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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Hmmmm, I suppose, but Facebook never had a Dislike, they added emoji reactions, technically, no?
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A better example for what they’re talking about might be something like a news story about something terrible. According to one paradigm, you would upvote the post for visibility. According to another paradigm (the Facebook/Friendica paradigm), you would dislike the post to express your disapproval of what’s happening.
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There are some platforms that offer emoji reactions. That at least gives a bit more nuanced of a reaction than just "up" or "down" - but it is not clear how you would use emoji reactions to sort posts. The good thing about upvotes and downvotes is that it's a very easy signal for which posts should be at the top, and which should be sorted below.
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Eh that's that age-old Reddit argument, isn't it?
Vote for visibility, not for agreement.
But yeah, like probably 99% of users abuse Like and Dislike as "I agree" and "I don't agree".
Also here's a picture just to screw with you:
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your example of how likes and dislikes can be interpreted on different platforms further reinforces my idea that likes and dislikes are an inherently bad metric that will be interpreted wildly differently between users, and that there should be better ways to interact with our posts than just two arrows.
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You express your like or dislike toward the sentiment expressed by the post, not the thing(s) mentioned in the post.
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When are you meant to use them then?
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As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI.
I don’t believe dislikes are meant to function like that on any platform.
