Réseaux

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. @bluesky
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2019/12/25
These are reflections from Tim Bray (who knows a thing or two about protocols) on Twitter's @Bluesky proposal to create a decentralized social network. Will it work? he asks. Probably not. There are too many things that can't be fixed via the protocol alone - things like "the messy political mechanisms behind our imperfect but essential legal and regulatory frameworks." But maybe it could work, he says, with carefully designed APIs and the sort of AI-based indirection proposed by Stephen Wolfram. And there needs to be some mechanism to define 'verifiable or not' in the network's algorithms, he says. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the network effect and PLN’s
Clint Lalonde, Ed Tech Factotum, 2020/01/15
Clint Lalonde describes his thinking and efforts to convince people to use Mastodon, noting that it's hard to get a social network off the ground because of the network effect, that is, the idea that networks become much more useful as the number of people using them grow, but which means they can appear less desirable at the early stages. I don't see Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter (which I continue to use as a broadcasting tool) but as an alternative to Facebook (in other words, as a place to form community and chat). Also, I will never overcome "the hesitation around 'using' people." I don't believe in using people. I am happy to contribute to community and to converse with friends, but the minute I start assessing a network based on 'what I can get out of it' my motivation and my relationship with the network is broken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fediverse field trip
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2019/04/04
This is a look at a number of the lesser-known federated social networking applications (known collectively as the 'fediverse', and known as 'federated' because there is no central website, but rather a 'federation' of interconnetced websites). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. T-Mobile and Twitter
T-Mobile is blocking Twitter. In their notification to clients the mobile phone serv ice provider writes, "Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation." Mark Bernstein says, "T-Mobile's decision to block Twitter could just possibly be the end of the internet." Maybe that's a bit extreme. But, importantly, this is what happens when free content competes with commercial content. The free content is blocked by the service provider, which offers exactly the same thing for fifty cents a message. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Demand for Decentralized Social Networks
This is going to become a lot bigger. In a nutshell, the idea is that your blogging application - WordPress, say - should be your social network. As Om Malik describes it. So that insofar as data is winging its way from one site to another, you - using your own software - are in charge. See Jens Alfe on distributed identification. It's time for distributed social network applications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Networking, the Third Place, and the Evolution of Communication
This document from the New Media Consortium is an interesting way to present online reading material - but I find that way too much space is used supporting the comments, resulting in a lot of wasted space on the page (it doesn't help that the width is static, and roughly half the width of my browser window to begin with). The document's premises - that changes in technology are changing the way communicate - seems sensible enough, but whether the explanation of that change lies in a description of the locus of communication is perhaps less convincing. Here's the PDF version of the paper. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Network Transitions
What will the next big thing be? "It will be a situationally relevant social experience that exploits dense, underserved clusters, treating the ego-centric aspects as a sub-feature." If that's not clear, then you want to read this post, which makes a very useful distinction between ego-based and object-based social networks (the former center around people, the way Facebook does, the latter around objects, such as photos, the way Flickr does). Because ego-centered social networks do not have objects around which to based networks, they need to mine dense clusters opf relationships - in the case of Facebook, for example, previously existing social strata in schools and colleges. Any migration from Facebook will have to be similarly based. "I'm almost certain that the experience will be mobile based, incorporating geolocational data and personal beacons," writes Fred Stutzman. Via Terry Anderson, who asks, "what combination of ego-centric versus object-centered site is most appropriate?" My own approach has been to think of learning networks as neither object nor ego centered, but rather, to be centered around some activity or purpose. More...