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Title: So aside from the discussion4
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Category: meet the developer
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slug: so-aside4
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So aside from the discussion of who listens (or didn't listen) to whose
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#i am placeholdercontent
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opinion it can be interesting to have a closer look at action and momentum.
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Three projects caught my attention and I think could be an interesting
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case for this 'next steps' discussion:
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Mastodon (2016) en Conversations (2014) and Peertube (2015) *
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All three are projects that during the past twelve months have somehow
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reinvigorated (the work on, attention for) their underlying protocols.
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Protocols that have been proclaimed dead or unsuccessful for many years.
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And probably will be for more to come.
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The first one, Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), you may have read
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about or even tried out. It is essentially a twitter clone /
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alternative. Technically it is based on Ostatus, which is a protocol to
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distribute
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status updates across networks. Ostatus is the protocol that powered
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early 'alternative 2.0 style' social networks such as Friendica and
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Lorea. The latter was a product of and important site of organization
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for the Spanish Indignados and 15M movements. Mastodon also supports
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ActivityPub which is the likely successor of Ostatus as a protocol for
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further ongoing work on so-called federated publishing. The interesting
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thing is that Mastodon managed to attract a good chunk of the recent Twitter
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refugees. These where mostly voices which aren't white, loud or extreme
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right wing and for those reasons felt themselves increasingly out of
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place on twitter. Mastodon communities managed to involve so many of
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these people by focusing on developing tools for community moderation,
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content warnings and the ability to block other instances in the
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network. As a result (the english language) Mastodon became a site that
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is predominantly populated by the queer, PoC, left and artistic, or
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anyone that would otherwise be at risk of being on the receiving end of
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the Gamergate-style interactions on twitter. The decentralized nature of
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mastodon has created a culture of 'thematic mastodon servers (see
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https://instances.social/list) that have become a large part of what
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makes the network interesting and relevant to its several hundred
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thausand users.
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