Hello and welcome to episode 75 of Linux Downtime, I'm Joe.
I'm Gary and I'm Marmarith.
Nice to talk to you both again.
So today I want to talk about open communication platforms.
Social platforms are messaging to some extent as well.
Are we really seeing this renaissance of it?
Is this this rebirth of the open internet, things like the Fediverse mastered on being the
prime example of it?
Are we seeing a break away from these big companies that have locked our communications
up for the last 10 plus years?
Or are we as open source people just living in this tiny bubble on Mastodon, patting each
other on the back and congratulating each other on a job well done of getting away from
Twitter and Facebook?
I think you'd be hard pressed to say that there's not a renewed interest in open communication.
The proprietary methods have definitely done a good job at making everybody look for
alternatives.
From my point of view, there's a lot of people that are looking for a multi-protocol client
again because social networks are what they are, you're not going to get everybody on
the single one.
And what I mean social networks, I mean your social circles, not an actual social network
like Facebook or Twitter or anything.
So are you seeing an uptake in activity in the pigeon community then?
Yeah, I mean, not as much as we did in like the mid-Auts and stuff like that.
But it's definitely starting to come back.
There's more people looking at it.
Even if you just search like Twitter or something, you'll see people like remember the days
of pigeon and Trillion, we really need that again.
That's a common thing.
You will see if you search, which I do.
So you've been searching for yourself again?
Well, you're on projects.
It's not quite as bad a session for yourself, I guess.
Right.
It's mostly to do like supporting stuff, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Emily, I know you've been into the Fed of us for a long time since way before it was
so you might be a little bit biased on this.
Just a little bit.
My Mastodon.social profile, I think, was created in 2017.
And then I moved to Fostodon.
Then I ran my own Mastodon instance, decided I didn't like Mastodon.
Switched to Pluroma, added Miski, did away with Miski, switched to Akoma instead of Pluroma.
It's a fork.
And I also run, let's see, PeerTube.
I ran a plume instance for a while, which is like long form blogging on the Fed of us.
And mobile is on, I think, is how you pronounce it.
Not entirely certain.
It's a tool by Fremasoft that's supposed to replace like Facebook events, kind of.
I've been in the Fed of us for a long time.
Yes.
So you did all that and then graduated elementary school, that's pretty much it.
Absolutely.
A hundred percent.
Yeah, because you're like, what, 15 now?
And that was like, however many years ago, I lose track.
No, no, no.
So in 2017, I was 17.
It's very easy to keep track of.
Oh, it is easy, isn't it?
Well, nevertheless, you were very young.
That's all you've ever known then.
You sort of grew up in a time when everyone else was using the like,
the Twitter and Facebook, but you weren't then.
I deleted my Facebook account in something like 2015,
because I just wasn't interested.
I never used it.
I was never interested in any social media, really,
until I got onto the Fed of us.
And I had a lot of fun.
You see, the reason I asked this about whether we're just in this bubble here
is that for me, it's great.
I don't have to see anything that I don't want to see unmasked on.
It's very rare.
I mean, I'd see some sort of quite self-absorbed people that I might mute.
But there's no one who's, you know, a bad person.
They might just post a little bit too much and be a bit annoying.
But on Twitter, there's people who are like,
at least their online presence suggests that they are a bad person
who I actively want to block.
And I don't get that unmasked on.
But then the world is still continuing to use Twitter.
The world is continuing to use Reddit,
even after all the drama that was seen with that recently.
The world's, over a certain age,
continues to use Facebook on a daily basis.
It's not like the Fed of us and Open Protocols
have actually replaced anything for most people.
It seems to just be like a fracturing.
And I've talked about this on the late night, Linux.
Like there's almost a split of people now.
There's the sort of tech elites that, you know,
I jokingly say that we belong to.
But maybe it's not such a joke.
Maybe we are the tech elites that have worked out
that there's this thing called Mastodon
and the Fed of us and everything.
And yet normal people are just,
they don't care that Musk has bought Twitter and ruined it
and allowed just terrible, terrible things
to be set on there, totally unchecked.
I think for many people,
the issue is more the cost of the change.
So like if you want to get everyone to move to Mastodon,
you've got to get a critical mass of people
they want to follow.
Otherwise, what's the point of them moving?
And it becomes a catch 22 where like,
I'm not gonna move because nobody's here
and then their entire social network
says the same thing.
And that's why we see stuff like Facebook and Twitter
and Reddit, people are still using it
because it's common, they know how to use it
and they don't see a need to change
because you know, they'd have to go
and rebuild their entire communities and stuff like that.
So am I just lucky that everyone I want to follow
went over to Mastodon at the same time I did that?
