Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by jonl Sun 19 Nov 23 12:22>
  

    
What if The WELL did in fact develop a way to support the ActivityPub
protocol?




1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
2. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
  

    
How would that work with the "gated community" aspect of the WELL?
  

    
IS there an implementation of ActivityWeb of appropriate scale to be
installed inside the WELL's gates, so each user could have an
easily-run instance with all the instances served under
https://www.well.com?
  

    
> How would that work with the "gated community" aspect of the WELL?

the hometown fork of mastodon allows local-only posting:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown
In the context of Hometown, local only posting is a per-post
security option that lets you set whether that post can federate out
to other servers or not.
  

    
I'm reposting <76> because I saw a rather serious typo... "I'm
thinking that we'll become less centralized" in the 2nd paragraph
was mistyped "I'm thinking that we'll become less decentralized,"
rather seriously mucking with the meaning...

Reading Jeff Jarvis' book _The Gutenberg Parenthesis_ and
interviewing him
<https://plutopia.io/jeff-jarvis-beyond-the-gutenberg-parenthesis/>
helped me understand a bigger picture: when print appeared, it
transformed culture, and it led to the more organized and top-down
ways we've had of disseminating information and culture over the
last centuries since it appeared. The Internet closes the
parenthesis on print culture, centralized and organized information
and media systems. Before print, information was socialized - and
we're back to the socialization of information in the Internet era.
But one key thing I got from Jeff is that the print transformations
evolved for centuries, and we're just a couple of decades into the
Internet era. A transitional period. So we're just beginning with
it, a transitional phase, and the negative aspects we're seeing
right now will inevitably be addressed as we find our way forward.
We're in the moment, and it's hard to see the bigger picture.

Right now I'm thinking that we'll become less centralized, that we
won't have another Twitter, which held so many threads of culture
and information for a few years but was laboring under the weight of
it. It was a system that was on a blurry line between mass media
culture and decentralized Internet culture, but its time is past.
Facebook is less of a centralized system - it's a platform that
hosts many clusters of information and community. It might survive
if it leans into its strengths, and especially if it acknowledges
and joins the Fediverse networked way of doing things.

In 1992 the Electronic Frontier Foundation called a meeting with
several local (state) groups that had formed throughout the US. It
was going to be a chapters organization, community based, with the
WELL's Cliff Figallo running the show. But that plan changed when
EFF hired Jerry Berman, who was more of a Washington lobbyist. He
convinced EFF to forego the community approach and to focus on
political action in DC. So when the EFF board showed up, they
revealed that they wouldn't have chapters after all. But they said,
as an Internet organization, it didn't make sense to do that anyway
- build a centralized organization with a bunch of chapters. Instead
EFF could become one part of a network of autonomous groups,
decentralized but working on similar goals. Some of the others
attending were upset at the change, but I thought the network idea
was right on. We did that for a while - and some of those groups
probably still exist. EFF drifted away from the idea and focused
more on its own stuff for years, but a few years ago came back to it
and formed the Electronic Frontier Alliance
<https://www.eff.org/fight>.

Looking at the evolution of the Internet era, I expect whatever
social technologies form and evolve to be close to the Fediverse
model - a network of autonomous entities sharing information
socially, vs centralized systems for top down information
distribution. This raises a lot of questions - one that's most
compelling right now is about how to get true and accurate
information through a network of autonomous social networks. We're
seeing at the moment how that kind of system can be infected... we
need to work on information vaccines.
  

    
>how to get true and accurate information through a network of
>autonomous social networks.

We still haven't sorted out how to do that with media and how to
correct it once it's discovered.

A year or two before the 2016 election, Pittsburgh's centrist
newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was taken over by a Trumper.
We didn't know that and when the paper *didn't* endorse Clinton in
2016 many of us subscribers were "WTF?"  After Trump won the election,
the new publisher John Block started firing people too critical of
Trump and hiring right-wingers.  Post-Gazette staff have been on
strike for over a year and it's rumored that Block has been
outsourcing some work to non-union shops.  The Block family
effectively controls the paper and some other media outlets.

How do we "fix" that?  Or can we?  The other major paper in town is
owned by the Scaife family so there is no competition.

I bring this up because I think it parallels Musk taking over Twitter
and destroying what was a functioning service.  Can any federated
system build up the reputation and sincerity(?) to be trusted?  Or is
this USENET and the Eternal September?  Single-sourced social media is
now a thing of the past?
  

    
> Can any federated system build up the reputation and sincerity(?)
to be trusted?  Or is this USENET and the Eternal September?

these good questions remind me of the end of this article:

https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/04/eternal-september/
Instead, we might remember Eternal September as an instructive
failure. In 1994, the people finding their way to the Net were more
diverse in every way than those that had come before. When USENET
failed to accommodate them, these newcomers formed communities
elsewhere on the nascent Web. Eternal September was not an end but
the beginning of a more open, inclusive internet.
  

    
Does the federation software include a way to manage globally unique
user IDs? Impersonation and throwaway trash accounts are problematic
on some platforms.
  

    <scribbled by mazz Mon 20 Nov 23 12:05>
  

    
> Does the federation software include a way to manage globally
unique user IDs? Impersonation and throwaway trash accounts are
problematic on some platforms.

mostly, but there's no guarantee that projects are sufficiently
compatible with each other and there's no guarantee that IDs
(user@domain) are globally unique. a common test suite could be
really helpful here.  regardless, this doesn't rule out the
possibility of shenanigans.  for instance, someone could deploy a
modified version of mastodon and forge a green lock used for link
verification but such a server might get blocked pretty quickly.  
  

    
Yesterday was the final day of the panel's commitment to participate
in this two week discussion of the Fediverse. Our thanks especially
to Tom Brown and Manton Reece, who helped put this session together.
Thanks to the other participants: Johannes Ernst, Evan Prodromou,
and Kevin Marks. And thanks to the others who joined the
conversation. Also thanks to all the technology developers and
advocates that are making the Fediverse and IndieWeb happen every
day.

The end of the formal discussion doesn't mean the end of the
discussion: this topic isn't going away, and participants are
welcome to keep posting.
  

    
And again, if you ARE a Well member, visit <mastodon.ind.> with
specific questions or to get an update on or help using the Well’s
(still unofficial) instance.
  

    
Thanks for this!