Good things are happening in the fediverses! What's on your list?

[jon]

I'm working on a post for @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange highlighting positive things happening in the fediverses. Of course there's also a lot of stuff that isn't so positive, which (not unreasonably) draws a lot of the attention ... but Mastodon in particular can be a very negative place, so it's useful to notice that hey, it's not all bad.

Here's some of the things I've got on my list of good things happening ... what's on yours?

• The Website League is a great example of focusing on the social aspects of social networking, and I'm really impressed with how they're starting with the right priorities from the beginning, learning lessons from the past, and doing their best to avoid common pitfalls (including anti-Blackness). Just as exciting to me is the network topology they're using: an "island network", taking an allow-list approach to federation. Consent FTW!

• @gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org release 0.17, with interaction controls and a lot of other improvements. I've been consistenty impressed by GtS's focus on smaller instances, privacy by default, and security; I also think they've made some great decisions including not providing their own web UI (there are plenty of great UI's out there) and having a flagship instance. This is their first beta release, and i'm excited enough that I made the jump and am setting up my own instance -- in fact I think I'll even tag @jdp23@gotosocial.thenexus.today to see if it works.

• DAIR Institute's PeerTube page, including videos of their Data Workers Inquiry and Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 (hosted by @emilymbender@dair-community.social and @alex@dair-community.social) is a great example of a fediverse presence from world-class researchers taking an anti-oppressive approach. Today's fediverse lets them provide surveillance capitalism-free access to this anti-oppressive work, and interact with people in multiple languages (thanks to Mastodon's easy-to-use in-app translation), how cool is that?

• And speaking of world-class researchers, @bonfire@indieweb.social is working with Nibö and others on Open Science Network. Bonfire's also some very doing interesting work on Prosocial Design Patterns, and the combination of their flexible framework and a focus on the social aspects of social networking opens up all kinds of possibilities.

• Bandwagon, an open community for musicians and fans, has a chance to fill a major void as Bandcamp continues to deteriorate – and is built on Emissary, one of several new platforms and toolkits that could potentially make it easier for people to build ActivityPub-based applications

• #Letterbook is continuing to make progress, and their recent moderation survey -- shared broadly with the moderator community -- is also a good example of starting with the right priorities from the beginning. As Letterbook's @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io said last year, "Tools are also reciprocal with culture. We build tools, but we are also shaped by the affordances of those tools. There's no magic to this, either, and nothing changes overnight. But when you change what's possible, what's easy, what's visible, you can change behavior. Changing behavior changes culture. And everything is downstream from culture."

• Weird is making a prosocial network based on personal websites and the combined principles of local-first and peer-to-peer. They're using the Leaf Protocol (based on Willow), and it's great to see explorations of complements to ActivityPub.

• And speaking of alternatives to ActivityPub, things are hopping in the ATmosphere, the fediverse based on Bluesky's AT Protocol. FrontPage, a link aggregator, is now open to the public ... hmm, maybe I'll try posting a link to this article there. (Update: it worked!) Over the last few weeks @laurenshof@indieweb.social's Last Week in the ATmosphere on @fediversereport@mastodon.social has covered chat service Picosky, linktree alternative linkat.blue, and audio space app Bluecast, which is big in Japan and has recently added karaoke. Plus, all the Brazilian Portuguese in my feed is definitely flexing my language muscles kkkkkkkk!

There's a lot more going on of course ... what's on your list?

#fediverse

[software_libero_e_dintorni@mastodon.bida.im]

@jon @thenexusofprivacy @gotosocial @jdp23 @emilymbender @alex @bonfire @laurenshof @fediversereport are you kidding me? I have never used a non free, as in freedom social, where the **** do you find negativity in this place?

Really, you are probably on the wrong server, join us.

Before you start free software and opensource are not the same, please read here before rpl

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.en

Cheers!
:gnu:

#FreeSoftwareRocks #JoinMastodon #LeaveYourAttitudeOnX #HereIsAboutRealFreedoms #The4Freedoms

[jon]

software_libero_e_dintorni@mastodon.bida.im I guess it depends on your definition of negativity. From my perspective, when somebody who knows nothing about my background tells me "you're probably on the wrong server" (not taking into account that I run this server myself, or that I've got accounts on multiple other servers) -- and points me to an irrelevant article by a sexist pedophilia-defending asshole -- that's a good example of negatitivity. And it wouldn't surpse me if most if not all of the other people you tagged have the same reaction.

Of course for some people, that's just everyday life!

#LeaveYourAttitudeOnBidaIM

[jdp23@gotosocial.thenexus.today]

Another really good thing is the responsiveness of developers on so many fediverse projects ... thanks @julian!

[michael@newsmast.social]

@jon I missed this until now - yes! Lots of good things going on.

[jon]

@michael@newsmast.social Yeah really! Including Patchwork and channel.org, which I'll make sure to mention in the final article!