Recent content on reb00ted
“The Orb” is popping up in all sorts of places, most recently in Time magazine’s “The Orb Will See You Now” . It’s being heralded as everything from the one and final solution for privacy-protecting digital identity online, to a civil liberties nightmare, to an indispensable tool for preventing an AI takeover, to a quick way to make $42, and more. But what it…
At this year’s, DWebCamp , my friend and collaborator Kaliya aka IdentityWoman and I ran a session titled: “Envisioning the future: what if a single, decentralized, interoperable, open social network indeed emerges and wins over the proprietary platforms?” We did something that, at least for me, was new. We started with: Assume it has happened. We have won. Like on page 1 of a…
Lenin supposedly said: There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. It’s the same in technology. I came to Silicon Valley in the mid-90’s, just in time to see the dot-com boom unfold. Lots happened very quickly in that time. There were a few more such periods of rapid change since, like when centralized social media got going, and when phones…
I participated in a meeting titled “Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue” at Meta in San Francisco yesterday. It brought together a good number of Meta/Threads people (across engineering, product, policy), some Fediverse entrepreneurs like myself, some people who have been involved in ActivityPub standardization, a good number of industry observers /…
Here are the two slides I showed at FediForum to help with the discussion on a possible Fediverse test suite.
I used that term frequently a long time ago, before the centralizing platforms took over all of technology. I believe it’s time to dig it back out, because for the first time in over a decade, perhaps even two, there’s real uptake in this computing architecture with protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix. My definition is at peercomputing.org . Feedback appreciated. (Historical note:…
The Wall Street Journal reports that: User engagement on Threads has continued to fall after an initial surge in sign-ups … the number of daily active users [has fallen] to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has also decreased to four minutes from 19…
In previous posts, I argued the EU’s Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts are the most likely reason why Meta is implementing ActivityPub in its upcoming Twitter competitor “P92”, and that ActivityPub is really the only game in town that meets Meta’s requirements for interop for “P92”, as they require protocols that are proven to work and governed in a…
Imagine you are Meta executive management, and one day your lawyers come to you and say: “We assess it as very likely that within a year or two, Meta’s social networking products will need to interoperate with social networks from other vendors, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and the like. Europe’s Digital Services and Market Acts have come in effect, they apply to us, and…
Meta has gradually locked down all of its apps. Now they are coming out with a Twitter competitor that, according to all reports, will have ActivityPub standards support. This promises to make it interoperable with other social networking apps like Mastodon in the broader Fediverse decentralized social network. The Fediverse is in uproar, debating fiercely how to react to it, with a sizable group…