mastodon/gnusocial/disapora/minds/etc - free software social networks and federation

The problem is they're an echo-chamber and it's junk for your brain. RMS said social media in itself isn't a bad thing, he just doesn't like black-boxes and he doesn't use them because they don't appeal to him. I like RMS' reasons for not using it, but I'll go further and say social media isn't what the internet is supposed to be.

The internet is supposed to IRC, XMPP, Mumble, eMail, Forums, Geocites/Neocites and self-hosted in your closet like peertube or your own site. This is what the Internet is supposed to be: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ (Though depending on the time you read this the site might be down, when the battery dies, the server goes offline)

The internet is supposed to be a post-office and I think even decentralized social media is brain junk food because of the way it's designed with reward brain chemical hackery. So in a way, it hacks your brain.

Whether or not one personally approves of social media the fact is that many humans enjoy communicating via facebook, twitter, etc. Political parties from all sides of the spectrum use it to communicate supposedly efficiently to many followers. From this point of view, for all its weaknesses, social media sites are part of human society and communication. In some ways its similar to past communication methods such as newspapers or TV. Newspapers and TV have their own weaknesses, including the possibility of owners wishing to manipulate democracy.

My fear about facebook and twitter is that one day it might be possible that an undue influence is applied to them so as to positively amplify certain views and negatively amplify other views, thereby manipulating supposed free speech within supposed democracies. Perish the thought such a day may have already arrived.

Commodore sir, you say that social media is an echo chamber but its obvious that on sites such as twitter one gets dissenting views and opposing arguments can be presented. I have seen it and I think that is not an echo chamber.

This is why I am in favour of the principles of decentralised social media. I'm not bothered by the fact that have much fewer users than the mainstream centralised social media. Having said that I did not yet try them and I suppose I just have to jump in and see for myself but I just wondered if anyone in the Trisquel forum had any views and experience with "federation". Thanks for the messages so far...

Ok. Thanks for your views commodore. In my view its possible to meet people in reality as well as participate with online forums of various kinds. But in principle social media/internet communication can more easily reach greater numbers of people so if you have a message to spread or defend I think its fair enough to use it. I'd say this forum we are writing in here is a form of social media, or to put it another way "a form of communication". If you choose not to use forms of social media or forms of communication then that's surely simply a matter of personal choice and freedom.

I have been doing research for fediverse.party, which aims to be a user-friendly introduction to the federated social web. I aim to inform the ongoing development of the fediverse.party site by helping to keep the information on these wiki pages up-to-date:
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/

We currently define the fediverse as a meta-network made up of any webserver running social web software that can implement one or more of four protocols (in order of age); OStatus, Diaspora, Zot, and ActivityPub.

PrimeOrdeal:
> If I understand correctly(?) it is possible to spot simultaneously to multiple networks - is that a two way communication option or is it broadcast only?

A webserver running software using those protocols is called an "instance", which is usually known by its domain name. Whichever instance you join, you can interact with other users on any other instance that communicates via at least one of the protocol(s) that the software on your instance uses. All communication on the fediverse is two way, but most of the apps give you some ways to mute or block other users who are spamming, flooding, or abusing you, or otherwise being a nuisance.

> Is it good?

That's a matter of opinion ;) I have had some great conversations on the fediverse, even made some friends, one of whom I've since spent some time hanging out with in person. I've learned about a lot of new developments in software and politics, and seen some very funny jokes and memes. I've also been bullied and harassed on a few occasions, and got into a few arguments that I might have been best to avoid. YMMV ;)

What I suggest you do is set up a Friendica account on a site like Libranet, and lurk for a while. You can search for hashtags (eg #GNU) and read the conversations threads that included those tags. You can click on the username of any poster in those threads who and read their recent posting history. If you like what you see, you can start following people whose posts you'd like to read regularly, and replying to posts you find interesting.

Friendica implements OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub, so you can get a pretty good overview of a larger cross-section of the fediverse than if you use Mastodon, which now only has ActivityPub support (they recently dropped OStatus and never implemented Diaspora). GNU social only uses OStatus, although an ActivityPub implementation is in the works.

If you'd like to interact with me on the fediverse, I am:
name at domain, or name at domain