[HN Gopher] The Wikimedia Foundation joins Mastodon and the Fedi...
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The Wikimedia Foundation joins Mastodon and the Fediverse
Author : Kye
Score : 240 points
Date : 2023-07-17 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wikimedia.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikimedia.social)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jfghi wrote:
| In addition to being the most useful website ever made.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Agreed. The librarians of Alexandria would be bereft in a
| tempest of envious tears.
|
| edit: Upon review it may not be clear that I am being 100%
| genuine. Wikipedia is one of humanity's greatest creations. I
| donate, and will continue to do so.
| Jonnax wrote:
| It's only on this site, ironically a forum run by a venture
| capitalist firm, that I've seen so much anti sentiment about
| Wikipedia's funding.
| wpietri wrote:
| Just to put it in perspective: Even if every dime given of the
| $150m raised by the Wikimedia Foundation this year were wasted,
| something am sure is not the case, the amount of money set on
| fire by WeWork is more than 100x larger.
| scrollaway wrote:
| You can buy 1/293rd of Twitter with that $150M!
| LegitShady wrote:
| Wework never begged me for money though.
| wpietri wrote:
| Wikipedia only asks for money from its users. I promise
| that if you had used WeWork, they would also have asked you
| for money eventually. They're bad at business, but not that
| bad.
| luuurker wrote:
| All you need is a domain and a server to host your own Mastodon
| instance.
| riffic wrote:
| you don't even need to use the Mastodon software to be a
| participant in the wider Mastodon ecosystem. A WordPress site
| with a plugin can be part of the Fediverse.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Some of the largest Mastodon instances are run on $100/month
| class servers (ex: mastodon.world).
|
| Its actually ridiculously cheap.
| fluxem wrote:
| Why does Wikipedia need Twitter/Mastodon?
| nunobrito wrote:
| Plus points for running their own server. Now just missing to add
| Nostr to make sure those texts continue to be available one day
| in case the server goes down or gets censored in parts of the
| globe.
| marksomnian wrote:
| Some background at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Did they write anywhere else about what they're actual plan for
| this instance is? A whole new service to operate and
| moderate... are they maintaining their other social platform
| accounts etc.
| marksomnian wrote:
| There's some (vague, nonspecific) goals in the Google Doc
| linked on the phab ticket (though someone did point out that
| the doc was created weeks after the ticket was filed).
| Kye wrote:
| I've heard the process inside organizations of getting approval
| to do a new social media thing can be involved. It's
| interesting to see one of those discussions out in public.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| Yes, I take some solace from the fact that most of the
| comments on the ticket are in the nature of:
|
| - "Wait, I don't think Team X can do this, it needs to be
| approved by Team Y and then handed to Team Z", followed by
|
| - "I thought our policy was not to do this?"
|
| - "No there's no policy not to do this"
|
| - "Well maybe the policy was that we do do not this"
|
| - "Does Team Z even get notified about tickets here?"
|
| etc...
| neilv wrote:
| How I try to avoid most institutional knowledge and
| communication problems like that is with... a trusted wiki.
|
| They should ask around, see if anyone in the organization
| is familiar with wikis and could help them get started.
| ploum wrote:
| Imagine for a second what the discussions could be for the
| official European institutions to open their own instance?
|
| https://social.network.europa.eu/explore (and yes, it was
| created early 2022, before Musk takeover of Twitter)
| Kye wrote:
| They also have a PeerTube instance.
|
| https://tube.network.europa.eu/videos/overview
| riffic wrote:
| transparency aside it's amazing how fast they were able to
| roll this.
|
| Heads up but if anyone's got questions about the Mastodon
| software, community, wider ecosystem et cetera you're more
| than welcome to hop into the unofficial Mastodon subreddit
| and ask away. saying this as one of the /r/Mastodon mods.
| ruffsl wrote:
| Is there a community on Lemmy for Mastodon mods and admins?
