Decentralized Social Media
May. 29th, 2019 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldAnnouncing Penguicon.social.
Mastodon is a social media platform. My first question was "Why another one?" You know how you have a network of endless different email servers, but they can all email each other? Mastodon is self-hosted exactly like that, for social media.
Penguicon operates our own Mastodon server, https://penguicon.social, funded by Penguicon, and run on our own internet infrastructure, which can interoperate with thousands of other social media servers. That network is called "The Fediverse", a re-de-centralized web with hundreds of thousands of active users, not just abandoned accounts. It's not someday; it's real, now. It finally reached critical mass in 2016. You can see a feed of recent activity.
There are no ads, because there is no profit-motive company, just friendly neighborhood admins like me. Instead of a distant and overworked moderation team, each server has mods who they trust to design and enforce their neighborhood's code of conduct and shut down organized harassment campaigns-- at the domain-blocking level, if necessary.
No one other than Penguicon can ever shut down penguicon.social. Its funding is not from ads, of which there are none. It's from our convention's registrations, which is why we give attendees and Guests Of Honor a free account. Even if the creator (who crowdfunds his income from his Patreon) quit developing it, we could just pick up the open-source project and carry on. This year, I plan to join the Mastodon Server Covenant, which guarantees we would never shut it down without giving you three months to click the Export button and move your personal activity (which you own) to one of the thousands of other Mastodon servers.
There is now a new Fediverse distributed alternative to Instagram called PixelFed, and one for YouTube called PeerTube-- all of which shows up right there in your Mastodon feed. The Fediverse is the re-de-centralized web. It does not need to succeed or fail on the eat-the-world-or-shut-down profit models of Silicon Valley. It's chugging along just fine.
I imagine how the conflict with tech giants will play out. Imagine ten years from now, if Google dominated Mastodon like it did to email with Gmail, setting up an instance which interoperates with the Fediverse protocol. But instead of Mastodon they would invent something probably called "gplusplus.social", which spies on traffic. We could still pick up and move to a different server, just like we do with email. We could even block their entire gplusplus.social domain to prevent privacy violations. Power would be in our hands.
If you have not attended Penguicon, you can search for other instances who are accepting signups. You could certainly communicate with penguicon.social accounts from one of those, if desired.
If you have attended Penguicon, we'll give you your doorway into the Fediverse!
I'm eager to contribute to re-de-centralizing the web! See you there!
Mastodon is a social media platform. My first question was "Why another one?" You know how you have a network of endless different email servers, but they can all email each other? Mastodon is self-hosted exactly like that, for social media.
Penguicon operates our own Mastodon server, https://penguicon.social, funded by Penguicon, and run on our own internet infrastructure, which can interoperate with thousands of other social media servers. That network is called "The Fediverse", a re-de-centralized web with hundreds of thousands of active users, not just abandoned accounts. It's not someday; it's real, now. It finally reached critical mass in 2016. You can see a feed of recent activity.
There are no ads, because there is no profit-motive company, just friendly neighborhood admins like me. Instead of a distant and overworked moderation team, each server has mods who they trust to design and enforce their neighborhood's code of conduct and shut down organized harassment campaigns-- at the domain-blocking level, if necessary.
No one other than Penguicon can ever shut down penguicon.social. Its funding is not from ads, of which there are none. It's from our convention's registrations, which is why we give attendees and Guests Of Honor a free account. Even if the creator (who crowdfunds his income from his Patreon) quit developing it, we could just pick up the open-source project and carry on. This year, I plan to join the Mastodon Server Covenant, which guarantees we would never shut it down without giving you three months to click the Export button and move your personal activity (which you own) to one of the thousands of other Mastodon servers.
There is now a new Fediverse distributed alternative to Instagram called PixelFed, and one for YouTube called PeerTube-- all of which shows up right there in your Mastodon feed. The Fediverse is the re-de-centralized web. It does not need to succeed or fail on the eat-the-world-or-shut-down profit models of Silicon Valley. It's chugging along just fine.
I imagine how the conflict with tech giants will play out. Imagine ten years from now, if Google dominated Mastodon like it did to email with Gmail, setting up an instance which interoperates with the Fediverse protocol. But instead of Mastodon they would invent something probably called "gplusplus.social", which spies on traffic. We could still pick up and move to a different server, just like we do with email. We could even block their entire gplusplus.social domain to prevent privacy violations. Power would be in our hands.
If you have not attended Penguicon, you can search for other instances who are accepting signups. You could certainly communicate with penguicon.social accounts from one of those, if desired.
If you have attended Penguicon, we'll give you your doorway into the Fediverse!
I'm eager to contribute to re-de-centralizing the web! See you there!
