blog: add twitters demise is activitypubs future

content/blog/twitters-demise.md

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