Social Web Bookmarks

Discussion of Mastodon user experience and users that tried it and later moved to BlueSky.

FeatherPub is an implementation of ActivityPub aimed at solving several problems with the Recommendation.

Jo Freeman - Discussions about the risks of not having organization structure. Not directly Fedi-related, but this article is sometimes used to describe the problems with the Fediverse's ability to "get things done".

"And before I get into why Mastodon (as is) will fail, I want dissect all of the things Mastodon does right, and why it’s such an important stepping stone in the decentralized computing movement in general."

"[The SWF] even goes as far as wringing out the Fediverse’s own historical context as a multiprotocol polyglot network, by equating the Fediverse to just the ActivityPub protocol. Hey, look everybody, it’s Evan, the bold creator of The Social Web / Fediverse, with his one protocol that powers the entire thing!"

From the primary author of the ActivityPub spec:
"I am anticipating a crash/collapse of the fediverse in its current form at a not too distant future; hopefully we'll have more answers ready by then, but this is a multi-year project)"

"This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology powering the Fediverse (especially the ActivityPub protocol), current statistical data regarding Fediverse user distribution over instances, and the status of two older, similar, decentralized technologies: e-mail and the Web. Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale."

"Mastodon link previews can lead to excessive requests at the same time, which is not Mastodon’s fault."

Compaints about Mastodon's (and the AP microblogging fediverse) link preview behavior and the performance problems it causes.

"The short version of this is that I believe that Mastodon — more specifically federation and decentralization won't work out."