean losing your audience. Users filed quickly and happily into this more closed internet. [6:33] And along the way, they handed a lot of power to the moguls running it. The moguls set the rules, and we had to put up with them. If any of us had issues, our choices were to functionally leave the internet or worse, complain on the very platforms themselves, turning our anger into just a little more money for the people we were angry with. But the architects of the Fediverse had a more radical idea. The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards a more open internet, where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now.
id977310391
These were people trying to build a Millennium Falcon in their garage out of old car parts.
id977311332
On the federated Internet, if you have a friend microblogging on a federated platform like Mastodon, you can follow their account from anywhere in the Fediverse. You don’t ever have to join Mastodon itself. And if your home platform does get bought by some temperamental tech mogul, you can leave.
id977313014
Twitter is gonna make you think in bumper stickers. [10:27] Instagram is gonna make you realize that everyone you know is, like, thinner and on vacation or whatever. And that the sort of boundaries of what kind of person we can be and how we can interact with each other are set by the platforms.
Las affordances de la estructura de la plataforma tienen efectos en las conductas de los usuarios y las representaciones sociales que promueven.
id977313251
look at Wikipedia. Like, Wikipedia is a collective Internet experiment that shouldn’t have worked. If you just, like, put that idea on a whiteboard in, like, you know, nineteen ninety-three, people would have been like, an encyclopedia that everyone can edit? That’s gonna be a total disaster. And yet today it is, like, a monument and, like, a thing that people hold up as an example of what the Internet can be.
Lo interesante que es darse cuenta lo improbable que es Wikipedia.
id977313578
Better to risk being a fool than commit to being a cynic.