Sunday readings: analysis of the #fediverse,
Welcome to the first episode of Sunday readings on the fediverse; a free bi-weekly newsletter that discusses analysis and articles with regards to the fediverse and social networking. This newsletter gives you three articles that we think are worth reading, as well as a short discussion about it.
In this edition:
- 🔍Research on quote posting
- 🗣️Stop buying and start talking to each other again
- 📲Deploying all of the fediverse
If you enjoy reading this newsletter, you can subscribe directly on your fediverse client of choice, by searching for @fediverse-report@write.as. If you want to follow my Mastodon account, you can also get it there directly, along with other interesting news and happenings.
🔍Research on quote posting
Two weeks ago, we reported that Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s lead developer, is considering adding opt-out quote posting. This came after the discussion about the value and risks of adding quote posting flared up; late December journalist Taylor Lorentz posted about how journalists need quote posting in order to communicate effectively on the platform.
This post, and other posts that build upon it, lead to a platform wide discussion about the value and risks of quote postings. One of the main risks people see with quote posting is harrasment via pile-ons or dunks.
Writer Hilda Bastian has provided valuable context to this debate, by analysing and summarising over 30 studies on quote posting on Twitter. Her conclusion:
“Now that I’ve seen a lot more data, I’m convinced that making quoting easy is not a major vector for abuse or toxicity, and there are benefits. That’s not to say that the QT can’t be abused. Every form of tweet/post can be, and has been. The toxicity was already there, thriving in replies in particular, and amplified in all its forms by the algorithm, retweets, and hashtags.”
The entire article is worth reading in full, and can be found here.
🗣️Stop buying and start talking to each other again
The next recommendation comes in two parts. The first is the heartfelt anger, in a great essay by Catharynne Valente (Mastodon/Substack). In this essay she masterfully describes how the social networks and the internet have been taken over by corporate interests, that tell us:
“Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.”
You can read the entire essay here.
Cory Doctorow responded to this with his own essay, building upon the work by Valente, by contrasting the corporate interests that Valente describes to the fediverse. He states that the diverse communities of the early web were not accidental, but possible due to the interoperability of the early web. For Doctorow, it is this interoperability that lead this diverse netwerk of human-focused communities:
“Letting people set up their own communities, responsible to one another, is the tonic for Valente’s despair that the cycle of corporate predation and enshittification is eternal, and that people who care for one another and their communities are doomed to be evicted again and again and again and again.”
You can read Cory Doctorow’s essay here.
📲Deploying all of the fediverse
In an article called ‘deploying a piece of the fediverse’, the headline significantly understates how ‘a piece’ turns out to be an extensive description of deploying almost a dozen software solutions. Blogger Stefano Marinelli goes into great detail about his experience with deploying both front-end and back-end solutions for the fediverse. He lists reasons pro and against choosing the specific software solutions, providing a great overview of the current status of the fediverse software.
If you are interested in IT, and maybe even looking to host your own instance, this blog is definitely worth reading in full. Even if you are not, its worth scrolling through, as it helps getting a feeling of how the fediverse is indeed much bigger than just Mastodon.
That is all for now, thank you for reading, and see you next week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, do not forget to subscribe, either directly to this blog via @fediverse-report@write.as or by following my Mastodon account.