| Hosting support discussions about Fediverse platforms on
| Fediverse platforms seems like an opportunity to dog food
| more it's development.
| riffic wrote:
| On Mastodon itself people like to use the #MastoAdmin
| hashtag.
|
| Good point about Lemmy. I remember reading the Discourse
| software was considering federation/ActivityPub support
| but haven't seen any traction there.
| riku_iki wrote:
| I guess "joins" means created account..
| thewataccount wrote:
| Beyond the fact that they created an entire instance -
|
| > I guess "joins" means created account..
|
| I do think this statement would be accurate, you are "joining"
| if you create an account.
|
| At least I don't see an argument for how creating an official
| account wouldn't count as "joining" - although it's admittedly
| boring if that's all they did.
| Kye wrote:
| That's what I had in mind when writing a suitable title. They
| joined the Fediverse by making their own instance, then
| joined Mastodon by creating an account on that instance.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > I do think this statement would be accurate, you are
| "joining" if you create an account.
|
| I personally was confused, and initially thought Wikimedia
| joined corresponding orgs, became codebase contributor, etc.
| But maybe that's me not familiar with his topic.
| als0 wrote:
| ...and their own server...
| jayknight wrote:
| Well, they're running their own mastodon instance at
| wikimedia.social.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Even if that were the case, and others have pointed out it's
| not, what would your point be?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| More than that, in this case. They're hosting an entire
| instance.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Yeah, joined by renting masto.host's service. Nothing against
| masto.host but Wikimedia are not running their own server, or
| really their own instance. It's a net positive but it's not the
| decentralised, independent example that it could be.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, I read the headline and was briefly completely mystified
| until I opened the article.
|
| This reads like the title of s 'Beautiful journey... chosen to
| join [company]' post.
| honest635 wrote:
| Huge if true
| jheriko wrote:
| [flagged]
| riffic wrote:
| cool, it's an opportunity for you to discover something of
| interest then.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| The same comment could be made for the majority of articles on
| HN. Maybe look up the words you don't know, and learn something
| new.
| [deleted]
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| The Wikipedia Twitter page has a lot of followers, but engagement
| is very low, and most of the tweets are random topics.
|
| What advantages does a mastodon feed provide?
|
| In my opinion, if Wikipedia is seeking more social media
| engagement, they should focus on the big platforms: Facebook,
| Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That's the easy route. The reason why those platforms are
| avoided is mostly because of the Wikimedia/wikipedia commitment
| to promote open source and privacy respecting platforms.
|
| Arguably none of those are world-famous with a positive note
| for those attributes.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Each of those platforms you mentioned is corporate-controlled.
| The "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is probably more
| interested in engaging with open-source, non-centralized tech
| when possible.
| rsynnott wrote:
| As you say, they have a Twitter. Twitter could, at this point,
| vanish up its own arse at any moment. It was largely unusable
| for about three days recently. It remains pretty broken for
| non-logged-in people. Backup plans are hardly surprising.
|
| Frankly, anyone who uses Twitter for anything more than
| entertainment should be looking at backup plans at this stage.
| CSSer wrote:
| It's even really sad to see that there's a lot of embedded
| Twitter content around the web that has been either breaking
| or disappearing for one reason or another too.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > What advantages does a mastodon feed provide?
|
| Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which
| requires a log in these days.
|
| -----------
|
| Lets reverse the discussion. What does Twitter offer Wikipedia
| that Mastodon does not? Since Wikipedia's engagement is largely
| readers / followers with very little comments, the read-only
| experience is king, is it not?
|
| Mastodon therefore offers a better reading experience, as it
| doesn't have advertisements, it isn't going to randomly go down
| (stability of Mastodon has improved a lot while the stability
| of Twitter is declining), running your own Mastodon instance
| allows for any size posts (no need for Wikipedia to pay Twitter
| Blue to get 2000-character posts. Wikipedia can just configure
| Mastodon to allow 2000 or 20,000-character posts), etc. etc.
