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.
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]
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.
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...)
Seems the real issue is that Mastodon is too hard to self host if not even Wikimedia wants to do it.
> it'd involve giving a third party a SSL certificate for wikimedia.org
You can have certificates for subdomains. With Let's Encrypt you still need to control the root domain to generate them so they'd have to setup something for that. But that's more a can't-be-bothered concern than an actual security concern. Teaching the public to trust random domains being authentic is a much much bigger security concern anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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?
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.
They control the identities, and if they wanted to they could transition the identities at the price of—at worst—data loss. It’s the difference between having a blog using the Medium CMS and hosting and having one on a subdomain of medium.com—you can switch away in the former case but you’re completely stuck in the latter (which is why Medium took away the first option and Substack never had it).
On a semi related note, WordPress recently acquired an activitypub plugin that does exactly what it sounds like. [0]
So as a corporation you don't really need a mastodon instance to broadcast your stuff. I think most organisations will go this route. (and i suspect threads hopes to piggyback of this for content).
I lost track of the conversation, but the developer is working on a full integration with WordPress so you can use it on a WordPress.com blog without the expensive plan that lets you use plugins.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
99% of what's posted on social media belongs in landfill anyway. It doesn't all need to be archived a it's probably not worth the effort trying to find the signal from the noise.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think we're past the point where Mastodon is obscure enough to need extra explanation in a place like this. This is a completely ordinary title form for people and organizations joining new platforms and technologies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which requires a log in these days.
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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.
>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.)
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.
>Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts.
My point is that "people with Twitter accounts" outnumber "people like you" (who primarily access twitter via nitter) literally and without hyperbole a thousand to one. You are exactly the kind of person who I'm talking about, who is wildly miscalibrated as to how the average person interacts with twitter.
>Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora
If you're talking about the login gate, then it's not "Quora's model", it's the model used by the single most successful social network in the world, which is still at or near the top despite being considered irrelevant. Dark patterns aren't used because execs like being evil for fun, they're used because they've proven to be effective in many cases.
Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions. Twitter's users numbers in the... what? 300 million or so? EDIT: Looks to be 450 million by some people's estimates.
Twitter remains a small fry compared to the real platforms. Locking itself out of the full size userbase of the world is incredibly stupid.
TikTok has 1.06 billion active monthly users. I think by any reasonable metric, Twitter's userbase is miniscule in comparison to the real bigwigs.
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Who is really out of touch between you and me? Do you have any numbers to back up the assertions you're making?
>Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions.
Sorry, I meant to be clearer about this. By "the single most successful social network in the world", I was talking about Facebook, not Twitter.
Facebook has done aggressive log-in gates since its inception, and it is self evident how successful that was in getting active users. Claiming that Twitter following suit is "locking itself out of the full size userbase" while using Facebook as an example is ironic, to say the least.
Elon Musk is rich, he can keep this going as long as he wants.
But we all know that Twitter's revenue is down from $5 Billion to maybe $2.5 Billion/year, and they got a $1.3 Billion / year interest payment due every year. It will not be profitable in any reasonable time period.
Whether or not Elon Musk will want to keep it when its in such a sorry state, or whether or not Elon will waste even more money on it in vain hopes of saving his investment is whatever. I don't know the timing of things, but these things can take years (especially if Elon puts more of his money up to raise funds).
But in any case, the money-losing aspect of Twitter is rather solid and publicly admitted. In general, businesses that constantly lose money (and loses $Billions when they only have low-single-digit Billions in revenue) makes the overall picture rather... obvious?
I'm not surprised that many other people agree with me. If that's where you're going with this. Do you have a counterpoint to offer?
Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount.
It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation.
The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.
> It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation.
Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021.
The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company.
You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before.
I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down.
So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story.
But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.
Twitter has never been a hugely profitable business. They lost quite a lot of money in 2021-22, though 2022 had a fairly profitable couple of quarters prior to the acquisition.
Musk made a leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt, true. But that's not really related to operating profit. It's a liability, true.
Unfortunately he bought at the peak of the market; had he waited 3-4 months, could have paid a lot less, & thus leveraged less. As I understand it, he signed a contract and then was under obligation to complete the buyout, and Twitter forced him to comply under threat of a lawsuit in Delaware court. It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation.
Be that as it may, he's treating this like his other companies, where he and his team were able to innovate and iterate until they became profitable. It happened with SpaceX and Tesla, at least. I have a lot of confidence in a man with this kind of track record.
