Peertube, the video service John Gruber says we need
I stopped reading John Gruber a few years back as I felt his Apple schtick was just old (I'd been reading him since the early 2000s) but while importing my feeds into NewsBlur today I ran across this recent post of his, riffing on an article in Political Wire about Jimmy Kimmel:
John says:
The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.
John is on Mastodon, and I don't know how active he is, but in my corner of "the fedi" PeerTube ("An alternative to Big Tech's video platforms") is fairly visible:
With PeerTube, no more opaque algorithms or obscure moderation policies! PeerTube platforms you visit are built, managed and moderated by their owners.
PeerTube allows platforms to be connected to each other, creating a big network of platforms that are both autonomous and interconnected.
Peertube is a video service that runs like Mastodon - it's an an ActivityPub service - where anyone with the time and inclination can run a video hosting service that allows its users to "like and subscribe" to users on the same server and others.
Yes, John is popular enough that I am certain a great many reply-guys have mentioned Peertube to him, but I am not them and this is for _you :heart:)_
Replying to a Mastodon post from the blog
Fedi/Mastodon programmers... with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a "local" ID that is suitable for passing as the "inReplyToID" in a toot payload?
Wondering if I need to:
- perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
- find the relevant status in the results
- use the ID for the status
Would that be the "local" ID?
#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb
On the Fedi and Viral Content
When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.
But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement -- these movements couldn't be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.
The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. ("Mal-odons"?)
I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how "content can't go viral" on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.
We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.
Wonder if I could write a little tool to calculate my post/reply/favorite/boost ratios on the #fediverse. Would be interesting to see and i'd like to maintain different ratios on different sites.
Or maybe i'm just over-engineering my social media usage.
nah