blog: add twitters demise is activitypubs future
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title: "Twitter's demise is ActivityPub's future"
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date: '2022-11-12'
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---
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Earlier today, I deleted all of my tweets and left Twitter forever. While I
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plan on leaving a nightlight thread for a while, I will eventually close my
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account, assuming Elon doesn't do it for me.
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The past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as I have watched
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everything play out.
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I was one of the original fediverse users when Indymedia UK stood up the
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`indy.im` StatusNet instance at the end of 2010.
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After some time, Evan Prodromou got bored with the StatusNet code base
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and started Pump instead, with the network losing the largest instance
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at that time, `identi.ca`.
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With the network fragmented as a result of that switch, I got bored of
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it and started using Twitter instead.
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Eventually StatusNet was forked by Matt Lee and a few other FSF staffers and
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became GNU Social.
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I was not really around during this time, but it was around that time that
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GamerGate happened, which created a network where half of the users were
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Indymedia contributors and the other half were the initial seeds of the
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alt-right.
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While I was not heavily involved from a development perspective in the early
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days of what we now call the fediverse, this began to change in late 2016 when
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Eugen Rochko started Mastodon.
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I was an early adopter of Mastodon, deploying Mastodon 0.6 on Heroku, using the
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`mastodon.dereferenced.org` domain for my account.
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But running Mastodon on Heroku (and later Scalingo) was expensive. I did not
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want to manage a Rails application by hand, and I hadn't started using Docker or
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Kubernetes yet.
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In early 2018, a developer psuedonymously known as lain began adding ActivityPub
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federation support to Pleroma, and he convinced me to try it out as an alternative
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to running Mastodon.
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I found Pleroma and developing with Elixir to be exciting and fresh, compared to
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other technology I was working with at the time. I felt empowered to start doing
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serious hacking on ActivityPub as a result of writing patches to Pleroma and
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sending them to lain.
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After a while, I became a Pleroma developer with commit rights.
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I felt like we could use the same strategy I used to promote Alpine to promote Pleroma:
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build a coalition of willing influencers to demonstrate the value proposition of
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self-hosted social networks for user freedom, and so I started working on building
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a group around it.
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Because I was showing it to friends I already had, Pleroma grew into being a
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project where many of the contributors were from queer and marginalized backgrounds
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similar to mine.
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Everything was going fine. As a team, we built a lot of features that are still
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innovative in this space, such as MRF and building the LitePub profile of ActivityPub,
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which shifted the protocol from being a Content *Distribution* protocol to being a
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Content *Advertisement* protocol.
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Towards the end of 2019, it started going to shit. By that time, I was running a
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public instance, and the database kept having index corruption issues on a daily
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basis.
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Around the same time, the Soapbox project was launched, and they decided to use
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Pleroma as their backend. This led to a lot of friction inside the project, because
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the Soapbox author had a tendency to share [his ideological positions][ag-trans]
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inside the project space as part of his anti-trans activism.
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I wound up leaving Pleroma toward the middle of 2020 because of the scalability
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issues in the database with Pleroma 2.0 and the lack of any effort to maintain a
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welcoming space for everyone.
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[ag-trans]: https://blog.alexgleason.me/trans/
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I decided to take a break from the fediverse because of that decision, because I
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felt a break was warranted. I decided to try Twitter in earnest during that time,
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but to be honest, I've never found using Twitter to be enjoyable in the same way
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as I found the fediverse to be enjoyable.
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As I said a few weeks ago, I think that [commercial microblogging][cmb] has been
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an absolute disaster for our society. Relationships on Twitter are parasocial
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and transactional, which leads to poisonous behavior, while relationships in the
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fediverse are largely grounded and mutual.
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[cmb]: https://ariadne.space/2022/10/27/the-internet-is-broken-due-to-structural-injustice/
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In April of this year, Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter. Based
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on the experience of watching a [rich fanatic purchase and then ruin something he
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deeply cared about][leenode] and my experience of being a Tesla owner, I thought it
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would be relevant to set up an [escape hatch][th-masto]. Others were of the same
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mind, and we shared notes.
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[leenode]: https://ariadne.space/2021/05/20/the-whole-freenode-kerfluffle/
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[th-masto]: https://social.treehouse.systems/
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With the events of the past few weeks, I strongly believe that Twitter's demise is
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going to bring all of the proprietary social silos crashing down. People are starting
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to realize that trading freedom for the alleged convenience of using a proprietary
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network isn't worth it. Although not perfect, ActivityPub is eating the world: there's
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now a million new users a week and this number is growing.
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### ... which brings me to the not so fun part, the things that aren't going so well.
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Although the fediverse is a decentralized and disparate network with many different
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groups with their own cultural norms, some of them have tried to enforce their cultural
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norms on the new users. This is normal and to be expected to some extent, as people
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don't like big changes.
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I don't want to get into the nuances of some of these conversations. What I do want
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to say is that the fediverse is a diverse network of different people who bring their
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own styles and approaches to posting and content curation. It is entirely fine to
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bring your whole self to the conversation in uncensored form if that is what you feel
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is right to do. Do what *you* feel is right, and don't worry about people muting or
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blocking your account, because you're not here for *them*, you're here for *yourself*
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and you will meet likeminded people regardless of who blocks you.
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The other problem is, of course, a question of scaling anti-abuse tools. Many have
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posted screenshots of abuse they have received, and it comes from a segment of the
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larger network where the culture is most diplomatically described as "player vs
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player." It is fine for those instances to exist, but we need to build better tools
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so that newcomers can be aware of segments of the network that they may want to
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exclude themselves from: what we have today where admins informally share threat data
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with each other is hard to scale upwards.
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In general these are good problems to have, because they are easy to overcome. Overall
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the future is looking bright.
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### Which instances are you recommending right now?
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At the moment, I am trying to recommend instances which have a moderation policy
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aligned with providing a safe space for marginalized identities like mine which
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are also targeted at technical people.
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Some recommendations:
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- [hachyderm.io](https://hachyderm.io), running Mastodon 3.5.3 and administrated
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by Kris Nova and other volunteers.
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- [social.restless.systems](https://social.restless.systems), running Mastodon 4.0 and
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administrated by NCommander, a tech YouTuber.
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- [social.treehouse.systems](https://social.treehouse.systems), run by me and other
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volunteers. It also runs Mastodon 4.0.
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The reasons why I recommend these instances are because the administrative capabilities
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far exceed those required by the Mastodon Server Covenant: the above instances are run
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by teams with marginalized backgrounds and extensive SRE experience.
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I am planning to put together a larger tool for finding instances which have been stood
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up as part of this new wave of SRE-backed quasi-professional instances.
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### What next?
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Next time, I will write a bit about how my own instance is put together and how it has
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evolved over the past few months. Stay tuned for that one.
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