Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

By Stephen Downes
Jun 05, 2025
Transcript of Inpost Convergent Discussions in the Fediverse

Unedited audio transcript from Google

[Speaker 1]
This is Stephen Downs. I am presenting convergent discussions in the fetter verse. And I'm doing it this way because I keep forgetting to turn on my recording devices. I've only been doing it since 2004, recording my talks. But I still forget. All right.

So, how many of you were here? For what just transpired? Only one. Uh, no, just one. Oh well, you're the only one who gets the full benefit of this. Because all of what I just said applies. Here. Um, and I didn't get a complete recording of the previous presentation.

I missed the first, I don't know, maybe five minutes of it. I got a lot of the good bits though. All right. Um. I won't actually start with the demo, but. I'll show you the demo or I'll show you what the demo would look like. This is a thing I built.

Uh, I did have some assistance. From chat GPT building app, but as I mentioned in the previous talk, Chad GPT. Max is out at about 1300 words. Give or take? And this is way more than 1300 words so. It wrote a lot of the functions for me, but I had to put it all together.

And of course I thought of this chat. Gpdt didn't, but? Something I've been working on for a long time. Let's set the stage, but let's first look at the promises I made in the abstract. They make promises. I don't always deliver on them. So, I'm going to talk about what the federal verse is.

I'm going to talk about the Dynamics of online discussions. I'm going to talk and show you. Uh, convergent fediverse discussion software, and it's actually more than that. It is a fully functioning Pro personal learning environment. Uh, it is, to my knowledge, the only one that was actually has actually been built.

Um, certainly seems to be the only one you could use today. You can use this today. It actually works, and you don't need to do any special installation of software or anything like that. Uh, we'll talk about that and. Interactive practice using software among the participants to conduct an online convergent discussion.

That's a bit ambitious for a one-hour session. Uh, super ambitious for a one-hour session, especially given. Three full points ahead of it. Um. And then consideration of learning potential for convergent discussions in the future. So, all that stuff I said before about societies, learning, being, learning, societies and all of that that applies here.

This is a tool for that, and it's also a tool for personal learning. As described previously, so learning. Outside the formal structure. Outside the typical course structure. Learning not based on creating content per se that you hand in to be graded. Kind of tricky. All right. So, where are we going to start?

We're going to start with the fetiverse, how many of you are familiar with the fetter verse? Okay. Uh, you're all familiar with Twitter and Facebook, though, right? Do you agree with me? Yes, you do that. They're awful. Yeah, they are awful, aren't they? Um, this is the slightest stall from the keynote.

Got a bit of? A cameo in it, um Michelle, 82 percent of Canadians using Facebook 73 using YouTube, etc, etc what these have in common. Is that? Single website platforms. Right, you go to twitter.com or x.com these days, or as I call it X Twitter, because I think that's funny, um.

Or facebook.com, youtube.com, instagram.com, or whatever. I don't use any Facebook products. I don't use any Twitter products I do use LinkedIn. I don't know why. Um, I used to use Tick Tock, and then it filed a copyright claim on me because I violated the copyright of John Cage. And for those of you who are familiar with John Cage and his epic work four minutes, 33 seconds.

It consists of nothing but silence. Yes, I had a silent video that I was accused of copying from John Cage. I complained, I got nothing back. I quit Tick Tock on the spot. It's just wrong, right? It's just wrong. And a lot of people think so.

People got together separately, and they developed something called the fetiverse. This actually has its origins in the World Wide Web Consortium. You might not know that, but?

The World Wide Web Consortium created something called activity Pub. Basically, it's a distributed messaging system. So, when you send messages back and forth the way we do on Twitter or Facebook, except we don't depend on a single server. And that's what it did. And then the guy called Eugen roshko, a Russian living in Germany.

Um, created the software for an application called mastodon. And Mastodon implements the activity Pub protocol that the World Wide Web Consortium came up with. Here is what Facebook and Twitter and the rest of them look like one Central server. Everybody connects for that one Central server. Well, one Central server is God.

It sees all. It knows all. If it doesn't like you, it kicks you off. Uh, if it wants to censor you or accuse you of violating copyright for having a silent video, it does. Not so here. The Federer verse. Think of multiple instances of Twitter. Or multiple instances of Facebook using open source software.

