Lady @Lady@cat.family

@djm62 here is the history of Mastodon, in short:

• Once upon a time, there was a technology called RSS. This let you follow posts from blogs you liked.

• RSS had some failings, so some people created Atom, which was basically the same but a little better standardized and more extensible.

• People with blogs wanted people tp be able to reply to their posts. So they invented a technology called Salmon which allowed people to send messages “upstream” to the originating blog.

• People realized that blog feeds + comments was basically social media, if only they had better support for user profiles. So they adopted Portable Contacts to specify user profile information, and added a small amount of PubSub features to more clearly define the concept of “following”. They called this combination of Atom+Salmon+ Portable Contacts+PubSub “OStatus”.

• Atom feeds have a problem where they are entirely public, so it is hard to make posts which are limited in audience. Additionally, they are XML feeds, which looks antiquated to modern technologists. So people designed a JSON push-based equivalent to OStatus where you can only push messages to specific people, instead of the whole universe of social media being public feeds. And this is basically ActivityPub.

at no point did somebody sit down and say, i am going to invent social media from the ground up. that’s Bluesky. the good parts of Bluesky are because it was designed by very smart people, and the bad parts of Bluesky are because those smart people are also evil. your mileage may vary

but Mastodon developed through a long process of people adding a single feature to an existing technology to solve a specific problem. that is the beauty of it and also the folly of it. when you start from a place of public blogposts in the blogosphere in the 2000s, you are not considering harassment on Twitter in the 2010s. and building the momentum to solve that very hard problem is difficult for a technology whose history has largely been to make the smallest possible change

@djm62 Mastodon predates ActivityPub though; it was originally built on a different technology called OStatus which was a development on Atom feeds. ActivityPub itself is an evolution of ActivityPump. It was designed by a committee whose primary concern was in enabling adoption by technologies which already existed. it is ahistorical to treat it as though it emerged ex nihilo out of the brain of Zeus, and once you start taking history into account you start reckoning with concepts like inertia and historical precedent and compromise, which complicate any design narrative

but in pointing this out i am not trying to efface agency. i do not think human beings are powerless in the face of fate and i believe if there is a will there is a way. but you must understand that “with enough political will and directed attention, we can overcome our historical trajectory” is a much higher bar to clear than “smart people could have designed this better if they had a better understanding of the problem space”

when i say the history of mastodon has resembled evolution rather than intelligent design, what i mean is that that will has been absent. so it has just gone the way the winds have blown

@djm62 i think the history of the fediverse resembles evolution much more closely than intelligent design, honestly

the longstanding issue with Black users of fedi is that, while their treatment is morally offensive to intelligent people, it does not exert enough environmental pressure to force a change in an unintelligent system. the vast majority of the major changes in mastodon have been in response to environmental pressure. it is much harder to initiate a change on purely moral grounds

the computer is a powerful tool ! all you have to do is data data data data data data data data data data

data data data data data

humility is not challenging AI nerds to try to accomplish with computers the same things you are trying to accomplish with computers just to prove that AI is inadequate for the task

is Jeff Derp a baseball name

i am good at making playlists