|
| Why should Wikipedia stick to 250-character posts on a website
| that can't be read by anonymous users that will shove ads into
| your face in between posts?
|
| > YouTube
|
| Does Wikipedia even have substantial video content to share on
| Youtube?
|
| > Instagram
|
| I guess you mean Threads, which is the closest analog to
| Mastodon and Twitter. I haven't used Threads though so I'll
| defer to other posters.
|
| > Facebook
|
| Way too closed and insular. Facebook is focused on smaller
| groups and smaller social networks. Its like the "login"
| problem for Twitter but a hundred-times worse.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not?
|
| Though it may not seem like it to the highly-technical
| terminally-online, twitter is still very much the Schelling
| point[1] for social media communication. People, by default,
| will look for communications from (and attempt to get the
| attention of) large entities on twitter (especially during
| events like the main website going down). This is a _huge_
| deal that needs to be accounted for when listing what the
| platform "has to offer".
|
| (Of course, the way things are going, this may change in the
| future. This is by no means a _bad_ move by the WMF. The
| future is uncertain, though, and it 's just worth being
| realistic about the value twitter still holds in the
| present.)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
| dragontamer wrote:
| Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts.
|
| Someone like me, who has always relied upon nitter to get
| Twitter information (and now that API access is locked off
| and anonymous browsing is disabled... I'm no longer welcome
| to Twitter).
|
| Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social
| network of Quora and thought... "We should copy that
| model". Closing off access to the website is the literal
| opposite direction, it will kill Twitter faster than any
| other decision made thusfar.
| orwin wrote:
| > Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which
| requires a log in these days.
|
| Now it allows you to read the linked tweet, but not the
| response/thread, so it's basically useless for stuff that
| interested me still on Twitter (and tbh, Nitter was 10 times
| better than Twitter UI for stuff that interest me)
| Kye wrote:
| The same reason the EU does, among many other organizations and
| companies. It's a backup and alternative, not too much work to
| run if it's only for people on the inside, and cross-posting is
| as simple as checking a box in a growing number of social media
| management tools.
| nologic01 wrote:
| There are potentially intriguing synergies down the line, beyond
| establishing a social presence.
|
| Fediverse platforms could integrate links to wikipedia content in
| a native way, somewhat similar to openstreetmap.
|
| The reverse is more speculative but potentially more
| groundbreaking. It would be a parallel "fedipedia" platform that
| would somehow distill, organize and preserve the various bits and
| pieces of useful information and knowledge that is being
| generated in social media platforms.
|
| One of the sadest outcomes of the adtech based walled garden era
| is how decades of human interaction and information exchange ends
| up in a sort of digital landfill.
|
| We need to think more boldly about the next web and the shape of
| the digital commons.
| Angostura wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing what they do with https://wt.social/
|
| I don't feel like it has gained a lot of traction. Perhaps it
| could be migrated to a Lemmy/Kbin/Their own ActivityPub
| implementation
| riffic wrote:
| wt.social isn't a Wikimedia Foundation site:
|
| > WT.social is owned and operated by WikiTribune Ltd ("we",
| "us")
|
| https://wt.social/terms-and-conditions
| egor-zhgun wrote:
| It's interesting whatever they'll federate with Meta or not.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Considering how they already have an active Wikimedia Facebook
| account, I don't think they'd object to federating with Meta.
| pornel wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense for organizations. They control the
| servers. They own the domain. This is how the Web is supposed to
| work.
| stasm wrote:
| > They own the domain.
|
| It seems like a wasted opportunity to set up a new domain (in
| this case: wikimedia.social) rather than use an existing one
| with a subdomain, e.g. social.wikimedia.org or
| social.wikimediafoundation.org. With a new domain I still have
| to do the work to verify whether the domain is indeed owned by
| the Wikimedia Foundation.
| Kye wrote:
| It can accrue reputation the same way Wikipedia.org did while
| providing a spot to add other things like PeerTube without
| worrying about the security peculiarities that led to them
| choosing this route in the first place.