That connect to each other. And each one of these. It's called an instance. A number of people can join. So, you still have a whole bunch of people. Right, and they're still all connected together. But these distributed servers act as an intermediary. This is really important because each server can set its own policies.

And anyone? Even you if you felt like it could set up an instance of one of these, enjoying the federal verse yourself that way. Uh, there's all kinds of stuff that happens, right? Not everybody likes everybody, so they don't all connect to each other. Um, there's a thing called being de-federated, where nobody else will connect with you.

Um, you've heard of Donald Trump's truth social? You may have. Donald Trump has his own version of Twitter called truth social truth. Social is in fact Mastodon. But nobody will connect to him. He's a completely defederated instance of Mastodon, so it sort of sits there all by itself in the middle of nowhere.

I find that hilarious. So, that's, that's the basic concept. There's a whole bunch and we'll talk a bit about a few of them. Mastodon Blue Sky, which was created by some former Twitter people Lemmy, which is a Federated version of Reddit pure tube, which is a Federated version of YouTube.

Pixel fed, which is a Federated image sharing service like Instagram. So, and there's many more. But. They can all connect with each other. Makes sense. It's really simple, isn't it? People get really messed up with this concept, but they shouldn't. People like to say, it's like, email, if you think about it.

Right? There's the University email server where your University account is. There's hot mail. For those of you who still have Hotmail? Please say you don't still have hot meals two, two, out of six. I'm hot now. I might be. Gmail, right? Um, outlook.com. Right, just like email common protocols connect.

They don't all like each other. And in the world of email. There's a whole set of protocols so that if you're not following the protocol, you send an email from one server to this server. This server says, wait, a second. You're not following all the protocols. I refuse your email.

You're gonna bounce, right? Probably seen that happen. Same concept. Except with messaging or with videos or with pictures or whatever. All right.

Let's think about online discussion. For a moment. To my mind online discussion. Has never really worked. And, and I have an explanation for that, but? This slide illustrates some of my long history with online discussion. I mean, long. This over here. Is from a site called hotwired. And I used to be a regular on a on a service

[Speaker 2]
Called thread, which was a discussion board that started around 1995 or so. Give

[Speaker 1]
Or take? So, and it's interesting, because the only reason I ever became a blogger and never created my own website was because I had lots of posts on threads, and I asked myself one day. What happens if they shut down prints? And I realized all my posts would be lost. So I copied them all onto web pages, and that was the beginning of my website, my blog. They, of course, did shut down threats. I think it lasted to 1998, something like that. Uh, slash dot. Reddit is there Moodle discussions because we could also look at the disaster area called in-course discussion areas where you actually have to force people to participate. Think about that. Humans are the most chattiest pieces on the planet, and yet we have to force them to talk to each other in our classes. Discourse. Uh, Alan Levine, who you may or may not know, is doing heroic work with a discourse installation for the oer Consortium oer Consortium. We're open learning Consortium. Yeoman work. Nobody uses it. And in fact, a bunch of people who. He works with, told him no. We've set up a group on on LinkedIn. And I can just imagine the poor guy, come on. Just. But, you know, it's hard, right, and, and it's hard, because all of these sites are all separate. You could never communicate from one of these services to another. You can't send a message from Facebook to Twitter. You can't send a message from LinkedIn to anywhere. Right? Terrible stuff. So? How do we address this? Well, there's the interoperability. But there's also just the design of these discussion areas in general.

So, here's a linear discussion lists. It's the the design of the old threads you. You might see it in ircs or in chat, uh, discussions. It's the sort of thing we'll see on Discord. Um, on Matrix, various other. Discussion systems, right? It's just a list of comments. Lumineer, right? Um. For a long time, it was my favorite kind of discussion because it made sense.

I've lost 20 percent of my audience. Actually, no, not 20. What am I saying?

15.5 percent. No, never mind. Can't do math talk at the same time? Um, but it makes sense, but. I discovered that it really messes up a lot of people, because if you get more than like. A few people in the discussion. It just goes on and on and on and on, or it flashes by you so fast. Back in the day, people were used to that, and they would just, yeah, we'll just surf in the chat, right? You don't have to read every message. Just pick out what's interesting, but hard. Hard to do anything with.

[Speaker 3]
So we got threaded discussion

[Speaker 1]
List. You all have seen threaded discussion lists. This is a classic. Formulation of a threaded discussion is a classic result. Somebody makes a comment. Somebody replies somebody replies to the reply.

