Technology

Now if only I could get a meaningful reply to a bug preventing complete account deletion, either on github or from support. It seems they modeled their support structure on Google's.

Let's see here... ahh yes, it's a company run by a board with a CEO based in Amerikkka. Who gives a shit if it's non-profit or not, the users are not in control. No thanks.

What I don't get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren't the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.

I stopped reading when the "journalist" asked this question:

How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform?

How little research must one do to credulously repeat that PR talking point for a platform that is in fact completely centralized?

"Today, social media, tomorrow the world! Muahahahaha!"

You have mastodon, which actually made a federated social media platform, but which has failed to become mainstream, and Blue sky which became mainstream, but has failed to actually become federated.

All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.

... but probably not.

this is potentially the last social identity you have to create.

..as long as you stay centralized on the central BlueSky instance. Once you move out to a (potential, future) federated server, that identity (and it's super duper verification) doesn't follow you.

Decentralized app plotting a total takeover of the social internet? Are these tryouts for the mental gymnastics invitational?

As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.

Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club's rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.

The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn't even hear about it.

Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.

Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.

Are they building an army with troops, tanks, aircraft and naval ships? Are they going to physically and violently take over the social internet?

Normies will be using weibo before they use Mastodon