Mastodon, ActivityPub, the Fediverse and how standards actually work on the internet.

This is a great article from Ars Technica that explains how a bunch of published and defacto standards come together - more or less - to make Mastodon go and create a decentralized social web.

Mastodon for Fun and Profit: The Fediverse for Brands

Twitter and Facebook appear to be in trouble. Twitter has been hemorrhaging users, with the Elon deal as a tipping point. Facebook just laid off thousands in an effort to re-focus on their core business and improve profitability. In light of that, and the sudden traction of Mastodon and the Fediverse, I started thinking about what the Fediverse could look like for brands. The Fediverse is decentralized. That makes it different.

The Signal and the Noise

As a new medium becomes popular its signal-to-noise ratio will fall to a level that renders the medium useless.

Is the open internet dead?

I was fortunate enough to get online in the mid-90’s. I wrote some terrible software to configure Dial Up Networking in Windows 3.1, and then sold it to a local ISP for years of free access. At that point, consumers were rapidly adopting what I’ll call “open” technologies, including email, forums (USENET), messaging (IRC) and file transfer (ftp). The web was about to be littered with millions of consumer home pages, hosted by Geocities and people’s internet service providers.

How I feel about the Twitter API change “controversy." Dave Winer, where are you now? Source: xkcd.com

Being a better media junkie

So I’ve already posted about trendspottr; I love how it surfaces trending tweets about particular topics. It’s not perfect, but the throwaway nature of twitter means that it doesn’t have to be. And it’s helped me discover a lot of interesting stuff, quickly - I surf less, and know more. I’ve been using trendspottr with HootSuite for a couple weeks now, but I just had my “chocolate in my peanut butter” moment.

The nerds were right.

foursquare - Like twitter, but Useful :)

foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can: identify what city the user is in read/write user and friends’ check-in data look up information for a particular location make/send friend requests retrieve venue data perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins add venues, tips, and to-dos This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are?