@muncman yeah, I check his posts periodically. Reading about his implementation actually made me more sure Pnut shouldn't become part of the fediverse. :/
@muncman I think we could look at federating as an opportunity to save Pnut. But the technical and cultural costs to mixing like @manton is, I think there's only commercial benefit. And Pnut is a commercial success already.
@muncman with Pnut users spread across Micro.blog and miscellaneous Mastodon nodes already, including one specifically for App.net folks, Pnut is a fairly shallow drop to add to that ocean.
@muncman That is, I don't know how we would be serving users who aren't already being served in that space. You and @anth included; Pnut's got nothing.
@33MHz I didn’t share it to suggest Pnut should get involved; simply as a “look what others are doing.” I _like_ that Pnut is its own thing, after all — and changing that, if attempted, would be hard to get “right” (whatever that might mean).
@muncman In fact, I think Micro.blog ceding to the fediverse is its undoing. Now it will be relegated to systems administration. I suppose there's an idea of a club, the local instance, that can be free of hate speech and marauders.
@33MHz I am curious to see how it turns out, but yeah, I’m a little nervous about it. Manton’s evolution of it so far has been careful, so that’s hopeful.
I haven’t used the Tw and FB integrations there at all, so I may not use the Masto one either.
@muncman@33MHz Thanks! I was nervous too, which is why it took me over a year to do it. But the implementation in Micro.blog aligns very well with our goals. Worse would be to risk people using Mastodon like Twitter and giving up on their own blog.
@anth Surely if all the bars in town had two-way video chats, your bar would be less valuable, right? A lot of people wouldn't like the noise/nuisance of being tied to each others' bars. Local bar for local banter.
@anth * in the bar, obviously there could be great things from integrating with the other bars… But any benefit would also reduce any reason to stay in that bar, especially if the effort of going to another bar is slim.
@33MHz I don’t think this is a good analogy. You could imagine gmail as local-only, and it could be a valuable service, but it’s better with SMTP (even though SMTP is a mediocre protocol).
@anth different E-mail providers aren't different mediums or cultures, though. MDB is supposed to be different from Mastodon. I mean, was. It's not just "different content". It's a different medium. Crafted for a different purpose.
@anth when you put a movie on TV, it changes the movie, right? What analogy can we use? :D MDB is a unique medium that forms how we use it. Very similar but very different.
@anth it is true that, as much as Manton wants to encourage blogging, most MDB users probably want a Twitter experience, and Mastodon is close enough, and so interoperating will have no effect on them? But that might not be fair to Manton.
@anth MDB is supposed to have a basis of blogging and sharing blog posts. Now it's a Mastodon node. Mastodon has no such basis or values. While users can do things to minimize the effect to themselves, the greater culture and purpose are mixed.
@33MHz@anth Interesting discussion! The key difference is that Micro.blog's ActivityPub support is based on blog domain names. This was more work than giving everyone you@micro.blog usernames and differentiates it from a normal Mastodon instance.
@33MHz In theory, yes. In practice, today, we're not quite there yet since there are so many moving pieces in ActivityPub, including internal URLs and private keys. But portability should be the goal.
@muncman I find myself thinking about how people buy and value houses; if you're buying a house to live in, not primarily as an investment, then you don't care about those around you. You can have a local Mastodon, or a Pnut, etc.