[HN Gopher] Flipboard Begins to Federate
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Flipboard Begins to Federate
Author : tonystubblebine
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-12-18 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flipboard.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flipboard.medium.com)
| reqo wrote:
| Unrelated. How hard is it to create another "internet" which is
| completely detached from the current internet?
| riidom wrote:
| Sounds like an "Ask HN" to me.
| nearlyepic wrote:
| The answer ranges from "basically impossible" to "trivial"
| depending on what layer of the OSI model you think the "current
| internet" exists on.
| aorloff wrote:
| Another answer might be - you do this every time your local
| network disconnects from the big internet. How do you like
| your little internet ?
| capableweb wrote:
| How long is a rope?
|
| There is already a bunch of "completely detached" networks out
| there, organized via wifi links. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh
| are three examples of such networks, where you can basically
| avoid the current internet infrastructure as long as you get
| hooked up to the mesh network. Lots of interesting services
| deployed on these networks too :)
| jaywcarman wrote:
| I think Project Gemini fits this description:
| https://geminiprotocol.net/
| kpandit wrote:
| > How hard is it to create another "internet" which is
| completely detached from the current internet?
|
| Seems like a good way to explain the meaning "network effect".
| riidom wrote:
| In case one has no clue what flipboard is, like me, have a
| shortened first paragraph from wikipedia:
|
| Flipboard aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo
| sharing sites, and other websites and presents it in magazine
| format.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| Completely forgot it even existed. I remember I loved the app
| initially on iPad. Looked so nice. Then it started getting
| flooded with ads and turned to peepoo.
|
| The layout was awesome though. It was kinda like a RSS reader you
| could follow a bunch of topics, twitter feeds, blogs...
| brandall10 wrote:
| Same here. It was one of those things I loaded on the 1st gen
| iPad and considered a possible killer app for a new and
| innovative way to get news content.
|
| Glad to see it's still around and doing something like this.
| Will be checking it out again.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm excited about this - and about Threads too.
|
| I've been on Mastodon for just over a year now. It works really
| surprisingly well, especially considering it's stitched together
| from so many independent, non-profit open source instances.
|
| But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.
|
| I'd love to see efforts from organizations like Flipboard, and
| Threads, and Automattic make an impact here. I want to be able to
| follow interesting content from the kind of people who are put
| off by language like "first, select your federated instance".
|
| Also noteworthy: in the Verge article about this at
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24006062/flipboard-fediv...
| there's this quote: "Basically, we're in the
| process of replacing our whole social back-end with
| ActivityPub," says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. "I think
| Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer
| service that existed in a walled garden that switches
| over to ActivityPub."
|
| You can now follow the Flipboard account for The Verge on
| Mastodon/other-Fediverse-things by following
| @theverge@flipboard.com - or pasting in the URL
| https://flipboard.com/@theverge
| phreeza wrote:
| I think it is definitely easy enough, but it's just not as
| intrinsically addictive.
| tedunangst wrote:
| https://flipboard.com/@theverge doesn't work for me. I have to
| change it to https://flipboard.com/users/theverge.
| leotravis10 wrote:
| If you can't get past the Medium loginwall, here's a mirrored
| link: https://archive.ph/uFFy4
| thekevan wrote:
| Flipboard used to be great, but as expected, it got diluted with
| recycled FB and reddit content, ads and "the top 5 things you
| shouldn't do, number 3 shocked me" type of posts.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Exactly what I was just thinking, had no idea it was still
| alive. Twitter took its place for me but now even that has been
| ruined.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| uh, isn't it an rss client? Can't you just add what you want to
| it?
| pndy wrote:
| Pretty sure it had always predefined sources
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Happens everywhere, even on my Google News Feed. I can tell
| Google I don't want to see specific articles, authors, topics,
| etc., but there's no way for me to tell Google that I don't
| want to see Clickbait article titles...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Try Ground News.
|
| https://ground.news/
|
| (no affiliation)
| leotravis10 wrote:
| I'm very stoked about this as I trust Flipboard to get major
| social federation right more than Meta/Facebook plus they're more
| ethical in all sense.
|
| As a long time user, it's a great that they're put their eggs in
| the ActivityPub basket and I'm looking forward to see what they
| truly got in the coming months.
| jwmoz wrote:
| I thought this app was dead. I used to use it years ago when it
| first came out-it was a great way to consume your news. Then the
| advertisers and paywalls came in and ruined it.
| filterfiber wrote:
| Fun monetization strategy for federated apps - federate with your
| own instance dedicated to ads.
|
| But more seriously what is the monetization strategy for
| federated apps? Up front pay or subscription for using the app?
