If Staff ever implements the editing method from Mastodon, we'd be fucked.
Currently, on Tumblr, if you edit a post, all the former reblogs stay exactly the same.
On Mastodon, editing a post changes all the boosts and simply notifies the people who interacted with the post prior to the edit.
Now, can you imagine that on Tumblr?
Surely giving the OP the ability to edit their post after hundreds of thousands of people have reblogged it would be a perfectly balanced feature that I'm sure the Tumblr' userbase has never abused before.
ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21.
If you have a sufficiently horrible boss, you might have heard them use the phrase, "One throat to choke," by which they mean, "We must arrange this project so there's one person I can blame and punish if it goes awry.
The problem with "one throat to choke" is that this is another word for chokepoint. If the person who has ultimate authority over the system somehow manages to evade your discipline, there's no one else you can approach to resolve any arguments about how the system should work. "One throat to choke" is a single point of failure. That can be a nice arrangement if you're in charge of that chokepoint, but if not, it means you're SOL.
The digital world is in the process of bifurcating. The dying, legacy systems are the zuckermuskian, centralized ones, where there's always one throat to choke. If you don't like the moderation, recommendation, or other policies on Google, Twitter, Facebook or Amazon, you know exactly who to blame. If you're a lawmaker or a regulator, you know exactly who to drag into court.
Then there's the new, exiting, free and open digital technology that's crawling out of the half-dead carcass of Big Tech: federated and decentralized systems like Mastodon (and the Fediverse) and Bluesky (and the Atmosphere). While both of these networks have official maintainers who oversee their open source software projects, and while both groups of maintainers also run the servers that dominate their networks, you can absolutely join and participate without the consent of the organizations that created and maintain them, and they can't stop you or kick you off.
That's what decentralization means – if you don't like a user or their behavior, there's no manager to speak to in order to have them removed. Sure, a user can be kicked off of some servers, even all the servers, but the user can still stand up their own server. So long as there are other users, somewhere on the internet, who want to interact with that person, they can continue to connect with one another.
Now, you'd think that the Maga movement would love this – and they do…to a point. Trump's Truth Social is just a Mastodon server, albeit one that very few other Mastodon servers have any connections to. But the Maga movement is incapable of imagining a world in which the power it arrogates to itself will ever fall into the hands of its enemies. They want the power to send troops into cities they don't like, to federally dictate election procedures, to fire any federal official without cause, to override Congress's budgetary edicts, to be insulated from all liability irrespective of criminality.
Maga desires these powers within the borders of the United States because it intends to abolish free and fair elections and install a dictatorship, which means they they won't have to worry about Democrats ever controlling the presidency and turning those weapons around.
But even if they manage this trick in the USA, they won't be able to pull it off on the internet. There are simply too many territories in which federated, decentralized services can domicile themselves, places that are not only outside America's jurisdiction, but where the local authorities are hostile to the idea of extraterritorial intrusions by the US state on their domestic affairs.
The American culture warriors, obsessed with the idea that tech platforms have shadow banned, downranked, deplatformed and demonetized them, want to bring Big Tech to heel. And since each Big Tech company has just one throat to choke, they think they can do it.
Take "age verification," the latest social contagion sweeping through authoritarian governments around the world. In the name of keeping kids from seeing stuff that's not kid-friendly online (a perfectly reasonable goal), governments are demanding that tech companies somehow deduce the ages of their users and block them from seeing adult materials. Some age verification proponents claim that it's possible to verify a user's age without creating as massive privacy catastrophe that reveals the browsing habits of every internet user, of every age. These people are wrong:
The only way to verify that a user is a child is to verify the user, which means performing extraordinarily invasive checks on every internet user, and storing the results of those checks, and, inevitable, leaking the result of those checks.
The Big Tech companies are delighted by this. Google and Meta have both offered to do a kind of digital phrenology on their users to determine their ages. After all, they spy on us so much that they can probably make a good guess about our ages. And if they guess wrong, well, no biggie, they'll just block all the edge cases and force users to provide them with even more sensitive data.