[Speaker 2]
Somebody replies to the reply to the employee. Somebody replies to the reply to the reply. Somebody replies to the reply to the reply to the reply. So now?

[Speaker 1]
All right, you need dangling threats. And they tail off into nothingness. Um, the mail servers, especially. Uh, you may remember things like the old Dios distance education online, supposedly a mailing list. Uh, was one or www.dev or www.eu. These are all threaded lists. There are archives are all threaded, and what would happen is you'd have a topic you'd have two or three people comment, and then you have two people going back and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth. Yeah, and they would dominate the entire discussion, and nobody could get a word in edgewise. And besides that, everybody was lost.

This is the dominant form of online courses, isn't it? Ever seen anything different? Linear or threaded?

[Speaker 3]
We talked this morning about. Social annotation on documents. Yeah, so that's

[Speaker 1]
An

[Speaker 3]
Interesting one where you're focused on some particular text, and then you can connect comments to text.

[Speaker 1]
Yep, those yeah, single level threaded basically or yeah, yeah, and actually, hot wires used to do that. Well, except they weren't threaded, but they would start with an article. Be commenting on the article or even with something like hypothesis. You can comment on a single paragraph and and then thread from there, but that's basically it. I mean that that's the big advance of the last 25 years, just commenting on documents. Something teachers were doing with red pens since pre-history. So?

Come also have linear threatened discussion list. Um, it's a combo form, right? And this, this is what, uh, discourse has. Which is why people find it so confusing? So you have a bunch of topics?

And then each topic will feed out into a thread. And that's also the organization. That we see on Mastodon today and on Blue Sky today. Is this modified form, but still? Linear or threaded? And you're probably thinking? Well, yeah, but hold what? Well. Nothing ever gets resolved. Right, you never reach any conclusion you tail off into nothingness. There's no, as we say, convergence. You just discuss and discuss and discuss, and this guy imagine science worked that way.

On the other hand. You can have convergence if you rethink. What a discussion looks like. All right, it's not just comment and reply. Comment and reply comment and reply right here we have. A model, just a model of a convergent discussion. It doesn't matter what they're talking about. A person makes a comment. We get two replies to that comment. We gotta well. We got two replies to that first reply. So, so far, ordinary threaded, and we even got a third level of reply to the reply. But then, what happens? Is this person replies to this person and this person at the same time? And then this person.

[Speaker 2]
Replies to this person and this person at the same time.

[Speaker 1]
How it doesn't always work out like this, but? One thing comes in. You bash it around a bit and something comes out the other end. That converges. To something. No, I'm not saying this is the guarantee. Of, you know, the future of humanity or anything like that? I'm just saying, it's a better way to do online discussions.

And is something that we've done for years. Millennia. Right, we don't just comment on papers. Right,

[Speaker 2]
You take a look at any paper in any discipline.

[Speaker 1]
Right. We have a paper somebody will cite the paper. Then the next person that comes along cites the first two papers. Because they're building on what has come before, but they're bringing it together very often. That's how we get our new ideas. So, we have. Kepler, taking the observations of Taiko bra. And the mathematics of say, I forget who he took it from Galileo. Brings them together and gives us the elliptical theory of orbits. Brilliant, but you got to bring things together. That's how we get scientific Advance. So far, so good. Makes sense. Seems to have nothing to do with. Hey, does it? It doesn't really. Okay. Well. They're working on it. But. They're working on it from the central Hub kind of thing. And you know there are citation tools that are out there that people know zotero is a good example of? There are others through note-taking tools, and so on. But they're all these horrible platforms. But we talked about earlier. So? Some people thought about convergence, obsidian, great example. Some people thought of convergence. Some people. Have thought about decentralization. But for some reason, nobody's put them together. And we're back to our full compliment. So, to wrap up then? Just kidding! So, here's what I do. Here's my thinking, this is a model I've had for many years and just agonized over.

So?

We have our decentralized, distributed social networks. We bring things together. In a writing environment. And then we send it back out to our social networks. I've described this in the world of moocs under the formulation aggregate remix, repurpose, feed forward. Or Earth. In honor of Alan Levine. The Cog dog walk.

Here's the flow of such your system.