I would say, yeah.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Uprooting social graphs is very difficult.
My girlfriend is just as technical
and knowledgeable about all the stuff as I am
and she was on Twitter and is still on Twitter
and that's because the majority of her social graph
was rooted in Twitter and they weren't moving
so she didn't move.
But then I gave her an invite for Blue Sky
and she's found that most of the people she follows
are also on Blue Sky, also posting there
and she said she's been enjoying that a lot.
So her social graph is slowly moving
shifting away from Twitter, which allowed her to do that
which is going to allow some of the people
that follow her to do that.
It's a very slow trickle, I think.
The only time you see these mass exodus is basically
what like a service gets shut down.
Like there was the initial exodus to Macedon
when Musk took over Twitter.
But like since then things have kind of calmed down
and that kind of stuff.
But it'll continue trickling for a long time
either until the service disappears
or everybody just settles.
What do we make of Blue Sky then?
I've read pieces suggesting that it's cosplaying being open.
So I've started looking at the documentation
of the AT protocol or AT, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
That's the distributed peer-to-peer protocol.
It's similar to Activity Pub that's behind it.
There's a lot of crypto in it, a lot of interesting stuff
and a lot of interesting ideas.
I don't know of anybody else
that's been trying to build their own implementation yet.
Cryptocurrency or cryptography?
Cryptography.
Okay, that's okay.
You got us worried that.
Wow, okay, right, good.
I've been around the world before crypto was tainted.
So when I talk about cryptography, I refer to it as crypto.
I thought you were talking about cryptos a lot, did you?
Yeah, let's watch out for Bigfoot and the code base.
So there's a lot of cryptography and stuff to make it
so you can jump between different instances
and keep everything and all that.
And do that in a way without a central authority,
which is very cool.
And again, not to be confused with cryptocurrency,
but it's a lot to digest.
And I started looking at it, obviously,
to see how it could start integrating into Pigeon.
And I'm just like, all right, I have to put this down for now
because it's going to take a lot of time to figure it out
and go from it.
The concern is that at least from my point of view,
I haven't seen or heard anybody making another client
or another server.
It's still invitation only.
Like you still need a code to join it.
Like what kind of federation is that, man?
Right, but more importantly than that, right?
So like when you look at like mastodon and activity pub,
right, you've got mastodon, you've got Paloma,
you've got, it's not, I'm messed up names.
You've got multiple instances of the servers, right?
We don't have that yet on Blue Sky.
And that's where my concern comes from.
And likewise with the clients, right?
So like I could fix the client program
by building a pigeon plugin,
but we're still only talking to one instance
when we, in theory, if it was a healthy distributed network,
there should be multiple servers at this point.
And are we ever going to get to a point
where we have multiple servers,
even though it is relatively open, right?
But still it's centralized at the same time.
And that just is a bit of a oxymoron, right?
Like you can't be open and centralized at the same time.
Yes and no.
Back in the day, jabber.org was the de facto XMPP server.
But over time, additional servers got written.
And that's all based on the federated network as well.
And jabber.org is still around.
But now there's all sorts of other services as well
that people use to talk on XMPP.
Does it come down to critical mass in a way?
Like you need a critical mass to get a platform going.
And you need a critical mass of people
who want an alternative way to connect to that other place.
Like there needs to be enough people on Blue Sky
to begin with on the original server.
And then there needs to be enough interest
in having a complimentary server that can talk to it.
And we're just not there yet.
And we may never get there.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
So XMPP back in the day was kind of like
mastered on this right now for us.
Where it's like the tech elites are on it.
But then when Google Talk came out, Google Wave,
and Facebook Messenger came out,
they were all using XMPP and they were federated.
That's when XMP saw this, I don't want to say Renaissance,
but they saw a huge amount of adoption
because everybody could use it.
Whereas right now we're seeing something similar
with Macedon and Meta.
And Meta might bring a ton of people into it.
I know there's a lot of controversy.
People have a lot of opinions about Meta being on the Fediverse.
But it's going to get the people that are only on Facebook
and stuff like that into the Fediverse.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, right?
Depending on what Facebook does with it,
that's completely orthogonal to getting
the people that are on Facebook onto the Fediverse.
And that's where the critical mass comes from.
I just don't get the problem with this.
A lot of people are up in arms.
Oh no, Meta, Facebook is going to be getting its tendrils
into the Fediverse.
Yeah, and it's open.
Let them, if you don't like it.
Block them just like we did with GAB.
I have the same viewpoint where,
because ActivityPub is open,
anybody can literally go in and do whatever they want
with that data right now.
