@mmn The fediverse is meant for everyone, not just for people or entities you like. BTW, Diogo only has 2 weeks to finish the GS AP plugin so you might want to start helping him since you've done almost nothing as a "mentor".

cc @up201705417

Yes, anyone can do what they please on their side of the !fediverse - I just think that power users and companies simply are incompatible with the federated structure and that tools for measuring e-penises is asocial and thus in vain.

I also appreciate your work with Diogo but you should be well aware of my situation and our communication by now. I would prefer a somewhat more pleasant attitude than your above post. Thank you.

@mmn I would prefer if you maintain GNU/Social and actually respond to issues/merge requests instead of reacting to my statuses.

@dansup Time to respond to statuses via a phone I am holding in my hand and looking at during the short amounts of free time I have: short.
Time to review, analyse, test and possible fix/comment on merge requests: long.

Time and energy available in @mmn's life and mind: little.

Thank you very much.

@dansup in a way, yes, in a decentralized and federated network  anyone can join it. But... bear in mind that many people that came here (1) was due our disagree with that companies and people you invite to come.

And because free networks are made not just for developers but also a lot of contributors and just users, we don't like the idea that build tools for they.

I'm enough old to remember when there was no much people in Internet and some prophets start to guess that it will be better when companies came here.
Now we have just a dozen of Internet companies that believes they own Internet... and maybe they are right.

Anyway, @mmn did not said who can came to !fediverse and who not. Just who he/we don't like and for who don't want to work.

(1) At least in !gnusocial I think most people are here to escape for that companies and people you invited in your previous status, maybe not so clear in Mastodon. Just understand our reaction. :)

@up201705417

@dansup and about the other sentence of your status, I agree with @mmn that it's not a friendly answer.

I know and understand that you have had differences but both you and all of us have to think that there are a lot of people behind that liked to have !gnusocial improved and maintained.

I don't know what can we do, but at lest there are some people that we'd likes to help in anyway.

Please let's try to do it!

@up201705417

@mmn tell that to apple fans :P

on the other hand, much of the fediverse seems to have enthusiastically jumped into the "block all the things" mentality (even some of the GNU Social people[1]), corporate instance entries in a blocklist / firewall won't even be noticeable

[1] I can't subscribe to !fediverse, for instance (connection timed out), and it looks very much intentional, tcptraceroute stops at the last hop; since I don't remember ever insulting someone around here (or being insulted, for that matter), I guess they just did a curl | grep free speech or something

@mmn @dansup I mostly agree with your sentiment, but let me offer one possible explanation.

When contacting a company via any private channel (e-mail, phone, whatever), they can just ignore you or do whatever they please, and rarely they get burnt.

Companies/brands use social media to promote themselves. The more followers they have, the better the promotion. But also, the bigger the burn if somebody calls them out publicly on their bullshit.

So in a way they are making themselves vulnerable.

@rysiek @dansup @mmn

I'm pretty sure I don't want Twitter-style brand callouts in the fediverse. If I saw it I'd block it. Brands can either stay on Twitter or have their own instance which can be easily blocked.

If brands do show up one nice thing is that they have no central authority to protect them from criticism or spoofs, and there aren't necessarily "real names" they can try to retaliate against. The lack of ability to buy their way into controlling the platform will deter them to some extent.

@bob @rysiek I'm pretty sure we can criticise and discuss companies - and they can be present to respond etc. - without analytical tools for their benefit (or power users who are only interested in maximising their reach and profit).

@mmn @bob ah, but that's a separate question than "why do we want brands here"! :)

@rysiek Yeah my response was written regarding on the initial "I do this _for_ the brands and power users" post. .)

@mmn makes sense!

@mmn @dansup #capitalism is good I am #capitalist

@kris Good for you! Not for the general population of the future.

@mmn @dansup Neither brands nor advertisement is necessarily capitalism. It could just as well be about orgs. Social orgs use fliers to advertise about their cause.

I think this feature could be useful. MMN-o lifts a good critical point that needs to be considered though.

Yeah my point is that promoting statistics and analytics is a bad thing. Delayed posts etc. are other things that have veen discussed in the past. These "features" are not something that maintains a healthy social communication base.

Of course anyone can implement this. I just don't think it benefits or otherwise contributes to humane social spaces.

Bots are also an interesting topic of discussion that I think anyone developing for the !fediverse should put some thought and critical thinking into.

@mmn It would be helpful for any social org's outreach. Seeing what people like to interact with is good knowledge. Especially as many social org's have limited resources. This is also something any big corp would have no issue to handle themselves. Making it available to everyone would be a more democratically way.

If you where tasked to do this. How would you do it?

cc: @dansup

Outreach != reachability. .]

@shellkr @mmn @dansup Plus other forms of self-promotion and payment besides. I've been reading this thread and thinking, mightn't the Fediverse's most widely advertised brand be Patreon?

@GardenOfForkingPaths @mmn @dansup No, wouldn't think so... FB, Google, Github e.t.c.. probably scores a lot higher. Also Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. With a bit more resources invested one would be able to find that out though. Right now I only know of https://mastodon-tags-explorer.hcxp.co/tags/broad which could hint on that kind of questions.

@Michcioperz The main difference is visibility. There are no ads on the fediverse. Your timeline is yours, based on the people you follow and in chronological order.