[Speaker 2]
All

[Speaker 1]
Right. So, we bring stuff. Together, we remix it, we repurpose it. We feed it forward. Four pains, left pain, read pain, right, pain, right, pain. Because I am terrible at naming things. Should see the software behind that, says right, painter, right, paint. Fortunately. The AI. Should I use? Don't know the meanings of words. Also doesn't know how they're pronounced. So right, and right, just two completely different things. To GPT, it never confuses them. Some caveats about what I'm showing here. Totally prototype! This is me hacking on a computer. It's not a completed application. Uh-Huh. That's probably all it will ever be, right? It's it's a way of trying to express what I'm trying to say through code if I were a better coder, I'd say more complex things, but this is what I can say for now. Um, I'll show you a live demo. It'll break. It always does. Um. Other people have done some of the things. You may see some patterns, some design patterns that I'm following, that's fine. Um, I'm always happy to give credit to other people. It doesn't matter. No, it's not secure against all possible attacks. I know other people could have written the software better. Like, it's me, a computer and chat GPT and zero resources.

What did I think about when putting this together? First of all, let's get rid of the stupid platforms. This is a single user application. It's personal to you. Right, it's not. You know you, you go in and you log into Facebook or Twitter or even masked it on. There is logging and we'll talk about that, but this is you have one. You have one. Everybody has one, just like your email, right? Everybody has one. You know, you don't share your email account with the rest of the department. Uh, it's completely open source. Um, and I have official permission from the government of Canada to license. It is CC. Uh, I license it as CC buy, and not as some sort of software license. Because it's written in JavaScript, it's just script. All right. Nothing fancy. It's all designed to be distributed and decentralized. There's no Central node, no Central index. It's like the Federation. You could have one completely running completely off by itself, not connected to anything. No problem. It's as simple as possible. Um, simple, as understood by me. Um, which you know as as human factors? Uh, people would say, you know, it's probably a terrible way of defining simple, but? Uh. The idea is that it can run anywhere, and I mean literally anywhere. You should be able to run it off your desktop. You should be able to run it off your phone kind of, sort of. Things that I could do. There are just some fundamental limitations in the technology, and I'm trying to work with, but that's what I'm aiming for. It's plain, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Uh, there's no libraries, no node, no, you know. React, which is a product by Facebook, which I won't touch. Um, nothing fancy. It's all basic script. Again, just because I wanted to keep it independent of any dependencies. Here it is. Okay. This is the fully functional version. Doesn't have to look like this. It can be a very simple version. I'll show you a little bit, but. The Reed. Right. So, here are basically all of my accounts. I bring in the content here, and I can read it. This is just like. Um. The, uh, the main feed on. On Twitter. Or on Facebook, except there's no algorithm. That was an aside, there could be an algorithm, but it would be your algorithm, not Facebooks. Think about that. This is a writing pain. I know it doesn't really look like one, but it's, uh, you can write your own content here. And then save. You can either save locally. To your own file system or save to any of the instances out there on the social network. Or you can blog it or whatever. Eventually, I wanted to safety email, save to newsletter, whatever. So far, so good.

[Speaker 3]
So, resources on the left there. So, say you check Blue Sky. Is that load in the second pane you're looking at your?

[Speaker 1]
That's exactly what happens, yeah? And then.

[Speaker 3]
Do you select one of the posts and then it's the writing is linked to that post? Or is it more like a? Based on all you're seeing,

[Speaker 1]
Let me show you. I'll show you it'll be easier to show you. This is the live demo part. Okay. So that probably just stayed up. Yes, of course. It did, so we'll stop the presentation. If I can find the presentation? No, don't do that. There we go. Okay, we'll stop the presentation.

It's too disruptive. No, no, this is what I wanted to do. It's just I can never remember how to stop the presentation. Which is stupid? I don't know if there's a way.

How can there not be a button that says stop?

Yeah, pardon. Could you press Escape?

That did it just shut it right off? Okay. Now you can access this as well.

It'll look a little bit different for you than it does for me, because oh, it'll kind of look like this.

And. So? I'm going to log in. Now, I'm not logging into a platform. I'm logging in to a third-party service that keeps all my accounts for me. Now, in this case, I wrote my own third-party service. Um, but there are alternatives as well.

Strictly speaking, you don't need to use that third-party service. But how you do? So I've logged in. And here are these accounts. So, I'll show you what I mean by that third-party service. So? Um, I call it KV store for key value store. Again, there are commercial applications that to do that for you, like Vault, is one that I've been working with. So, I have a bunch of different accounts. And for each account, depending on the type of account it is. I have various values, so here's, for example, a mastodon account. And so, my username? Uh, the permissions. And an access code. We'll talk about that in a sec.

