The Post Social Media Age

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Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I'd take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future

Playing With WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish

As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s. What I mean by this is that the fediverse is a gigantic web portal. We add photos via pixelfed, video via peertube, conversations by mastodon, notes via Firefish, and blog posts via WordPress and ClassicPress, among others. The point is we're on niche platforms, talking with other niche platforms without logging in and out constantly. Log in, in one place, and we're connected to everything within the fediverse. We're on a community of communities.

Post Social Network

That's why we're in a post social media age. In the 90s and the first half of the zeros (2000s) we were on websites for our niche interests. Eventually with Twitter, Facebook and the explosion of websites it was decided that oauth was useful to make logging into and out of websites almost instant. We didn't need to think of a user name, password and all that crap. It was automatic, so we could surf between services more easily.
Remember in Twit podcasts of the mid zeroes Leo Laporte and others were speaking about signup burnout, about being tired of having to fill in forms for every single website they joined.
Now we're beyond that. Twitter is x-tinct and Facebook sees that it needs to join the fediverse, not to be irrelevant. I would argue that it is idiotic of Facebook to join the fediverse because it already has four billion users, on a planet with 10 billion people. Everyone that is on the fediverse, probably quit Facebook years ago, because of the crimes that Facebook has commited, from helping fascists reach power, encouraging genocide, playing with making people depressed, and more.

The New Era

In the age of the fediverse photo sharing is integral to the fediverse, video sharing is integral to the fediverse, blogging is integral to the fediverse, and conversations are integral to the fediverse. We can generate the content of our choice, and share it on the fediverse and everything is already integrated.

Google Reader, E-mail and FeedReaders

With Google reader, e-mail and feedreaders we could subscribe to RSS feeds to dozens, or even hundreds of feeds at a time, but every day you need to go through and mark things as read, either by scrolling through them, loading the post or other. It's easy to have hundreds, or even thousands of unread posts. With the Fediverse we don't have that problem, we jump in and out when we want, and we see what is recent, rather than what is recommended. We can see what is recommended, but in my eyes the people we "follow" are already recommending things for us to see.

Corporate Social Media and the Cost of Quitting

“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”

When Jaiku and Twitter were competing I preferred Jaiku, and when Twitter and Identica were competing I preferred Identica. I loved Google + but it was destroyed. I liked Google Reader but it was destroyed. I liked Instagram but it was bought by Facebook and destroyed. Facebook destroyed itself, by encouraging people to see stuff by strangers, rather than their friends, forcing people to seak new groups. Some of those groups were toxic, so I dumped Facebook.

With the fediverse you can be on three, four or five instances and follow all the same people across each instance. You're not stuck to a single instance. There is no single point of failure. You can bounce from instance to instance, and occasionaly look for replies and reactions.

And Finally

One of the beautiful things about the Fediverse is that we don't need to see ads anymore. We just see content, conversations and community. We don't have to scroll down and see posts that look like posts, until you notice they're selling cryptocurrency, magical cures, or other rubbish. Twitter was fun, but now we're scrolling by an advert every fourth or fifth post, like it was with Instagram after Facebook bought it.

I like the Fediverse and what it represents.