Notices tagged with bifurcation
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I actually think that the overwhelming majority of blocking should be done by individuals curating their own timelines. I am sensitive to the effect on the Fediverse as a whole, especially as we've already been through this.
Even the original #bifurcation (when the largest instance at the time, Identica, severed communication with #StatusNet / #GNUsocial & #OStatus and switched to the #Pump.io protocol and software) and the subsequent #ActivityPub - #OStatus split have caused untold breakage. I've seen AP-side devs, admins, users patting themselves on the back while commiserating about brokenness that is built into the protocol itself or at least its common implementations.
I have also seen people telling other people to create "alts" on various instances, so that their posts can reach all of their intended contacts. Not for resilience against instance shutdowns or separating by posts and recipients by topics and interests (which is what groups and Diaspora style Aspects / GPlus style Circles are for), but because #blockwars prevents posts and members from one instance to be seen on certain others.
For the record, I think that instance governance is something that Mastodon should include in its instances.social instance-picker, along with instances' topical foci. People should have a way to see what they're agreeing to (and what the alternatives are) before the sign up.
In other words, it isn't my way or the highway so much as it is making it possible to know what one is getting into. I am certain that there are (or were) instances with democratically chosen rules. I also believe that we're not doing the people who use an instance any favor by not making it possible for them to contribute to the financing and administration of the instance. If you're paying all the costs and doing all the work to maintain and moderate the instance, it is difficult to let an election institute a policy that you disagree with. (I've started to really disagree with the idea of individuals hosting public instances wholly out of their own financial and time resources. Besides the "truck factor", it is much easier to keep an instance going if everything was already handled by a team and at least partly member supported.)
On the other hand, if the instance encourages those in its membership who can do so to participate in keeping it going, then it is perfectly reasonable to expect the admin team to carry out the decisions voted by the membership. I do realize that not everyone can contribute funds, nor can everyone do the technical labor ... but as @simsa04 will remember, things like writing documentation, contributing in discussions about improving the software, designing and implementing themes, and even marketing-type tasks such as creating a logo and a favicon or promoting the instance to people outside the #Fediverse are beneficial.
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It's important to keep in mind that GS survived the #bifurcation (when the largest instance #Identica switched to #Pump.io).
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https://shitposter.club/objects/73ab2929-892e-43d0-834d-de7fbf2a16ad That's already happened at least twice. The first #bifurcation was when #Identi.ca became a pump instance, and the second was when Mastodon and Pleoma dropped OStatus support.
But I know he means maintaining different interpretations and extensions of the same protocol, not abandoning one protocol for another.
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@tealturtle I knew of some people from West Africa (but none from Southern or Central Africa) years ago, before the #bifurcation.
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I think they were #lost to the #corpocentric networks when Identica switched to #Pump.io and many #StatusNet instances closed.
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I wouldn't say https://identi.ca/ is "dead", it just is not accepting new members and suffers frequent downtime. Without the #Pump.io firehose, it is difficult to tell how many active users are on the Pump network (though certainly a lot less than in the months after #bifurcation).
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@aab @diogo @dalme @colegota @xrevan86 I agree. We survived network #bifurcation once, we can do it again.
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@dragnucs I disagree. Once your federated network survives one severe #bifurcation (the #Pump.io split), you know it can survive others. The #ActivityPub addition is still somewhere in the process, but I doubt that defederating from the #OStstus part of the network would speed it up.
@gargron
@heluecht
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I just thought of something: no one in the current #fediverse has seen me in person, though two people who were #lost in the #bifurcation (and Dr Jon Kulp, who left our network more recently) have seen me in person at least once.
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@alpacaherder @clacke It mostly stayed full of cool people until the #bifurcation, when some stayed in the #fediverse, some went to the #pumpiverse, and many were #lost to the #corpocentric networks.
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To be fair, the !StatusNet network that Evan was running became unmanageable -- it cost too much to run, and I think Evan was funding most of it himself (although there were/are a number of paying #StatusNet customers). Evan developed #PumpIO to reduce the number of servers needed to run a federated network, and purposely kept the UI to a minimum to encourage federation. Sadly, that didn't work. Porting identi.ca from StatusNet to PumpIO was intended to introduce people to PumpIO as well as reduce Evan's costs. That partly worked; identi.ca is alive and well as a community, although much reduced from its glory days around 2013. But the #bifurcation did spawn a large number of new StatusNet / !GNUsocial instances, so that was a good thing too. But you're right in that PumpIO never gained widespread traction, the proof of which is in its lack of continued development. In that respect #GNUsocial and !OStatus are more successful than PumpIO
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@clacke True. It hasn't been updated for the post #bifurcation fediverse, where larger character limits are the norm instead of the exception (and where some instances use #Markdown or #Textile to enable formatted posts).
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My explanation of the #bifurcation, whereby half the #fediverse was split off into the pump.io #pumpiverse and unable to communicate with the remaining users. https://nu.federati.net/notice/513186
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@craigmaloney @cwebber @deadsuperhero etc
It's also important to note how committed Evan was to Identi.ca, StatusNet (and the Status.Net service), and finally Pump.io. He kept things going even after there was no revenue, then switched to cheaper-to-operate software and opened a couple of dozen Pump instances and related sites (ofirehose, open farm game, at least one uni-directional bridge site).
I hate many of the effects of the #bifurcation, but I think it helped awaken people to the need to disperse among many instances. That was really needed when almost everyone was clustered on Identica.
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@windigo Thanks for running #fragdev and for taking in #identica refugees during the #bifurcation.
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@musicman I suspect many will be #lost to the #lockiverse, they way many others were during the #bifurcation. (Wondering whether the !lost group was on now-defunct oracle.skilledtests.com.)
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@notnavigium @strypey I have two possible sources for the name: @mk or @jpope. It could have been around the #bifurcation (when #Identica switched to #pump.io, splitting one network into two) or even earlier, around the time of the StatusNet 1.0/1.0.1 upgrade, when identica was offline for multiple days and many of us launched our first self-hosted instances.
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@nds The other side of this is that removing ads from #Identi.ca and other SN sites helped lead to the #bifurcation of one federated network into two incompatible federated networks.
One of the main drivers was the cost of operating Identi.ca with no corresponding revenue.
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@enkerli Yes, there were many users #lost to both the #fediverse and the #pumpiverse when one network split into two. ActivityPub offers some potential to undo some of the #bifurcation's damage.
For example, it may help revitalize the nearly-moribund Pump.io network when GS and Mastodon and Diaspora can all interact seamlessly.
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I would say it partially worked. Identica started with such a huge number of users that I doubt any other instance is even close. When the #bifurcation happened, many people stopped using their early pump.io accounts and went back to ica. But the imbalance can't get worse because no registrations allowed there.
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#lost in the #bifurcation
I'd like to see some of those people return to the fediverse.
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Bob Jonkman
Linux Walt (@lnxw37b1)
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