Indieweb.social is a six-year-old. Launched only 3 years after Mastodon 1.0 itself did, give or take.Over the last two years, it was clear to me as the owner and admin that it was growing and would either need to find some form of new structure to take it to the next level, or, in some way, artificially cap or even have to find ways to shrink ongoing growth. Something I did not wish to do.| www.timothychambers.net
A few days ago, I expressed concern over Meta’s new fact-checking and content moderation policies. When Thread announced its move to the Fediverse over a year ago, we chose not to take preemptive action. Instead, we saw that we had all the tools needed for proportional responses to potential threats to keep our folks safe. And as we stated then, we would treat Threads.net like any other Fediverse server. For details on Meta’s new content policies see here: https://opentermsarchive.| www.timothychambers.net
Looking over my 2024 predictions before I make some 2025 predictions, to soberly say which ones I got right, wrong and way wrong. ▶️ For starters got this one WAY, WAY wrong: " The overall Fediverse as measured by FediDB will cross 25 million registered users, and by year’s end over 3 to 5 million monthly active users. The Fediverse will cross over 35,000 servers in 2024." The open social web did grow to about this big, but did so on BlueSky, while Mastodon and fediverse based social gr...| www.timothychambers.net
So given the post-election swell of BlueSky and Threads…and a far more modest but existent swell of new users to the Fediverse, it feels like the battle to be a non-X/Twitter microblogging solution is coming into view. Threads and BlueSky, each seeing a recent momentum of over 1 milliion users per day are the clear top two. Notable that both Theads and Bluesky are built with the open social web, and decentralized open tech features are either inherently part of both, or soon will be.| www.timothychambers.net
As we see Apple, Meta, and Google deeply integrate their AI systems deeply into their platforms, browsers, and operating systems, I think one of the competitive advantages of the Fediverse will be that it is place where USERS are in control of how they consume, share, and interact with AI generated content. This advantage to users relating to AI, I think, will rival the advantage that the Fediverse already sees in terms of being free from and in control of algorithmic manipulation, free from ...| www.timothychambers.net
This is a brief announcement announcing Indieweb.social’s future software bridge work by BridgyFed - fed.brid.gy - will enable interoperability between ActivityPub networks and AT Protocol/BlueSky users. Read the announcement at snarfed.org/2024-02-1… As a server, Indieweb.social will NOT fediblock this effort; rather, to the contrary, we will assist users in understanding how to engage with BlueSky users if they choose to do so via this new offering. This is akin to our server’s positi...| www.timothychambers.net
These are fun and like seeing the tech predictions starting to pop up in a lot of other places. Figure I should add mine about the Fediverse. All of these predictions are based on how FediDB will measure them in the next year: ▶️ The overall Fediverse as measured by FediDB will cross 25 million registered users, and by year’s end over 3 to 5 million monthly active users. The Fediverse will cross over 35,000 servers in 2024.| www.timothychambers.net
As the year ends, thought this would be a good time to list some of the projects and group efforts relating to the Fediverse I’m very jazzed about. Some I’ve helped advise, some I’ve just applauded them from a distance. I think there has been more innovation that benefits user experience inside the larger Fediverse in the last year or so, than in some of the giant closed silos of Social Media in ten years.| www.timothychambers.net
Here are some very important quotes from the head of Instagram on their roll-out of ActivytPub support and how they plan to interact with the Fediverse: which he commits to being a “fast follow” feature to add now that they have launched, where he commits to decentralization to be a long term feature, and where he discusses how content moderation at IG Threads will work with Federation server content moderation:| www.timothychambers.net
As Meta’s new App - now officially confirmed as “Threads” - has a near-term launch date of July 6th, wanted to restate that Indieweb.social will be taking the same position as almost all mid-sized and large-sized servers and will be “Watching Like a Hawk, with our Fingers Over the Block Button.” We will NOT be pre-emptively taking a “Fediblock as a Frist Strike” position. For reasons I listed here: www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/2…| www.timothychambers.net
The strum and drang of the conversation of Meta joining the Fediverse continue at it’s wild and intense pace: See this: netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/3… And to me, for the most part, that is a good thing, this is a big deal and we as a fediverse family should suss it out. We have had big turns in the road before - and we sussed it out over time. We will again when the next bigtech go adopts ActivtyPub.| www.timothychambers.net
One more post about how things are going inside the Fediverse now that #Project92 has joined the Fediverse. I have two ideas: One is that the Fediverse has ALWAYS had to make hard choices about things like this, but we’ve always found a way. We’ll do it again. The sky isn’t going to fall, and there probably won’t be a “Great Schism.” It’s a mess, but we get through it. I think that a small part of the Fediverse will take a preemptive maximalist stance and try to defederate Meta ...| www.timothychambers.net
With the #meta #Project92 or #Threads Fediverse offering, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the Fediverse public social graph today - Want proof? See here: is.gd/q8U2pv But what if they merge that Fediverse data with their own internal data from IG isn’t that worse t...| www.timothychambers.net