I don't think this is true, maybe not at all.

Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.

Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the "migration" is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

For me, it seemed like Gargron didn't really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn't a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

So, random thoughts:

• I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse's big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I'm not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
• More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that's really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
• Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse's decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
  • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn't really matter (and "it's just like email") and can be ignored for the most part.
  • In reality, it does matter and can't be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
  • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
• By community building, I mean "flexible space creation" that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build "humane spaces" that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
• Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it's always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you're on doesn't really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I've seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does ... perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.

Cool to see so many peeps on the Fedi!

While I haven’t used uv (been kinda out of Python for a while), and I understand the concerns some have, the Python community getting concerned about good package/project management tooling is certainly a telling “choice” about how much senior Python devs have gotten used to their ecosystem. Somewhat ditto about concern over using a more performant language for fundamental tooling (rather than pursuing the dream of writing everything in Python, which is now surely dead).

So Simon is probably right in saying (in agreement with others):

while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall

Concerns over maintainability should Astral go down may best be served by learning rust and establishing best practices around writing Python tooling in compiled languages to ensure future maintainability and composability.

Yea the writing had been on the wall for a while AFAIU. I don’t know what lessons are to be gleaned from its story, but I’d bet at a basic level it’s that building new social media spaces is not easy. An old school forum is likely fine. But a whole platform with all of the expectations and features people have today, hard if not impossible.

Oh yea I hear you.

Thanks!

Yea, the "cheaper than droids" line in Andor feels strangely prescient ATM.

Not a stock market person or anything at all ... but NVIDIA's stock has been oscillating since July and has been falling for about a 2 weeks (see Yahoo finance).

What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype? There were open reports from some major banks/investors about a month or so ago raising questions about the business models (right?). I've seen a business/analysis report on AI, despite trying to trumpet it, actually contain data on growing uncertainties about its capability from those actually trying to implement, deploy and us it.

I'd wager that the situation right now is full a lot of tension with plenty of conflicting opinions from different groups of people, almost none of which actually knowing much about generative-AI/LLMs and all having different and competing stakes and interests.

AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.

What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.

Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.

1. Fix picking an instance. It’s an irredeemably bad UX, even for tech people who could run an instance if they wanted to. Gotta remove that as an initial UX barrier first, which would require a new layer of system with integration with all of the clients.
2. Accept that this isn’t like mainstream social media and likely never will be, even if instance picking becomes easier for newcomers. So instead focus on what can be done well here. IMO it’s customisable community building.

Currently all the big fediverse platforms kinda suck at this, in part because it likely requires a bunch of features, but also because they’re all made in imitation of big social platforms that were always less “homely” and more engagement farms.

To bring normies, something new and unique needs to be offered. IMO there could be a rich ecosystem of content and structures and communities that draws people in.

My fear is that the protocol and federation are the limiting factors on this, and so I suspect some restructuring or redesign is necessary.

Yea, instead of a default instance, I think there should be a default system that assigns you to one of a set of participating “general” instances without you having to decide or think about it.

Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!

Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.

It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?