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Fool Me Twice We Don't Get Fooled Again: There's a crucial difference between federatable and federated.

doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-tw…

#Bluesky #Threads #Mastodon #Fediverse #Federation #SwitchingCosts #UlyssesPacts

A pair of fake screenshots, one from Threads, the other from Bluesky. The top one is from a verified account called "gwb1946" whose avatar is George W Bush's flightsuit-clad crotch. The post reads, "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you." The second post is from an account whose handle is "Regimechange," and whose userid is @missionaccomplished.failson. It reads "Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a…
Cory Doctorow (Medium)
#mastodon #bluesky #fediverse #SwitchingCosts #threads #federation #ulyssespacts

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

The Wit and Wisdom of #GeorgeWBush (a very slim volume)

doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-tw…

#Facebook #Twitter #Bluesky #Threads #Rugpulls #NonconsensualFuckabilityRatingService

It’s not (just) that Bluesky’s board includes the guy who sold Twitter to Elon Musk. It’s not (just) that Threads is owned by Facebook, a cancer of a company founded to nonconsenually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads (incredibly, that was Facebook’s least terrible moment. It actually got worse after that). It’s that neither of these services are actually federated. Both claim that this is coming. Both claim that they have the technical hooks to federate with other services when the time is ripe. But that time isn’t now. Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own. The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing. As George W Bush told us, “Fool me once, shame you. Fool me —you can’t get fooled again.” Wise words.

Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a…
Cory Doctorow (Medium)
#Twitter #bluesky #facebook #threads #georgewbush #rugpulls #nonconsensualfuckabilityratingservice
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

How things fail is more important than how they work

doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-tw…

#HardWonLessons #WisdomOfAge #GracefulFailureModes

Look, I’m 52 years old. I used to be way more interested in how things worked. Now I’m interested in how they fail. I don’t care how good the administration of Bluesky or Threads is today— I care about what happens if it sours tomorrow. Facebook has broken so many promises. Remember when Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006 with the promise of being the pro-privacy alternative to MySpace? Remember when they told us they’d never collect and mine our data? They are liars, and we shouldn’t trust them. But a company doesn’t have to be run by venal scumbags to put its own interests ahead of its users. Many is the tech CEO who reasoned that selling out their users was the moral thing to do, because the alternative was firing dozens or hundreds of people who trusted them, quit their jobs, and jeopardized their mortgages and kids’ college funds to come work for the company. Seen in that light, selling out your users is actually an act of noble self-sacrifice, in which your loyalty to your friends trumps even your pride in delivering a high-quality product.

Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a…
Cory Doctorow (Medium)
#hardwonlessons #wisdomofage #gracefulfailuremodes
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

#UlyssesPacts are how wise people protect themselves from themselves

doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-tw…

#FLOSS #CreativeCommons #IrrevocableLicenses #UlyssesWasAHacker

Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a…
Cory Doctorow (Medium)
#floss #CreativeCommons #ulyssespacts #irrevocablelicenses #ulysseswasahacker
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

Talking about federating in the future shows humility and foresight.

You know what would show more humility and foresight?

Federating right now.

doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-tw…

#MoneyTalksBullshitWalks #DeedsNotWords #WeDontGetFooledAgain

I hear that the Bluesky developers are having conversations about how they design their service to protect themselves from their future selves. That shows an admirable degree of humility and foresight. But you know what would show an even greater degree of humility and foresight? Being federated. Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends. The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good, the more we tempt their managers to break their promises and never open up federation. For the owners of a service, the fact that it is thriving as a standalone is a powerful siren song: why open this service up and share its bounty when it’s doing just fine as a walled garden?

Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a…
Cory Doctorow (Medium)
#moneytalksbullshitwalks #deedsnotwords #wedontgetfooledagain
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
• •
any way to read this without a medium account? Medium started login-walling articles at some point, it seems.
in reply to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

@rysiek @kas a) Medium is federated

b) the article is about why I won't set up on +new+, unfederated services, not why I'm ragequitting

c) Everything I write - 5-7 essays/week - are open access (CC BY you can republish them, including commercially) at pluralistic.net, and mirrored to Medium. I write one Medium column every week, which is Medium-only, and pays my mortgage.

It's OK if you want to skip that column, but I think it's hard to characterize my publishing program as ungenerous.

@Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Klaus Alexander Seistrup
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Meow :verified:
Meow :verified:
• •
@rysiek @kas Does medium make use of ActivityPub?
@Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Klaus Alexander Seistrup
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Meow :verified:
Meow :verified:
• •
@rysiek @kas Oh that's pretty cool. How do I federate with medium to get their content. Do they have one that is a bot that posts what their authors write?
@Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Klaus Alexander Seistrup
in reply to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Meow :verified:
Meow :verified:
• •
I see so I am apparently following people that are using medium already and getting their content. Very interesting.
in reply to Meow :verified:

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
• •

me.dm is a Mastodon server where people with Medium accounts have access. I don't know if they can authenticate with Medium itself or if they just have some way to request a Mastodon account.

medium.com does not interoperate with the Fediverse and me.dm holds separate content.