@dansup My timeline is not in chronological order, my timeline is in the order that the posts arrive from other servers, which is chronological most of time, but not always.
There are no ads only because there are no brands yet. There is no system for ads, but ads can be brought into the federated timelines through spammy accounts. One person on the server following a spammy account is enough for it to flood the federated timeline. I can imagine brands automating this.

@dansup And generally I disagree with stats and measures, I'd probably even try and remove the interactions counters from my Pleroma, although I understand that your software is trying to appeal to certain gamified minds.

@Michcioperz There is no federated timeline on pixelfed. Just your personal timeline and the local timeline.

@dansup I was talking about the fediverse overall.

@dansup I think what I meant to say is that
even if by design you don't have ads and the timeline is chronological, it will get messed up

@Michcioperz How? You willingly follow the users whose content appear in your timeline. You can unfollow them or report them too.

@dansup Wait a second, how are you aiming to handle discovery on pixelfed?

@Michcioperz By using public data like a discover page based on hashtags you've used as well as content relevant to accounts you follow.

@dansup That sounds confusing to me, frankly

@dansup > There is no federated timeline on pixelfed. Just your personal timeline and the local timeline.

This is an interesting question for me, and I'd like to know if you have reasons like pros and cons for that.

Thinking in self hosting a @pixelfed instance, maybe if no federated timeline I'll need less resources like disk space and bandwidth.

At the other side, maybe was difficult to know and follow more people.

What is your point of view?

@Michcioperz

>but ads can be brought into the federated timelines through spammy accounts

Which already happens if one takes a look at the federated timelines.

Also, "influencers" are mostly enterprises, aka they sell products (mainly themselves, but not only). Some of them don't, but most of them function like that.

They won't come here any time soon because there's not enough people (nor mainstream consumerist background) to "influence" (sell) profitably. My guess.

@dansup

@irina You will never see brands unless you follow them or someone you follow shares them.

@dansup @irina But do we need them here at all after all?

@Michcioperz @dansup I don't think so. But other people might.

@nipos @dansup Strong opinion!

But isnt this the real advantage of the #fediverse? You can just block commercial accounts / make your own instance / whatever. Good luck blocking ads on #facebook, right? 👎

@hinterwaeldler @dansup Sure, #facebook sucks,too.But that doesn't make the things Dansup does better.We all moved here to get away from Facebook and now he throws a second Instagram into the heart of the fediverse.That sucks 👎 😡

@sydneyfalk The fediverse was created for everyone, that being said I believe you can strike a balance by offering tools to give users more power over what content they see, privacy and reporting tools.

The public data insights is stuff like graphs of new followers over a period of time, most recent mentions and other features that are already present. Its meant to make it easy to organize interactions compared to a single notification feed.

@dansup @sydneyfalk I'd also want to not be included in any follower statistics. This type of gamification which helps celebs or SEO type people maximize their engagement is a bad idea, since it encourages people to chase numbers instead of cultivating real relationships. We can see the bad effects of this on Twitter, and in my opinion the fediverse should not be trying to reproduce Twitter-like habits and practices.

@bob While not required by the AP spec, have you ever seen an AP social media implementation without follower counts? Statistics is just plotting information already available via an API and notifications. You can perform exactly what Deck does via a 3rd party client.

@dansup @bob I think this is a very interesting discussion. Just because we _can_, should we really do it? There are choices we can make to create a less competitive and more social space for people to enjoy. Just because there are statistics everywhere doesn't mean we have to buy into that paradigm. Just because classes in society exist today doesn't mean we need to maintain such a social order for all future.

@mmn @dansup @bob I think there's a difference between letting 3rd parties build tools vs. building them yourself and packaging them in by default.

For example. some vain Instagram users download apps that show graphs of follows, unfollows, etc. But users have to seek those out and developers have to build those. Should the pixelfed project's official stance be to enable or encourage that use case? Implementation and design will matter.

@mmn @dansup @bob If it's just scheduling posts or filtering notifications, then why not make those features available to all users?

@mmn @dansup @bob Statistics, used the right way helps us understand. I agree that it should if possible not be used for vanity or competition.

@shellkr @dansup @mmn

I'd rather opt out of being in the statistics. I don't want to be part of someone's Big Data project or a politician's statistical quote. Having your social activity aggregated into statistics without consent is what the silo systems do.

Things like number of users, or number of active users is ok, but profiling users and aggregating them into categories is something I'd rather avoid.

@bob @dansup @mmn It is not Big Data if it is you looking at your own data. Big Data is about finding commonality among millions of users. That is different. How I think about this would be about a single user. You. Where some of it might also work publicly.

@maiyannah @mmn @bob @dansup Why? Please elaborate.

@bob @dansup @sydneyfalk Gamification is not an automatic bad. It is a great motivator and can be used to motivate good behavior. Maybe there is a way to use it for motivating cultivation of real relationships?

One thing would perhaps be motivating higher activity. Participation leads to more relationships being made. Which is also something social org's which from their members. A common trick is to offer free coffee for instance.

@dansup

> first paragraph

This doesn't seem like a very concrete statement, but for some values of all those things, I suppose they're true.

> second paragraph

So it sounds like nameless data; opting out of that would still be ideal but it's far less worrying.

Is it nameless data (i.e. aggregated and sanitized, like follower count changes over time or such)?