| crowcroft wrote:
| I suppose you could have an 'Apollo' style app providing a nice
| UI for power users with a subscription cost. I could see it
| being a solid revenue stream for small teams/indie makers.
| Difficult to get to the kind of scale needed for advertising to
| be particularly profitable unless we get some kind of federated
| facebook ads platform...
| indymike wrote:
| You can look at how email is monetized for some ideas.
| Everything from ad infested free client to pay service to
| freebie with the purchase of your internet connection.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| Strange for me to see the negative comments on Flipboard (though
| I'm not of course criticizing anyone's personal opinion) since
| I've been a user pretty much from the beginning and still use it
| daily. Ads are definitely visible but not obnoxious or in the way
| of how I read it. I agree with Brent's take on Fediverse in read
| apps
| (https://inessential.com/2023/12/17/on_mastodon_support_in_ne...)
| and Flipboard seems to match with this thinking.
| ixwt wrote:
| Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...
|
| I'm always a bit leery of things like this when massive companies
| begin adopting open source things such as this. Google Chat
| embracing XMPP, only to end up abandoning it (as Google does).
| Slack having an IRC gateway, only to end up abandoning it. There
| are probably other examples, but these are the ones off the top
| of my head.
|
| These technologies still exist, but in their own bubble. I doubt
| that Flipboard adopting and dropping ActivityPub support would
| have a significant impact in the long run. But I'm hesitantly
| happy about this.
| apitman wrote:
| As someone who never really used XMPP, was it worse off after
| Google compared to before? I mean sure a ton of users lost
| access to XMPP after they ended support, but surely most of
| them never would have used XMPP in the first place.
| indymike wrote:
| > but surely most of them never would have used XMPP in the
| first place.
|
| There was a time that Facebook messenger was XMPP and Google
| chat was XMPP, so there was a time it was gaining a lot of
| traction. Most people just think their email is email. They
| don't see it as using SMTP/IMAP/POP3.
| apitman wrote:
| I guess what I'm asking is was adoption by big tech a net
| negative? If you add 50 million users then take away 50
| million users, then maybe no harm done. Unless there were
| other effects as well.
| apitman wrote:
| Lot of Fediverse news this week. Elon buying Twitter might be the
| single best thing that's ever happened to social media. 5 years
| ago I was excited about ActivityPub but I'm not sure I really
| believed decentralized social media could ever get a foothold.
|
| Now I believe it's possible. There's a hundred ways it can go
| wrong, but dang it I'm excited about the possibilities if we help
| it go right.
| 57FkMytWjyFu wrote:
| Awesome! One small step to admitting you actually are bloatware!
|
| https://medium.com/@kaikoenig/samsungs-bloatware-disgrace-c7...
| yaomtc wrote:
| What does Flipboard have to do with Samsung?
| 57FkMytWjyFu wrote:
| Perhaps you assumed that I just threw that link in there, and
| it had nothing to do with my comment.
|
| Here is a sample of text from it.
|
| "Unwanted 3rd party apps from Microsoft or Flipboard."
| tedunangst wrote:
| You'll have to explain how adding activitypub support is
| related to that, because I'm not clever enough to follow.
| 57FkMytWjyFu wrote:
| No, I don't.
| mkl wrote:
| IME Flipboard is one of the few bundled crapware apps on
| Samsung phones. I got rid of it immediately.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to
| being enabled.
|
| Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour
| bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with
| Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".
|
| This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just
| want to connect with people and content no matter where it is
| hosted, which is the very purpose of ActivityPub, have no choice
| but to move to instances that do federate.
|
| ...which will be the large instances, like mastodon.social. It's
| already the default instance and by far the largest. For maximum
| connectivity and the biggest chance that it doesn't go under, it
| is the primary choice for most users. So this dynamic of too much
| instance-level moderation effectively undermines the idea of the
| fediverse. There will always be tiny for-purpose instances, but
| the idea that many small instances will grow the fediverse to Big
| Tech scale is invalidated.
|
| Come to think of it, one might as well create a Threads account.
| It's a community almost a 100 times larger than all of Mastodon
| combined. So if you just want to connect to people and find
| content, Mastodon offers few tangible benefits to normies.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| What do you mean it "takes away choice"? Did you mean "imposes
| annoying bureaucracy"? Because I have a hard time seeing how
| forcing people to make a choice is taking away choice.
|
| Also, the people who have accounts away from the big instances
| have actively declined to use them, so they are clearly more
| likely to move to some other mid scale instance if they need to
| migrate than to head for the big ones.
| iteratethis wrote:
| When your instance moderator makes the choice to block
| Threads at domain level, you're fully blocked from seeing any
| Threads content or interacting with any Threads user.
