Link Bundle: Mid-week edition
The Breadth of the Fediverse | Electronic Frontier Foundation
People coming from Twitter tend to think of the fediverse as a Twitter-replacement for the obvious reasons, and thus use Mastodon (or perhaps micro.blog), but that’s only a fraction of its potential. The question isn’t if the fediverse can replace Twitter, but if protocols can usurp platforms in our life online. With enough momentum the fediverse can be the fabric of the social web, incorporating existing systems like Tumblr and Medium and outright replacing stragglers.
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech via Of Course Mastodon Lost Users
Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak.
Doc Searls Weblog · Is Mastodon a commons?
I find myself wondering if each of Mastodon’s boats is a commons. Or if some of them could be, or already are. Or if Mastodon itself is one.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? | MIT Technology Review
But when she looked at the ideas themselves, Cornforth had questions: “I was like, ‘You didn’t talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?’ They were not contextualized in the problem at all.” The deep expertise in the communities of educators and administrators she worked with, Cornforth saw, was in tension with the disruptive, startup-flavored creativity of the design thinking process at consultancies like IDEO.org. “I felt like a stick in the mud to them,” she recalls. “And I felt they were out of touch with reality.”
How New Ideas Arise | The MIT Press Reader
Ideas arise from boredom. During a conference on film in Assisi in 1962, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini got bored and started absentmindedly flipping through a copy of the Gospel of Matthew. He was struck with how the world of the farmer in the age of Christ was documented in a text that was important not only for its religious fervor but also for its realistic brutality. This inspired the amazing shots of his film “La ricotta” and, later, the revolutionary shots of “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo.”