But the future-proof, federated, decentralized services can't do age verification. Oh, sure, some of the servers in these federations can verify their users' age, and they might have to, because you can always find that single throat to choke for the people running the main Mastodon and Bluesky servers. But you can use Mastodon and Bluesky without using those servers – and they can't stop you.
This is something that the Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan discovered last spring, whe he ordered Bluesky to block information about his political rivals. All Bluesky can do in these cases is flag some messages as "banned in Turkiye" and then turn on the "block banned in Turkiye posts" filter for Turkish accounts. Those users can just turn that filter off, or avail themselves of a third-party client that doesn't auto-subscribe them to "block banned content" filters:
That's what it means for a service to be a protocol, not a platform. It means you can't demand to speak to the manager of the protocol if you don't like how someone is using it. It means there isn't a single throat to choke:
Today, the new, future-proof federated services are trying to figure out how to comply with age verification orders. Bluesky has announced that it will age verify UK users:
But you don't have to interact with the Bluesky servers to use Bluesky. While Bluesky was (very) slow off the mark to enable the tooling that would allow anyone to talk to anyone else using Atproto (the underlying protocol) without Bluesky's permission, that day has arrived now. There are now Bluesky (the service) implementations that are entirely separated from the authority of Bluesky (the company), most notably Blacksky, created by and for Black social media users who lived through Musk's enshittification of Black Twitter and won't get fooled again:
The Mastodon server operated by the Mastodon organization has a policy barring under-16s from getting an account there. But there are many, many Mastodon servers (including, you'll recall, Truth Social) and they are all technically capable of talking with one another. Even if Mastodon (the organization) implemented some kind of invasive age verification on its server, other organizations – so distant from Mississippi as to be beyond legal retribution – could sign up users of any age, at its discretion.
One wrinkle here is whether there is an "enforcement nexus" between one of these independent Mastodon or Bluesky servers and a government seeking to impose age verification or other censorship policies. If you're running one of these servers, you wanna be sure your throat is out of choking range of these governments:
The easiest way to do this is to not have any personnel or assets in territories controlled by governments seeking to impose censorship requirements. Large corporations whose investors made a bet on global domination find this tradeoff difficult to make. They want to open sales offices in every country.
But co-ops, individual tinkerers and small businesses typically don't have assets or personnel in a lot of countries or states, and avoiding the censorious ones doesn't pose much of a challenge.
The other enforcement nexus to worry about isn't enforcement against a server's operators, but rather, enforcement against its data. Territories with national firewalls (or heavily concentrated ISPs who represent a tractable number of chokeable throats) can block noncompliant servers from their users (who might or might not avail themselves of VPNs to evade thse blocks).
There aren't many national firewalls, and enumerating all the noncompliant servers in the Fediverse is a big chore for their operators (less so for all the noncompliant Atmostphere servers, because there's just not that many of those – yet). On the other hand, the mobile device duopoly of Google and Apple represent a pair of trivially chokeable throats that can be used to extinguish any app that displease a country's censors (all the more reason to make everything web-first and treat apps as unreliable adjuncts to core web functionality).
But there's one more potential chokepoint: to the extent that the Bluesky (the service) or Mastodon (the service) maintain some nexus of control over users, even users on independent servers, they could come under pressure to terminate users that displease governments. Now, Mastodon has no such control over users, and if it tried to exert that control (for example, by pressuring an independent server to terminate their users' access), they could be sued for tortious interference with contract.
Unfortunately, Bluesky has chosen to insulate itself from that hedge against being the chokeable throat that is used as a means to exerting pressure on independent servers in the Atmosphere. Bluesky's Terms of Service trap all of its users in a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces them to surrender their right to sue. That means that if Bluesky were to threaten Blacksky in a bid to force it to do age verification or engage in some other form of censorship, anyone involved with Blacksky who ever created a Bluesky account would be unable to use to courts to defend themselves:
(However, if you set up a Bluesky server without ever joining Bluesky (the service) and clicking through its ToS, you're golden.)