|
| It could be that as an instance user you like this decision,
| but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users
| and content yourself.
| Zak wrote:
| Threads has (as of late last week) enabled federation for a
| small set of employee accounts. Here's a federated post; it
| doesn't look like comments and likes are federating:
| https://mastodon.world/@mosseri@threads.net/1115866154367492...
|
| I don't think _most_ instance owners will block them. The
| larger servers I 've paid attention to don't plan to at this
| time, though many people have expressed concerns about it being
| an attempt by Meta to embrace, extend, and extinguish the
| Fediverse. A few people are _very_ loud about not wanting a
| Meta presence and are trying to convince others to block them.
|
| I think the opportunity outweighs the threat. There's a chance
| for Mastodon and others to show their software to a mainstream
| audience which has already shown a willingness to try out new
| social software by joining threads. Ideally, some projects will
| have a better pitch than just "we're not corporate".
| iteratethis wrote:
| I agree that it's a loud minority complaining about Threads
| but that loud minority is quite powerful in the Mastodon
| community.
|
| I think the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" fear is
| hilarious. The Fediverse is tiny and useless to Meta. Threads
| as a really crappy Twitter clone is just launched and many
| times the size of the Fediverse. By federating, they're
| losing algorithmic control and monetization possibilities.
| Honestly, I think it's just a "do good" afterthought for the
| sake of PR.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E
| countless times." This just looks like the first E.
|
| The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two
| remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can
| predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.
| iteratethis wrote:
| As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the
| largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of
| Mastodon combined.
|
| At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from
| organizing as they already do.
|
| So I don't see the threat, really.
| nocoolnametom wrote:
| The problem comes with "Extend."
|
| "We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if
| it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned
| us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce
| MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still
| communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best
| and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in
| your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already
| present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough
| influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.
|
| Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub
| reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up
| entirely and turn off federation anyways.
| threeseed wrote:
| This ignores the role of regulators e.g. EU.
|
| ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social
| media networks are interoperable over a common standard
| similar to mail. And from recent history the period we
| are in is one in where governments are looking for open
| standards as a hedge against big tech.
|
| The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard,
| shut down competition and invite anti-competition
| investigations is far-fetched.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Can I ask how many 3E-ed products you've used in your
| lifetime?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook
| posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an
| account. Now the only way to follow someone's Facebook posts is
| to have an account there. And Facebook will probably only show
| you a small fraction of the posts by the people you actually
| follow, sorted by what Meta thinks is most likely to make Meta
| money.
|
| If you trust Meta to not follow a similar playbook with
| Threads, you are much more optimistic than I am.
|
| I run a small Mastodon instance, and have preemptively
| defederated from Threads because _I do not want Meta to suck in
| my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart
| Meta ad views_. I 've informed my users of this and so far
| everyone with a reply has praised this decision. They have made
| choices.
|
| In fact lately there have been waves of spam from the big open-
| registration instances. I and a lot of other small instance
| admins I know have responded by limiting our federation with
| these instances. This creates a slightly worse experience for
| our users, in that they're likely to stop seeing media from
| big-instance accounts they follow. And it creates choice - do
| they talk to their friends on the big instances and say "hey
| can I persuade you to move to an instance that isn't a spam
| gateway?" Does the friend say "yes" and acquire an invitation
| to a closed-registration instance that's well-federated to
| their friend network? Eventually we end up with multiple
| networks all on ActivityPub that have very few connections.
| _And this is fine_. Because people can also do things like
| choose to have multiple accounts on these multiple networks.
| iteratethis wrote:
| I remember the RSS times. But let's be honest. Even then it
| was only tech enthusiasts using an RSS reader. Probably the
| same people now experimenting with the Fediverse.
|
| Do I trust Meta regarding federation? No. But I'm thinking
| it's an afterthought for them. The Fediverse isn't a threat
| to them at all, just like RSS never was.
|
| I totally understand that some instances have strong opinions
| about this and self-isolate to a degree. And that will cement
| what Mastodon is: a set of small for-purpose communities.
|
| It will not compete with the scale of Big Tech and maybe it
| shouldn't. Mastodon is to stay in their marginal role, a
| niche network. For sure exactly those strong-willed instances
| will agree to that.
|
| I'm fine with that as well. I'm just pointing out that an
| anti-growth mindset produces a small network.
| threeseed wrote:
| You can't blame Meta for shutting down RSS given how many
| companies e.g. Cambridge Analytica abused open data access
| features for nefarious purposes.
|
| It is still possible to access the data just via the official
| Graph API.
| Podgajski wrote:
| This corporate infestation of the Fed verse is not going to end
| well.
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(page generated 2023-12-18 23:00 UTC)