So, and I have accounts for all of my. I have an account for every service. Uh, I can have more than one account on any given service. I just give the account a different name. I have a different access code access code. So far, so good. Okay. In theory and back in the day, we I could have done this. I could have had an account for Twitter, an account for Facebook, and the account for LinkedIn today that is impossible. The access by third-party software to those Services. It has either been cut off completely. Or costs way more money than I have, which is none. So I don't have those. And now, again, that's the problem with the platform system, right. All these platforms are closed. They're proprietary. They don't interoperate with anything else. But the Federal verse stuff like Mastodon does. Let's have a look at Mastodon before I do anything else. Here's Mastodon. Very slowly. Here's Mastodon. So, this if you're familiar with tweet deck, that's what this looks like. If I didn't use the deck view, it would look a lot like Twitter.

[Speaker 4]
Oops, oh, stupid.

[Speaker 1]
I turned off my computer.

Okay, here we go. All right. Let's try that. No, it's still gonna give me deck. Right, because I have deck as an option. Never mind. Okay, so. Here's my my home feed. There are various other feeds. Um, here are notifications. And this is just some ways of getting access to more feeds. Like, for example, here are my bookmarks.

And uh, if I wanted, I could search on a hashtag.

Like Otessa. And has anybody done anything on a Tessa? Nope. Nobody's been posting on? Oh, Paul Hibbetts did very nice. Oh, that was 2024. So? Yeah, that's kind of what I thought there may be stuff on Twitter for otessa or Facebook or whatever. See if it was on the third reverse. It wouldn't matter which service you're using. You use one hashtag, and everybody could find it. Right, because this hashtag search it's checking every instance, not just mastodon.social, which is where we are, but all the other different instances. Anyhow, I can make a post just like on Twitter. So, let's make a post here I am. Demo. Straight. Last hold on at otessa. 2825.

And. A post. Also works on the phone. I can take a picture and upload it, Etc. Just like Twitter, really, really?

Yeah, and so here's my account. And I can go into my account details. Um, preferences. Right, it's all really similar. And, uh, development. And. You see these applications. Here's one for C list. I've given it some permissions. I can create a new application when I create a new application. And set the permissions. Mastodon will give me an access code. And they'll use that access code to connect clist to mastinon.

Twitter used to do that. You, you could go onto Twitter's development. Area, create a service and an access code. Twitter would give you an access code. And. You could generate a new one anytime you want it. Just by logging into Twitter again. Um. And it would allow you to connect, but not anymore, because.

This was even before Elon Musk. Uh, Twitter blocked access way before Elon Musk. Elon Musk monetized it. That's all he did. Okay, so here we are. Let's go back to where we were. So? I select my account. So, here's the following, there's my bookmarks. Various lists. I'll just pick the following. So, here's, here's the, uh, oh, here's cool. Surfer dude saying, hello, otessa, that's cool. So, that's cool. Let's tell the story of that. All right, so I typed.

And then, he replied.

And you see, I just click. The arrow right now. The formatting's a little bit off? I'd really rather it was over there, but yeah. Can't have everything? And so you see what I've done right. I've taken two separate posts converged them together. Now they're in a single post, and I'm replying to both of them at once. And so I can save that.

Hmm, I should have more.

Huh? I can save it as a local file. I don't see why I can't. Oh, right, save rather than post, or I can post that so I can save it as a local file. Um, that blank one there. That's, that's future technology that's saved to Cloud eventually. I'll just use the Google Cloud API and right to that, but I don't have that working yet. So I can send this. Let's send this to my blog because it might be a bit long for a Mastodon post, so I'll publish now. I've published this to my blog. And if you don't believe me?

[Speaker 4]
Here it is.

[Speaker 1]
I didn't give it a total, so I went downward. Here I am demonstrating or demonstrating Mastodon and here, he replied. So, my post is responding to the two things at once. Steven

[Speaker 3]
Argos at schooling out. Into our activity Hub, or to say, Todd, get a verification that you're,

[Speaker 1]
Um. So? Not at the moment. So? And that's, that's a great question. Now, if I just simply replied to him here?

[Speaker 4]
Yeah, right.

