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[//]: # (title: Create a Mastodon bot to forward Twitter and RSS feeds to your timeline)
[//]: # (description: Take your favourite accounts and sources with you on the Fediverse, even if they aren't there)
[//]: # (image: /img/twitter2mastodon.png)
[//]: # (author: Fabio Manganiello <fabio@platypush.tech>)
[//]: # (published: 2022-05-06)
## The search for a social safe harbor
My interest into the [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) and
its ideas, protocols and products dates back to at least a decade.
I've had an account on the [centralized Diaspora
instance](https://joindiaspora.com/) more or less since the service was spawned
in 2010 until it shut down some time last year.
And I've been running a [Mastodon instance](https://social.platypush.tech)
mainly dedicated to Platypush for a while, although I haven't advertised it
much so far because I haven't been spending much time on it myself until
recently.
However, my interest used to be quite sporadic until recently. Yes, I would
rant a lot about Facebook/Meta, about the irresponsibility and greediness
rooted deep in its culture, their very hostile and opaque approach against
external researchers and auditors and the deeply flawed thirst for further
centralization that motivates each of its decisions. And, whenever I got too
sick of Facebook, I would just move my social tents to Twitter. Which is far
from perfect, but it probably used to be the least poisonous between the two
necessary evils.
That applies [until
recently](https://www.economist.com/business/2022/04/23/elon-musks-twitter-saga-is-capitalism-gone-rogue).
I don't feel comfortable anymore sharing my thoughts and communications on a
platform owned by the richest man on earth, which also so happens to be a chief
troll with distorted ideas about the balance between freedom of speech and
responsibilities for one's words.
So, just like [many other
users](https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/140065/mastodon-gains-30000-new-users-after-musk-buys-twitter)
did after Musk's takeover, I also rushed (back) to the Fediverse as a safe and
uncompromising solution. But, unlike the majority of them, instead of rushing
to [mastodon.online](https://mastodon.online) (I don't like the idea of moving
from a centralized platform/instance to another), I rushed to upgrade and
prepare my dusty [social.platypush.tech](https://social.platypush.tech)
instance.
## Give me back the old web
The whole idea of a Fediverse is as old as Facebook and Twitter themselves.
[identi.ca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identi.ca), launched in 2008, was
probably the first implementation of an open-source social network based on
[Activity Streams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_Streams_(format)), an
open syndacation format drafted by the W3C to represent entities, accounts,
media, posts and more across several social platforms.
[GNU Social](https://gnusocial.network/) followed in 2009 (and it's still
active today), then
[Diaspora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)) in 2010
brought the world of alternative open-source social networks into the spotlight
for a while.
A lot of progress has happened since then.
[ActivityPub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub), another open protocol
drafted by the W3C, has become a de facto standard when it comes to sharing
content across different instances and platforms. And tens of platforms
(including Mastodon itself, Pleroma, PeerTube, Pubcast, Hubzilla, NextCloud
Social, Friendica) currently support ActivityPub, making it possible for users
to follow, interact and share content regardless of where it is hosted.
Anybody can install and run a public instance using one of these platforms, and
anybody on that instance can follow and interact with other users, even if they
are on other platforms. This is possible because the underlying protocols are
the same, no matter who runs the server or what server is run.
In my opinion, this is the way social networks should have been implemented
from the very beginning. Anybody can run one, it's up to admins of instances to
decide which other instances they want to _federate_ with (therefore importing
traffic from other instances into a unique _federated_ timeline), and it's up
to individual users to decide who they want to follow and therefore be part of
their home timeline, regardless of who runs the servers where those accounts
are hosted.
It's an idea that sits somewhere between email (you can exchange emails with
anyone as long as you have their email address, even if you have a `@gmail.com`
account and they have a `@hotmail.com` account, even if you use Thunderbird as
a client and they use a web app) and RSS feeds (you can aggregate links from
any source under the same interface, as long as that source provides an
RSS/Atom feed).
