Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.
The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
I wonder how compatible groups will be with other applications.
It all depends if Mastodon decides to further evolve what some people call MastoPub or uses the existing standard: FEP-1b12.
As other people have undoubtly pointed out: Groups already exist in the FediVerse.
@_ed
That depends how strictly Mastodon (and other applications) stick to AP conventions over defining their own realm in the Fediverse… I’ve seen many discussions in e.g. Hubzilla how devs work persistently around quirky non-standard solutions of other platforms (including diaspora and Mastodon). Sometimes it’s more a matter of philosophy (e.g. dedication to ensuring privacy vs. “we are designed around public posting”, so groups have to be work-arounds for the basic philosophy instead of just a special case of existing privacy by design). Usually, they make it work in the end (at least for the Hubzilla side) - sometimes with a few compromises.
But I think often it’s a matter of dedication to interoperability attitude vs. platform-centric thinking by design.
And mastodon has consistently used platform-centric thinking over interoperability since its start. You can notice how whenever gargron talks about groups, he doesn’t mention any of the current implementations and the masto team is rarely involved in FEP or interoperability conversations (other than to defend their own stance)
I did notice the lack of any mention of other fediverse group mechanisms.
Overall, you’d have to presume that Mastodon being so dominant on the fediverse is just not a good thing, this being a tiny demonstration I’d say. Though to be fair, mentioning Friendica to that journalist may have just resulted on more questions.