[Speaker 1]
Than he would. Because I'm just. I'm just using the, uh, the Mastodon status posting, so that that goes out as a reply to. And we can see that here. I'll reload.

I forgot. My leftish.media. Um. Wordpress blog is also part of the Federverse. And I use my Mastodon account to follow my WordPress account. So, my WordPress post just showed up here. And so anybody who follows my WordPress post would have seen this. Here's my response to cool Surfer dude. All right, and you can see, it says, replied, this one doesn't say replied. So? Yeah.

So many technical things.

Design of activity Pub, and therefore the design of mastodon, and therefore the design of blue sky and everything else.

The the data element reply to defined as a string and not an array. Now, what that means is you can only have one reply to? It's linear. Right? But if it was an array, I could be replying to more than one at a time. For me to fix that. I need to. Download an instance of Mastodon. Open up the code, learn how Masterdon Works. Mastodon is written in a software language called Ruby. And specifically Ruby on Rails. Which I sort of now, sort of, don't know. Find the definition of reply to change that to an array and then fix every spot that refers to that so that it refers to an array and not a string. So, a bit of a pain to fix. But if that was done, or if somebody marked me did that, or if somebody built software servers that could accommodate that, then I could be replying to multiple people at once. I don't know. I was going to say as the good Lord intended, but that's probably overstating it a bit. What do you think so far?

[Speaker 5]
It's great, I just need to a train, but thank you so much. That's great. I'm sorry,

[Speaker 1]
You can't leave. This is a platform you're captured.

[Speaker 6]
The

[Speaker 1]
Door is locked. I don't even know how much time I have to go. Probably not too much, eh? So?

Yeah. Um, I won't go back to the slides. I'll just show you the stuff that's on the slides. From here. And then you can go back to the slides and you'll see some explanation of them. So, here's Blue Sky. Remember, I talked about things being silos, right? Twitter can't talk to Facebook, and Facebook can't talk to Twitter. Here's Blue Sky, and let's get rid of all of this. And now, let's, uh. Let's. Just get the timeline from Blue Sky? And we'll take one of these. Um. Oh, insect, die off. You wouldn't believe. You know when I'm at the football game, I look up the lights on the stadium. There used to be covered. With moths and other bugs. Now, when I look up, you see a few hardly any. It's. More than 90 percent of the insect population has died off, and people know, oh well, whatever we don't like bugs anyways. Just, it just kills me anyhow. So, I'd like to promote Veronica's statement about that, so I've taken it from Blue Sky. I'll go right. And I'll select Downs, which we recall is my mastodon account. And let's also select Blue Sky. Might as well send my reply to both of them. I'll publish. So?

It should have gone to both of them. Should have?

Okay. Let's reload. It might not have.

Unless it doesn't seem to have gone to mastodon. You would think sending a message to multiple Services is simple, but no. Um. This probably failed because it was too long. I bet you it failed on Blue Sky for the same reason. Let's check.

[Speaker 4]
Uh.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it did. Oh wait, let's check me.

I can never on Blue Sky. I can never find how to get to my own account. To see my own posts. I don't follow myself. It's, it's a pain.

See, I just get that another. Oh well, I'll just assume it. Oh, maybe this? There we go. Yeah, I know it didn't show up there either. It was too long for both of those. So, I need to. What I need to do is write a check or have a thing. That, and that's what those permissions are supposed to do is to Define how long the post can be. On the different service and then trim it to that length, but I've done the math a little bit wrong there. Um, either that or if I'm signing to multiple Services, it's not looping through them quite right. This is all the stuff you can't really depend on. Chat GPT to figure out because it doesn't really know what you're trying to do because, as I said in my previous part time presentation, chat GPT doesn't understand. The content just understands the sequencing, so it has no way of reading my intent. Um. Some neat things. I want to show you this at the very least. Um. I'm gonna load a template. Maybe? No, it's not hanging a load. All sorts being really slow because I don't know why.

[Speaker 4]
There we go.

[Speaker 1]
I had this problem earlier as well. Okay, here we go. Load content. So, let's load the template. Or no, let's generate a new template. There we go. This template. Is generated in real time by AI. And I'll generate it in. Well, I'll pick text.

And take a little bit of time. So, the idea here is in my editing area. I'm not just doing stuff myself, I can pre-load a template, then get some content that I've gotten from social media loaded into that template, and then send all of that off as a blog post if I want. But even better. Now that I have an editor now that I have the template generated, I'll load it in etherpad.