And that's indeed the trajectory that social networks were projected to follow
until the early 2010s. The W3C and ISO had worked feverishly on open protocols
that could make the social network experience open and distributed, like the
whole Internet had been designed to run up to that date. And implementations
such as identi.ca, GNU Social and Diaspora were quickly popping up to showcase
those implementations.
But that's not how history went, as we all know. Facebook underwent an
exponential growth through aggressive centralization and controversial data
collection practices and monetization practices. Most of the other social
networks also followed the Facebook model. Open chat protocols like XMPP were
gradually replaced by centralized apps with nearly no integrations with the
outside world. Open syndacation protocols like RSS and Atom were replaced by
closed timelines managed by centralized and closely guarded algorithms. This
was in part also due to Google killing Reader, the most used interface for
feeds, because it was in the way of their idea of web content monetization.
Open activity pub/sub algorithms were replaced by a handful of walled gardens.
Transparent, machine-readable data access was replaced by proprietary user
interfaces, and a few half-heartedly implemented APIs that cover only part of
the features and can be deprecated with nearly no notice depending on whatever
objective a private company decides to pursue on the short term.
I would argue that the aggressive push towards centralization, closed protocols
and walled gardens of the 2010s has only benefited a handful of private
companies, while throwing a wrench in a machinery that was already working
well, replacing it with a vision of the Web that created way more problems that
the ones that it aimed to solve, and overall the 5-6 companies behind that
disaster named Web 2.0 are responsible for pushing the innovation of the
Internet back by at least a decade.
The wave however, as it always happens in that eternal swing between
centralization and decentralization that pushes our industry forward, is
changing. The drawbacks of the centralized social network model have been under
everyone's for the past few years. The "you can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave, because all of your friends and relatives are here"
blackmail strategy starts to be less effective, because alternatives are
popping up, they are starting to gain traction, and the bleeding of active
users on Facebook and Twitter has been a fact for at least the past two years.
Twitter is well aware of it, and it has in fact decided to scale up the gear on
their [Bluesky
project](https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/4/23057473/twitter-bluesky-adx-release-open-source-decentralized-social-network).
They have recently published a [Github
repo](https://github.com/bluesky-social/adx) with a simple MVP with a server
and a command-line interface, and a (still quite vague) [architecture
document](https://github.com/bluesky-social/adx/blob/main/architecture.md) that
resembles a lot the ActivityPub implementation, except with a more centralized
control that would sit in the hands of a (still vaguely defined)
consortium/committee and a Blockchain-like approach to manage documents. This
has probably been an instinctive reaction to the bleeding of users towards
decentralized platform occurred after Musk's takeover, but to me it's too
little, too late:
- There are nearly two decades of work behind ActivityPub. A lot of smart
people have already figured out the (open) solutions to most of the problems.
I don't see the value of reinventing the wheel through a solution owned by a
private company, with a private consortium behind it, that proposes a
solution that is largely incompatible with what the ISO and W3C have been
building since the mid 2000s.
- I don't trust the sincerity of Twitter and the BlueSky investors. I feel like
the timing of their announcement is odd, it sounds much more like a
primordial reaction against Musk's takeover and the consequent bleeding of
users towards `mastodon.online` rather than a sincere effort to improve the
social media experience. And the publication of the Github repo (and
therefore the opening of the discussion with the community) has occurred way
too late. Had they been that interested in building a decentralized social
network, they should have been taking active part in the discussions around
ActivityPub for the past 10 years. Instead, they have milked their
centralized cow as long as they could (even when it was clear that it wasn't
profitable), built some hype around BlueSky in the past two years that was
all stale marketing talk, and they have rushed to publish a half baked MVP
from some engineer's laptop after the richest man on earth bought them. All
of this, just to prove the point that Twitter❤️open -source, that their cow
has run out of milk, that the geek community had been right all the time,
that they can't go anywhere without the open-source community (even if
they've been ignoring us for the past few years), but that they still deserve
get a chance of running the show their own way, with their own protocols, and
with a project where they still hold a majority stake. We shouldn't allow
their efforts to succeed, because they don't deserve to succeed.
## The problem of content