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Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1)
(blog.elenarossini.com)
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
I think she's obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it's best, this is a "people before economy" value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
Agreed, me too. Also, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts regarding this - they're very insightful.
I agree. I don't think it's realistic to expect all of the fediverse to adopt a set of core values, not any more than we can expect all of the internet to adopt a core set of values. Certainly, there's no one in a position to enforce them from the down top, at the very least.
I want to start off by saying that I respect you and your opinion very much. I think this is a serious point of concern, especially considering that a major reason given for the exodus that happened from a major website back in July 2023 occurred in part due to fear of loss of accessibility (which was an unintended consequence of API restrictions). r/blind moved to the fediverse primarily because of this point.
So basically, a failure here really feels like it would have serious ramifications for the fediverse.
Agreed - but that just means there's room for something new. Hopefully from the diversity of groups that you alluded to above, a privacy minded group with dev skills will arise with a new entrant to the fediverse here.
I've been doing some thinking about this. One (not yet fully fleshed out) thought I had was if content was retained on the original server (the one the community/magazine is based in) and others receive a new "CONTENT_LINK" type of ActivityPub message that points back to the original server. A good app/web UI can then fetch from the link to display the content - but this would happen client side and be meant to be analogous to a web browser fetching a page from a web server. I wrote more about what I had in mind in https://lemmy.world/comment/12109601
This is a positive IMHO.
That's true. Time will tell if things like sub.club are able to move forward
I'd call this, the power of community
And this, going global.
I think this is usually termed "having the best of both worlds".
I should point out though that this isn't entirely true. I don't think that we can really say that this applies to folks who made their home on exploding-heads or lemmygrad, for example.