The Fediverse and WordPress Should Be Better Friends, with Evan Prodromou
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Evan Prodromou is often called “The father of the Fediverse”. It's amazing how much overlap there is between the aims of WordPress and Fediverse. These two communities should work together more! The Fediverse consists of independent social networking platforms including Mastodon (micro-blogging), PeerTube (videos), Pixelfed (images) and more.
Just like WordPress, most of the Fediverse runs on open source code. And just like WordPress, you get to create content that isn't swallowed by corporate algorithms. And you can build successful business or communities on your platforms that you own control.
We talk with Evan about the origins and evolution of the Fediverse. Evan has played a key role in building several early Fediverse sites such as Wikitravel, Identi.ca, and StatusNet. He also helped to develop Activity Pub which the key protocol that enables Fediverse to talk to each other.
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Evan Prodromou is often called “The father of the Fediverse”. It's amazing how much overlap there is between the aims of WordPress and Fediverse. These two communities should work together more! The Fediverse consists of independent social networking platforms including Mastodon (micro-blogging), PeerTube (videos), Pixelfed (images) and more.
Just like WordPress, most of the Fediverse runs on open source code. And just like WordPress, you get to create content that isn't swallowed by corporate algorithms. And you can build successful business or communities on your platforms that you own control.
We talk with Evan about the origins and evolution of the Fediverse. Evan has played a key role in building several early Fediverse sites such as Wikitravel, Identi.ca, and StatusNet. He also helped to develop Activity Pub which the key protocol that enables Fediverse to talk to each other.
I think proposals like Bridgy Fed and Minds.com are better, bridges run by independent groups, instead of changes being forced onto the underlying engine. When the latter is done, devs need to make changes based on the smallest common denominator, slowing or even halting individual development of environments. Bridges at least are developed adjacent to multiple environments instead of having to change fundamentals.
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I think proposals like Bridgy Fed and Minds.com are better, bridges run by independent groups, instead of changes being forced onto the underlying engine. When the latter is done, devs need to make changes based on the smallest common denominator, slowing or even halting individual development of environments. Bridges at least are developed adjacent to multiple environments instead of having to change fundamentals.
auster@thebrainbin.org may I ask you to expand in what you mean by "underlying engine"?
If you're talking about ActivityPub then it's a open standard which isn't beholden to any one organization. It's like saying HTML is bad because websites are all forced to use it as the underlying engine.
I personally feel that the technical and mental overhead of maintaining a bridge is much worse than the overhead of a slowly changing standard. What if there are bridges for 20 different protocols, 200? When does it get unweildy?
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Sounds like Rakuten actually...
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This is kind of how it works in countries that haven’t been infected by Amazon Prime. In Sweden for example most e-commerce is done directly from individual stores. There are aggregation sites like prisjakt which lists prices of all different stores so you can find the best deal.
It’s not perfect and maybe not as convenient as Amazon Prime, but I don’t see how a fediverse alternative could do it better.
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Try shopping on Discogs or EBay. They both can handle a single cart with multiple vendor items shipping from different places.
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The main reason for a store to sign up on a website would be:
Advertising Centralised shipping Centralised handling of payments (and note, this one is especially hard due to laws surrounding KYC and complexities in handling different payment methods)The Fediverse, being decentralised, has a hard time implementing the latter two. The first is basically not much different than being discoverable on Google.
So fun as it sounds, it won't be easy to implement. You'd likely have to have independent "shippers" and PSPs sign up to this, and somehow have webshops choose which to use. And that's a very awkward structure for a Fediverse-minded solution.
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There are actually 2. One is being more blatant about this and enshittifying in its attempt to be more like Amazon and hide the sellers. The other one is trying ads/subscription. I use the second.
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In the near-term, a better idea might be to establish an alternative under a co-op model, like Subvert is trying to do for music as a Bandcamp successor. Vendors are part-owners of the entity and have input into its governance. Any code should be open source, too. Federation would be great to later help turn it into a truly resilient global platform.
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I think this is a good idea