Listen to his interview with Tucker Carlson, on youtube. He lays out the problems and promises of Twitter. Exciting times ahead.
> It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation.
The Twitter shareholders forced Elon Musk to create a $13 Billion loan to buy Twitter?
That's a pretty nuts take, ya know? The deal was designed by Elon Musk. If market conditions change between March and October, that's not Twitter shareholder's fault, that's Elon Musk's fault for failing to see how the economy would shift.
Once Musk signed the paper in April, it was over. The company was his, no matter how much he tried to squirm or get out of it. To think otherwise is to treat him as some kind of idiot who is incapable of accepting deals or making decisions for himself.
I asked an innocent question, and got a lot of lengthy, technical responses. The platforms I mentioned service _billions_ of users. It seems to me regardless of your opinion of "closed" or "insular" or "shoves ads", they're the big players right now and it's pointless to say "Oh, we're idealistic and we don't want ads or outages so we'll go with a feed that no one's heard of".
The reality is that the vast majority of Wikipedia users are _not_ tech savvy DIYers who know better than everyone else. They're ordinary people looking stuff up every minute of the day.
I would think that Wikipedia, despite its own vast size, could leverage the existing large platforms to achieve its goals (presenting unusual news or interesting facts, as their Twitter feed currently does, or explaining to people how Wikipedia works, how to contribute & edit content, etc.).
As for youtube, well, why not video content? It would be great.
I literally can't access Twitter anymore dude. Its cut off to people like me, who never bothered to make an account. I also don't have a Facebook account, so I can't access anything on Facebook either.
There's nothing "technical" about this issue. Its a simple issue of access. I can read the above Mastodon post just fine. I cannot do the same with a hypothetical Twitter post.
Twitter's always been open before, and I've never felt the need to chime into discussion over there. 250 characters sucks for discussion.
As far as my personal habits go, its easier for me to cut out Twitter forever (if they're going the crappy Quora model) rather than me making an account.
What does Twitter offer me? All it is is a bunch of crappy, one-or-two sentence long comments with the occasional person taking screenshots of text whenever they want to bypass the character-limits. (Alternatively, they make X/46 posts to link tweets together so that they can actually form a cohesive point, but such behavior is better suited for a proper blogpost + Twitter link anyway). Discussion is incredibly shallow and the bulk of the "usefulness" is top-level posts that get reposted to other locations on the internet anyway.
Discussion is consistently bad and shallow. Why would I ever want to join Twitter? Reading for points was all I ever did, and only when other people posted Twitter links.
I think it depends on the particular discussion. In the pre-acquisition days, there were thousands (probably millions) of automated accounts posting garbage. Many of these have been removed. I recall that when Trump had an active account, his every tweet had a cascade of unbelievably vile, profane responses, incredibly nasty. This type of thing still happens but seems less than before.
In more specialized topics such as crypto, technical, pets, etc., discussions seem tamer. But I don't consider Twitter really a place for discussions. It's just a microblogging platform.
By the way, the paid tier ("blue check") now allows much longer postings than 280 characters.
Twitter could be an absolute heaven of discussion (not that I believe it'd be possible with 280 characters), but unless its open to anonymous users, don't expect me to read it any time soon.
1. I've read it enough over the past years to know what kind of discussion typically takes place on there. I'm glad we both agree that discussion is poor.
2. Blue-checkmarks to be heard better is literally pay-to-be-heard and is not a model I'm particularly fond of. Other pay-to-win structures are similarly anathema to how I want to have discussions with people.
3. Reports from media I trust contradict your opinion. Andrew Tate for example has been getting a lot of news recently, and it has become clear that Elon Musk paid Tate the posting bonus for being a popular guy on Twitter. Is that the kind of person Twitter wants to be elevating on their platform?
You make it sound like bots are the problem. What about misogynistic assholes who (pending the results of their current trial) may have led a human trafficking ring? Are these the blue-checkmarks that people are boosting on the platform?
There's something to be said about curation. Choosing who, and who does not, get boosted by your algorithms. You're talking about "vile" posts that you are glad are gone. What about Elon Musk's "cisgender" discussion? Is that the kind of stuff you like associating yourself with?
4. Respectable people I trust, such as plainsite, have been banned on Twitter. This is a chilling effect. If people I trust have been banned on Twitter, that lowers the odds of me participating in the discussion, because I know I'll be banned for posting public court documents and otherwise being a reasonable person.
The moderation and kinds of people that this new Twitter is going for is definitely in the wrong direction for me. I never wanted Twitter before, but it has taken huge steps away from what I care to align myself with.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
