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