@Cory Doctorow's linkblog I appreciate that your content is open and on multiple services. I am enjoying it here and on your own site and don't mind that you parallel publish on medium, your strategy is up to you and I'm not contributing even a fraction of what you are doing for the web and the open internet in general. But saying that medium is not a content silo and that it's federating is factually wrong unless I'm missing something.

@Kitty :verified: :neurodi: @Klaus Alexander Seistrup @Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@Cory Doctorow @Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Klaus Alexander Seistrup @Meow :verified:
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
• •

oh no, thatw as never my intention! It was an honest question. If it's mirrored on pluralistic.net, I'll find it there, thanks!

@kas

@Klaus Alexander Seistrup
in reply to Cory Doctorow

acb
acb
• •

@rysiek I’ve seen it claimed by a number of lapsed Mastodon users now active on BlueSky that the latter’s killer feature is that the culture isn’t the Mastodon one (insert any of “HOA Karens”, “alt text/CW scolds”, “Linuxbeard mansplainers” or similar). Their view of the desirability of federating with the AP fediverse may be very different to ours.

This may also apply to people active on Threads, assuming that those exist.

@Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
in reply to Cory Doctorow

cmars
cmars
• •
Applies to fediverse projects too. If your fedi app ain't on F-Droid, how can we trust it's not gonna embrace and extend on us.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

David Fyhrie
David Fyhrie
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Why don't we try applying Asimov's 3 Laws to our existing AI corporate overlords?
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Ben Ramsey
Ben Ramsey
• •

After spending several months on Bluesky and working with the protocol (on building a PHP library for it), I realized it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Even if/when they do federate, the intent appears to be for large companies to run major portions of the protocol.

And Bluesky just converted to a C corp to take on venture capital.

I deactivated my account last week because I won’t get fooled again.

(I now have that song by The Who stuck in my head.)

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Lukas Bergstrom
Lukas Bergstrom
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@ramsey what do you mean by "run major portions of the protocol"? Control the protocol specification?
@Ben Ramsey
in reply to Lukas Bergstrom

Ben Ramsey
Ben Ramsey
• •

@lukasb This post and the one right after it explain what I mean. phpc.social/@ramsey/1108487839…

Ben Ramsey

2023-08-07 14:23:31


@DaniES Admittedly, I’m doing some reading-between-the-lines, but IMO, it’s implied:

“The federation architecture allows anyone to host a BGS, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke BGSs could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.”

blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-f…



Federation Architecture Overview

Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment for federation. In advance, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions.
blueskyweb.xyz

@Lukas Bergstrom
in reply to Ben Ramsey

Lukas Bergstrom
Lukas Bergstrom
• •

@ramsey ah! Sorry I missed that.

Must admit I'm pretty taken with the marketplace of algorithms idea ... but I see what you mean about the BGSes.

@Ben Ramsey
in reply to Lukas Bergstrom

Ben Ramsey
Ben Ramsey
• •
@lukasb I definitely think they have some good ideas in terms of the protocol and tech, but they have lots of people/culture problems they think can be solved by the tech, which IMO, won’t work out for them.
@Lukas Bergstrom
in reply to Ben Ramsey

Dani 0×1B
Dani 0×1B
• •
@ramsey Can you elaborate on the "large companies [running] major portions of the protocol"?
@Ben Ramsey
in reply to Dani 0×1B

Ben Ramsey
Ben Ramsey
• •

@DaniES Admittedly, I’m doing some reading-between-the-lines, but IMO, it’s implied:

“The federation architecture allows anyone to host a BGS, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke BGSs could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.”

blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-f…


Federation Architecture Overview

Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment for federation. In advance, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions.
blueskyweb.xyz
@Dani 0×1B
in reply to Cory Doctorow

a full-on monet
a full-on monet
• •
My father used to have a book titled “The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T Agnew” and all the pages were blank. GWB should count himself lucky he didn’t suffer the same fate.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

The Great Llama :fuck_verify:
The Great Llama :fuck_verify:
• •
To think we can look back fondly to an era where the GOP was only running someone as shitty as W.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

Shiri Bailem
Shiri Bailem
•
@Cory Doctorow's linkblog thank you so very much for putting my feelings about Bluesky and Threads into words, I think that'll genuinely help me make my point going forward
@Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow

shibaozi
shibaozi
• •
i can't take you seriously when your complaint about walled gardens literally gets cut off by a walled garden
in reply to shibaozi

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •

@shibao mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11084361…

Cory Doctorow

2023-08-06 16:29:04


@rysiek @kas a) Medium is federated

b) the article is about why I won't set up on +new+, unfederated services, not why I'm ragequitting

c) Everything I write - 5-7 essays/week - are open access (CC BY you can republish them, including commercially) at pluralistic.net, and mirrored to Medium. I write one Medium column every week, which is Medium-only, and pays my mortgage.

It's OK if you want to skip that column, but I think it's hard to characterize my publishing program as ungenerous.


@shibaozi
Unknown parent

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
• •
@ianbradbury Thank you.
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