Now, yes, Meta is known to be a bad actor
in a number of ways,
but better to have the enemy you know
than the enemy you don't kind of thing, I don't know.
Well, yeah, people are complaining
that Meta's going to suck up everyone's data from the Fediverse.
Well, you put it out there.
You knew what the risks were.
If you have your own little private server
that can only talk to other instances
and isn't properly federated, then okay, fine.
You're probably going to avoid them,
but if you want something like fostered on,
and I just broadcast to the world,
and so anyone could just use Curl or Wget
at the end of the day.
It'd be a lot longer to do it that way,
but nevertheless, anyone who wants the data
that I put out on Mustadon can get it.
Whether or not Meta, Facebook, whatever you want to call them,
joins the Fediverse to get my data
or just uses a web browser or a script.
Doesn't really make any difference, does it?
I recently saw a post on the Fediverse
that boiled down to just because it's open,
does not mean we want everyone to come in and join in.
Openness is for like hacking on it.
Hang on, it's open for the people that we want it
to be open for, but not for the people we don't.
That's not what open means.
Not necessarily.
The thing worded it much more eloquently than I am.
Yes, but the point remains,
it's very much like the pseudo-open source licenses
that try and stop people.
I mean, I remember the original debate was around
whether people could use it for weapons and war stuff
or whatever, and then the whole Amazon reselling services
and you had source available licenses and everything.
It seems like the same argument to me.
Either it's open or it's not,
and open doesn't always mean good.
You have to take the rough with the smooth.
My original viewpoint was that
meta-joining the Fediverse was a bad thing
for all the reasons we've mentioned,
but I am coming around to the opinion that,
eh, I don't care.
I mean, I'm gonna block them.
Excellent, once again, we've convinced you
that we're right and we are wrong, our left.
There's a pattern emerging here on this show.
This is an opinion I was coming to before we started
in this episode.
Okay, okay, good.
Because we can block them,
I think a lot of people should block them,
but it's not going to affect me.
I mean, all the data collection stuff they can do
if they were going to, they already are.
Yeah.
And if you put it on the internet,
it isn't a longer private.
I know, what about all our DMs?
Does that mean they're not private anymore?
Well, I don't know about that one.
If they're not end-end encrypted,
assume at some point they will become public domain.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, I don't know whether that's a good thing,
but that is a reality that should be accepted.
Yes.
To be clear, this is just the,
everybody will eventually get compromised
if you point.
And that's why you want to do the end-end encryption
is because even if the company tries to do
their due diligence, they may eventually get hacked
and everything may leak.
Yeah.
I know they're gonna find out that we discussed
what to talk about on the show and then did the show
and put it all out publicly.
Yeah.
I'll find out how hard it is to schedule
one of these recordings as well.
If anyone ever sees the who's on first style fiasco
that was I was trying to work out
how to schedule our recordings then.
Such a mess.
We're just all finished, I think, at that point,
as internet citizens.
Remind me what UTC is again,
this is London time.
The circling back to Blue Sky.
My opinion on it is we just need to wait
to see how it ends up being.
It's too early right now to know whether it's gonna succeed,
whether it's gonna flop.
I don't know.
I've been using it.
I don't really like the experience
compared to the Fediverse and the platforms on the Fediverse.
Blue Sky feels extremely immature,
which it is Fediverse platforms
and activity pub have been around for,
I don't know, 10 years at this point, something like that.
It started with...
Can you social, I think, in 2012?
Can you social?
And I think the protocol was like,
oh status or something, I don't know.
It's been around for a long time.
Blue Sky is brand new.
Well, you don't need an invitation
to find out the sum total of what I have posted.
I've retweeted a couple of things.
I don't call it that, whatever.
Reposted one thing, actually.
I've heard people calling it re-skete.
Yeah, they call them skits.
I don't get it.
I don't like it.
Like clay pigeons.
Yeah, if it doesn't involve a shotgun, it's not a skate.
Ah, I see.
But the only thing I've really posted is
what if mastered on but worse in every conceivable way?
It's just a bit rubbish, isn't it, at the moment, yeah?
One of the things that drives me nuts about it
is there's no emoji support on the website.
I know.
I press a colon.
I expect short code suggestions.
I don't get any.
I'm also missing my custom emojis.
That is from like the Fediverse and Telegram custom emojis
have been, have become a core part of my vocabulary.
And the lack of them on Blue Sky just kills me.
Well, we better get out of here then.
But do let us know what you think.
You can email us show at Linuxdowntime.com.
We'll be back in a couple of weeks.
But until then, I've been jogged.
I've been Gary.
And I've been homolith.
See you later.