Re: A thought experiment: writing a report on intermediary protocols

> Am 07.02.2022 um 14:16 schrieb Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com>:

> it actually removes one of the few reasons why people get fed up and try alternative social networks such as Mastodon even if almost no one is there). 

But the social network is called “ActivityPub” here. 
mastodon is just 1 of many softwares which the 8.5 million people use with the network, an Open Protocol, a W3C recommendation and the world’s leading federated social web standard.
A selection: http://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/c/software/14

Please, let us not create new monopolies by saying mastodon when we mean ActivityPub.
It is hard enough to accept the new "Trump mastodon monopoly" ($1.3 billion, says 75 mio. users, together with Thiel who left Meta) … 
[
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-mastodon-trump
https://mashable.com/article/trump-social-media-mastodon
https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000132359996/truth-social-trumps-internetplattform-soll-im-februar-starten ff.
]

It might defer from country to country. In Germany authorities and political parties do use ActivityPub. 
My hope was that such a recommendation will be build upon decentralised or federated W3C standards and not a “dominant platform”.



> Am 07.02.2022 um 17:09 schrieb Chris Riley <me@mchrisriley.com>:
> 
>  Adding a further degree of orthogonality, the specific notion of a third-party recommender system is orthogonal also to this and in my mind primarily addresses the problem of a lack of agency with respect to existing platforms (rather than challenging their dominance). I would fully accept if the collective sentiment of the group is to focus on a different problem; my suggestion is that we can find the most collective impact through something like this proposal, given that it isn't inherently dependent on changes to law/regulation, but nevertheless intersects well with those efforts.

ack

> Thanks Sebastian! From my perspective, there's a ton of value in developing a sort of federated trust/values signal that could be part of this as well - but that's an ambitious exercise in its own right, and able to be considered separately rather than necessarily as a component of a third-party recsys. No reason why we couldn't have parallel efforts tackling them together as there's a lot of value in the pairing of the two. Does that make sense?


Yes. 
We have frequent developer meetings in Social CG, they could potentially overlap.


> Am 07.02.2022 um 18:05 schrieb hellekin <how@zoethical.com>:
> With this 'social network' unavailable to European citizens, another Fediverse is possible.
> 

I agree very much, it would be …
My 5 cents: FB will not leave Europe, they have tried the same kind of extortion to the EU many times. 
Last was 2 years ago 
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/22/facebook-says-it-may-quit-europe-over-ban-on-sharing-data-with-us