Building the FOSSicon Valley: Could the Fediverse become the better silicon valley?

More importantly, the fediverse can represent a viable alternative to what FANG wants to build.
The internet will be divided into walled, tracked, identity based, surveilled regions, and truly anonymous regions.
Without the fediverse a viable non-surveilled internet might not be able to exist.
- Just looked up what FANG means - what the hell does Netflix in there? Seriously Netflix doesn't do shit. Typical case of forced acronyms ;)
  Without the fediverse a viable non-surveilled internet might not be able to exist.
  I would agree. Mastodon made search opt-in. There will always be communities and users that refuse to be searchable and that should be fine.
  
  FAANG originally meant the silicon valley giants. Netflix is obviously one of them, even tho it is falling behind now.
- Like a dark alleyway in a big city, I like it.
- FAMG doesn’t have the same ring to it but i hate that Microsoft is missing.
  Or we keep FANG for Nestle? Maybe not relevant but any opportunity to say Fuck nestle.
  
  (Let's) Fucking Annihilate Nestlé, Guys

Who wants another Silicon Valley? Their model is foundationally based on "moving fast and breaking things".
\ What about focusing on responsible, organic stewardship and community over growth at any cost? If no one's making any real money, we don't have to hitch our cart to the capitalist horse which has resulted in our current situation.
- I think it shouldnt ban companies per se. But yeah, if its all build up on open source software and a more healthy culture it will all be for the better. Thats why I wrote "better" silicon valley

Tangentially related, but I've been feeling like perhaps we've been jumping the gun with Lemmy and Kbin...
Maybe it would have made more sense, at least from an interoperability statepoint, to make an activitypub User protocol that can be selfhosted easily. So instead of making a new account for each Lemmy or Kbin instance someone has, you can instead connect your activitypub account to it.
Additionally as I know hosting has been an increasing problem around here, perhaps it would have been better to make instances single focused message boards ( i.e. just political humor, just animemes, just 196 etc.) So that the instance host can more easily manage moderation and hosting costs without ballooning things they might not necessarily care about to also be hosted by them.
This is just idle musings though, I'm not sure of how the community would be receptive to such thoughts.
- Many end up think along these lines at some point. It’s not you! Truth is activity pub is best thought of as an experiment. It’s got flaws as a system, and its recent growth is, IMO, somewhat awkward given the long term game. It would have been much nicer if the fundamental system were more solid.
  Many who’ve moved platforms from big social to Fedi, especially the non tech ones, would not be so happy to move again soon. They’re used to a decade or longer on Twitter and Facebook. So any new and improved protocol would split the user base and so struggle to gain traction. Same goes for the platforms probably.
  This interview from a while ago now of a developer that has made a parallel universe to the fediverse all in their own it seems is pretty eye opening on hotter tire whole thing might be under engineered: https://medium.com/we-distribute/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-45287601ff19
  To me, it seems pretty dated in what it was trying to achieve and shows it’s age in the current climate of privacy, safety and moderation concerns.
  
  They’re used to a decade or longer on Twitter and Facebook. So any new and improved protocol would split the user base and so struggle to gain traction.
  Could that be an inherent issue, no matter how you approach it? The issue might be that any social IT system which gains traction is already 10 years outdated. If true, it would mean we could start making something new now, which might be popular in 10 years, but then unable to effectively deal with whatever people deem essential in 10 years.
- message boards
  But thats what Mastodon does effectively. Then Lemmy would be another micro blogging service in the fediverse

Yes, but the Fediverse is only one part of the equation, and has its own pitfalls.
Free and open source software could overtake the proprietary software market in theory, but in practice it often fails since many FOSS projects are made for developers by other developers, most of who tend to be power users. And the average user needs ease of use, and easily accessible common functions, not a lightweight command-line interface with scripting.
Even then, things like games and other stuff might only will be partially FOSS, like engines and frameworks, the rest being behind a paywall. However, I think people should experiment with what I call "open source universes", which is basically creating shared universes that are open source. Maybe even make some open source RPG system with it too, so we could have an open source alternative to the likes of D&D, WH40k, etc. At one point I tried to make something like this, but the issue was that it was based on an old webcomic idea of mine, which I started working on when I had totally different views on many things. Might revisit it with different ideas later on.
Open source hardware will be a really hard uphill battle, with a large issue coming from closed-source drivers (Thanks ARM and nVidia!), cost and difficulty of manufacturing silicon, etc.
- An important aspect of the success of D&D/40k has been fan creations and lore explainers. A challenge for growing a creative commons (alternatives is that there isn't a unified set of "cannon" stories for independent creators to make "TOP 10 WACKIEST THINGS IN [franchise]" which are the intellectual equivalent to baby food (which I don't mean as an insult).
  then again, d&d and 40k are popular because the companies that own them decided to let smaller creators do the work of reprocessing the decades worth of lore into easily consumable and marketable chunks. Both the small creators and the central company got to symbiotically feed off of the brand value of the other. Then begins the enshitification once the brand reaches the mainstream
  The problem for less centrally controlled media isn't just that there isn't decades worth interconnected lore within one overarching franchise, it's that stories that aren't centrally controlled will mutate and be remixed too much to have the sort of symbiotic brand growth of 40k and d&d
- Yeah, this is very complex idea and also at the same time, I think IF open source community can handle or focus on privacy and security to the max that even Quantum Encryption can't break it (again, from our community first rather than come from military standard or big corporations), we can create FOSSicon Valley in reality. Of course there's a pros and cons bout this, but I think if we think about it together, then the problem would be solved by the nature of open source itself. This is imho from optimistic POV for this topic..
- Interesting that you mention open souce shared universes. I mean, at the end of the day, all of these become public domain anyways. The problem is that it takes way too long.
  But for example with "lord of the rings", it will someday be available to the public and then things will get interesting, especially with AI these days ...
- However, I think people should experiment with what I call “open source universes”, which is basically creating shared universes that are open source. Maybe even make some open source RPG system with it too, so we could have an open source alternative to the likes of D&D, WH40k, etc. At one point I tried to make something like this, but the issue was that it was based on an old webcomic idea of mine, which I started working on when I had totally different views on many things. Might revisit it with different ideas later on.
  Haven't played any of those, but I think they (and more) exist for a long time already: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

Nope. FOSS doesn't have the marketing or rapid development of centralized services. We stand out on longevity and stability over night however. Who knows how many days Twitter has to keep their lights on, and then the whole thing is dead. ActivityPub has no central point of failure, so it'd only die if every single dev lost interest. Though we definitely have a lot of problems we need to figure out, and our development is incredibly slow compared to theirs.

- Well you def a stakeholder

I thought this was going to be a blog post...
Silicon valley is full of companies. Should each service a company or how am I supposed to understand the proposition?
- No, each service is a service, regardless of whether its a company or a community or a single user. The idea is that it is a center of innovation for FOSS.

Without disliking the fediverse at all, I think what really hits the bell is nostr
Its a similar discussion as with renewable energies/storage: like which technology to focus without wasting resources?
- Its peer-to-peer, right? How do they handle moderation in there?
  
  This is what I was wondering.
  There are ways to do it. Whitelists and blocklists people can subscribe to (with different moderation strategies), with maybe default logic for integrating different lists and an easily extensible format for clients or end users to write their own scripts to do more complex combinations would go a long way.
  But as much as "decentralized" sounds cool, I think more structured communities for content work better. Reddit worked so well as a source for information before it shit the bed because it allowed communities to form with their own standards and ideas. It was flawed, but a hell of a lot more coherent than twitter was, because structure is useful.