Of course, none of this matters to Maga – but it should. Decentralized systems with no readily chokeable throats are good for people with disfavored views, and that includes a lot of the Maga movement. Remember, Trump's agenda is incredibly unpopular:
Someday, Maga is going to find that their enemies have found the right throat to choke to silence them. But Maga's useful idiots just keep on stepping on this rake – these are the same self-owning fools who opposed municipal fiber and thus ensured that if just a handful of giant ISPs decided to deplatform you, you'd disappear from the internet:
Bluesky users were furious when JD Vance joined the service. Maga culture warriors were furious when Bluesky users called for his account to be terminated. Both groups are nuts. If Bluesky lives up to its promise – if it becomes an unchokeable, future-proof, decentralized social media protocol, and not merely a platform, then there's no way to kick JD Vance off Bluesky (the service). All you can do is demand that Bluesky (the server) cut off his account, whereupon he will immediately decamp to another server where he is more welcome, and still able to communicate with any Bluesky user who wants to hear from him.
Progressives should want this, because it's far more likely that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate users for failing to be insufficiently demonstrative in their anguish over the Charlie Kirk shooting than it is that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate the Vice President of the USA. But Conservatives should want this too – because if they're really worried about "deplatforming" and "Big Tech censorship," then they should be trying to create a new internet where deplatforming and Big Tech censorship are impossible – not an internet where they decide who gets deplatformed and censored.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Since 2022, blogging site Tumblr has been teasing its plans to integrate with the fediverse -- the open social web powered by the protocol A
Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today.
Running Tumblr’s back end on WordPress would allow for greater efficiencies, while not changing the interface and experience that Tumblr’s user base has grown to love.
I had to delete a lot of the fan art I posted here during the porn purge. To this day I have to deal with antisemitism and transphobia. I’ve found good people though, and I mean, I’ve been an active user this whole time. Hell, I even bought merch once.
But I’m spending a lot of time off tumblr too, these days. Guess where! Wafrn, where I can access both Bluesky AND the fediverse, and where the mods specifically care about folks like me.
Wafrn is a federated social media inspired by tumblr that connects with the fediverse and bluesky
Come hang out. They have an app too, if you prefer browsing on your phone, but the main website is really mobile-friendly too.
And no, it’s not going to go the way of cohost. You can host your own if you want! There are already other folks doing so. And if you don’t want to host, you can always move. That’s the whole point of decentralized social media.
What's happening on bluesky (Yes, I'm talking about the drama with Dana Terrance, involving people not leaving their homes and not touching the grass) makes us talk more loudly about fediverse and mastodon, seriously, fediverse needs more traffic than it currently has
If you are looking for a place without toxic fans, I recommend it
Good morning, have you let the Fediverse into your life
OK so i wanna tell you about Mastodon and the Fediverse. I have a video coming out about it soon and I'm too hungover to do any other kinda work right now so let me proselyte to you about The Fediverse!
What the fuck is a Fediverse?
So you know Email? The one thing we all wanna be safe from? Well the thing about Email is that it's not one service; it's a protocol. It's a whole load of independent services that can all talk to each other. Someone on gmail can email someone on proton and vice verse. It's why email is old enough to have seen the discovery of the Titanic Wreck!
Anyway, The Fediverse is a bit like that, but for Social Media. They're a collection of things that work on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows for various social media services to talk to each other to create one big metanetwork through a collection of independently run instances.
One of those Fedi-things is Mastodon, a Microblogging network on the Fediverse.
Mastodon
So Mastodon is not one service, it is a collection of services that talk to each other (like Email). To join mastodon, you go find an instance, sign up to it, and add people. They can be from your own instance or another instance.
Instances?