|
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8920625
| marksomnian wrote:
| There's some background at
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586 - a wikimedia.org
| subdomain was out of the question due to security concerns
| (it'd involve giving a third party a SSL certificate for
| wikimedia.org) [1], and wikimediafoundation.org was ruled out
| because it could cause confusion about volunteers'
| relationship to the Foundation [2]
|
| [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8932905 [2]:
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8936483
| j1elo wrote:
| From your first link, it seems the decision to use a
| different new domain stems from difficulties getting the
| server's HSTS policy right, and it even seems they had a
| similar issue in the past with having the store as a
| subdomain [1].
|
| If that's true, for a use case as functionally basic as
| having a store and a social instance in their respective
| subdomains, it looks to me like a complete failure of HSTS,
| a case of technology causing problems that shouldn't exist
| to begin with.
|
| [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337586#8920625
| marksomnian wrote:
| It's not linked there (or on any Wikitech pages I can
| find), but I can imagine there's a secondary concern of
| *.wikimedia.org cookies getting sent to third parties -
| e.g. Stack Overflow has separate second-level domains
| (stackoverflow.email/stackoverflow.blog) for their 3rd-
| party-hosted email service and blog for exactly this
| reason (cf. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2017/05/22/https-
| on-stack-overfl...)
| soneil wrote:
| I think it'd be great if there was a way to push the identity
| through a different domain. @foundation@mediawiki.org or
| such. Needing subdomains is so clunky - imagine if you were
| example@mail.gmail.com, yuck.
|
| We can get half way there with /.well-known/webfinger - but
| the alias that provides doesn't show up in the feed, so
| that's not the username I find from links like OP's.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > This is how the Web is supposed to work.
|
| More like: this in how the Internet is supposed to work.
| ActivityPub is hardly "web" because it's not trying to attract
| traffic on a specific website.
| riffic wrote:
| ActivityPub is inherently _web_ because it 's a
| recommendation by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium):
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| They don't really control this server - they're using
| masto.host to host their instance.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yes, but they COULD. If for some reason they decide that
| something's wrong with their host, they could just go
| offline, export the data onto a new host somewhere, move some
| DNS targets and set up some redirects, and bam, new server.
| The point is that some one social media company doesn't have
| a lock on the site.
| lolinder wrote:
| They control it a whole lot more than they do Twitter,
| Facebook, or any other central platform.
|
| Control is a sliding scale. They could run it on a physical
| box in Wikimedia headquarters and you could still argue they
| don't fully control the server because their ISP could always
| cut them off.
|
| You have to make reasonable decisions based on your threat
| model and how easy it would be to move up the level-of-
| control ladder if needed. Getting on Mastodon at all
| represents a huge leap forward, and frees them up to migrate
| to a higher level of autonomy later.
| gochi wrote:
| Nobody would argue that because if they did control the
| servers an ISP change would be effortless.
|
| Which is the point, the move to a higher level of autonomy
| is not going to happen later. It's far too much effort once
| they've already settled in.
|
| We should praise organizations that actually seek to
| normalize control over servers, not praise relying on yet
| another "fully managed" service. We can do that while also
| recognizing that them being on fediverse is nice in
| general. All of these are possible without stating
| falsehoods like "They control the servers".
| lolinder wrote:
| > if they did control the servers an ISP change would be
| effortless.
|
| I don't know where in the world you are, but I want to
| live there. Changing my ISP is far more intimidating to
| me than migrating a database and a few DNS records.
|
| > We should praise organizations that actually seek to
| normalize control over servers, not praise relying on yet
| another "fully managed" service.
|
| What would be enough to satisfy you? A VPS on AWS? A VPS
| on a smaller provider? A dedicated box at Hetzner? Or
| would it have to be a machine that they built from
| scratch and can physically access?
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(page generated 2023-07-17 23:00 UTC)