Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!
Hey, thanks for sharing this! The site seems to be down right now, and needs to migrate over to new servers anyway. I’ll be investing time into that process - for now, I’m writing weekly articles over at the fledgling FediNews publication.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have some platforms be specialized around really particular kinds of activities, but I have like 7 different accounts floating around. It’s tiring. I’d really just prefer a good generalist platform and a handful of different apps that all hook into the same account.
That being said, I don’t mind the concept of following someone’s Pixelfed to see their neat photography pics, or another person’s PeerTube to watch their videos. In fact, if my hypothetical server can interoperate with them without any major issues, I’d consider that a win for me.
You know, every time I’ve tried to take a look at Solid’s protocol, I find myself struggling to understand what they’re actually trying to do, or how any of it is supposed to work.
I’ve tried to read the protocol spec several times, and my brain just kind of melts. From their About page for the Solid project, I kind of get what they’re talking about, but so much of the under-the-hood stuff feels really vague.
I’m not against making a fediverse platform support Solid, if only to support the core concepts its promoting, but I feel like they have a lot of work to do to make their own project more accessible to people.
So…there’s a couple of communities worth checking out!
If you want to do something purely FLOSS-related, https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/ has a pretty dedicated built-in community for that.
If you want to produce tutorials for edutainment purposes, there’s TILvids: https://tilvids.com
I’m not exactly surprised to see Roy Schestowitz taking this position. However, I think he’s making the classic mistake of assuming that centrally-issued censorship by an institution is the exact same thing as a bunch of people swinging ban hammers because they don’t like what somebody has to say.
An important component of Freedom of Speech (by extension, Freedom of Association) is the freedom of the individual to decide whether they have to listen (or in fact, associate with a person at all). I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes various parts of the fediverse can get a bit ban-happy…sometimes that sets up a toxic dynamic where the people making those kinds of announcements are at best loosely informed on what they’re spreading around. But, that’s also nothing new when it comes to online communities.
If you’re going to act like a repulsive human being, I reserve the right to cut you out of my feeds so that I don’t have to deal with you. In a sense, that puts power directly into the hands of the user.
Craigslist has long held a philosophy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” when it comes to their design and layout. Aside from some small quality-of-life changes, the site really hasn’t needed to make major adjustments the way that social media platforms have.