Each instance is different. They have their own target market (general use, subcultural (furries, gamers), regional (countries, cities), sectoral), but they all can talk to each other. If you have the know how you can even set up your own Instance (with Blackjack and Hookers). They have their own rules and regs, so you can find your own little corner, but you're not isolated. You can still follow people from other instances (like how you can email someone from a different service). Your handle on Mastodon will look like @[email protected] (eg, my handle is @[email protected]), so if you wanna add someone, that is what you type in the searchbar.
Advantages
Mastodon cannot get Elon Musked: Yes, you heard. You can't have something like what happened to Twitter where one man buys the whole network and turns it into a right wing circlejerk. Someone like Musk can set up a Mastodon Instance, or even potentially buy one, but if they fuck up said instance, other instances can defederate that instance (block it on an instance level) keeping their own instance safe and sane.
It's containerized, but not isolated: So with it being different instances, you can basically choose your tribe, but you can also talk to other people from other instances. Just add them using their username and server name. This also helps stop or slow down trolls and bigots because they have to put in legwork to find marks which most don't do. On Twitter, you were forced together with those bigots and they were encouraged to fight you.
No algorithm: The site doesn't tell you what you see, you do! What you see is who you follow! There are starter packs out there now to find people to follow, or...
You can view the firehose: Yes! You can view the firehose for either your instance or Mastodon as a whole. This is a great way to find people to follow if you are just starting out and get the vibe of the network.
Lots of independent apps: You can find plenty of phone and web apps to access the fediverse, so you're not tied a single, shitty, official app!
Disadvantages
Server performance depends on the instance: You will experience slow servers. Be at peace with that.
Not everyone is on here yet: If you wanna follow celebrities, bare that in mind, but if you do not wanna follow celebrities or wanna follow new, more interesting people, this could be the place for you. I'm literally following with the Astronomer Royal of Scotland!
Are there other Fediverse things?
Lemmy is a Reddit-style network on the Fediverse! Upvote, share, and meme like the good old days before reddit went to shit.
Pixelfed is an Instagram style photosharing network on the Fediverse!
Peertube is a Video Sharing Network on the Fediverse!
Do you have any Recommendations for Mastodon?
Yes, Don't join Mastodon.social. It's run by the creators of Mastodon but it has some iffy TOS (if you use it you have to settle for arbitration and can't sue them) and centralising everything is not how the Fediverse should run. Instead try the following:
ohai.social (they also run other services like matrix or 13ft).
mas.to
mastodon.scot (targetted at Scots or Scottish related things)
mstdn.party
mastodon.au (targeted at Australians)
toot.wales (targetted at Welsh people).
woof.tech (for furries, tech people, or furries in the tech industry).
gaygeek.social (LGBT targetted)
You can find a list at https://joinmastodon.org/servers
I imported my following list from mastodon and started following everyone with my goblin.band account too, so I basically read all my mastodon content from there already. Even if no one but me using the tumblr-like features I'm adding, I already enjoy Goblin more than Mastodon.
Things that I've added since my last post:
Integration with mastodon (and well, any other fediverse platform that use plain text instead of html)
Copy/pasting images in the editor
Sanitized html input when saving & updating posts
Improved the landing page
Cleaned the menus and improved the UI in general
Current "next" to-do list:
Fix posts displaying images twice when you paste an image
Fix RSS feed including the inline files again after the post
Sanitize html inputs on incoming federated posts
fix several style issues around different settings sections (black texts on dark blue background, white text over white background, etc)
Figure out if I can create a tumblr-api app so the posts from goblin can be automatically shared here without having to go through Zappier.
Figure out what kind of server I need to run a, let's say, 500 people server.
Find someone to do some security review of my server (Long story short, I've only a very slim idea of what I'm doing when configuring a server and I'm sure I've left some huge security holes around).
This is happening, folks. I think Goblin is going to be a reality. At least https://goblin.band will be.