[Speaker 4]
And.

[Speaker 1]
Here's my ether pad. And now I can. Use my template, which unfortunately I generated in text. Which probably wasn't the right thing to do. Um, but now I can work with another person collaboratively me in my personal learning environment. They, in their personal learning environment, we're combining on a document you are using your sources, the feeds that you follow. I'm using the feeds that I follow. We bring it all in together convergence on convergence, then we can each individually send it to our separate networks or blogs or wherever.

Uh, it's also connected to. Google search and duck dot go search! And Oasis open educational resources. Oops, I forgot to search for anything, but it still gives me a result. You can imagine I, I can connect to any number of open educational resource repositories.

[Speaker 4]
Or,

[Speaker 1]
And this is another thing that is future technology I can. Give it. A request. Please create a resource that teaches me blah, blah, blah. The AI will create an open educational resource on the Fly. And give it to me so that I can read it right here in my reading pane. And then I'll select a paragraph from it. And feed it. Uh, into? My feed actually will feed it wherever my cursor is. So, let me. Move that down a bit, oops. Here we go.

Let's see what we get now.

[Speaker 3]
So that text above, there is, oh, there

[Speaker 4]
It is.

[Speaker 1]
Well, it looks sus because it's text. Formatted in an HTML environment. That's why it looks sus if I had generated it as HTML. It would look like a nice template. But. Um, it doesn't prevent you from making mistakes like that. It could, but it doesn't. So? Think about it, right? Oh, and one last thing, the the feeds. Um, are automatically translated. In the background on the fly. Now, you have to be careful with that. I accidentally charged myself about three hundred dollars last November, testing the service. Testing the system. So, yeah. That's the sort of thing that can happen if you're not careful. But you would all be smart enough not to sign up for something like that, so I need to optimize that a bit so that it works and doesn't break the bank when you translate because. Yeah, when you don't notice what it's costing, you could translate everything. Uh, one of the things it does is every single post it checks a test and uses AI to detect what language it's in. Because what I've discovered is people lie about what language they're using. And so they declare that you're using English, but what they're really using is Slovenian. And. So I was, I was, I was missing a whole bunch of Slovenian content because I do follow someone who writes in Slovenian. And. Yeah, so I have to check. Okay, this isn't English. It's a slow being okay. Translate from Slovenian. And I got his very localized content.

Okay, let me wrap up.

Mundane tool, right? I mean, I think it's pretty smart myself, but I mean, it's just a piece of tech who cares, right? We we saw several Tech just demonstrations at this, and this isn't even Tech. You can buy, right? You can use it anytime. This, you know, to the extent that it functions, you could use it. Now, all you have to do is go to that address. And. The, you know you, you could create your account and the KV stored start storing your credentials. There's instructions that show you how? You could use it. And I'm not worried because you would not be using my AI translation service. Because that's only for me. You want AI translation, you pay for it. All right, or are any of the other services some of my services, you know, I mean, well, think about what I connect to. I connect to the key value store. I connect to an ether pad server. I connect to three different types of AI. Um, I connect to Mastodon to Blue Sky. All of these external servers, right? So? But, what's happening is? I'm creating if, if enough people use this, and of course, it's a network effect, right? There has to be enough people using it, but if enough people use this or something like this, I don't care if it's this. And then we create that network of connected people, each with their own distinct set of resources. Or, if you will, their own individual context or context is used in the same sort of technical sense. It was in the previous talk. Right? Interacting back and forth. Think about how that changes. Most of what we've been talking about this whole conference, right? Um, open educational resources. You know, every single one of these posts is, in its own way, an open educational resource, and it's shared out there in this open network, and they build together. They feed on each other. We're creating collectively a base of resources. This base of resources can be stored in external servers like Cloud servers or databases, or wherever we want to store them.

We're not all going off in our own individual directions. We're bringing together content. So that, well, we're convergent. So, we're creating a kind of social intelligence. By thinking of ourselves. Not as separate atomistic individuals. Who have read and Rand and believe in technocapitalism? And not as young Communists who think that we're always collaborating, always working toward the same objectives together as defined by the party. But cooperating right, each of us with our own individual distinct, diverse perspective. Each of us, putting him to the system and getting out of the system, what we can, and what we need. And as a model of learning. Now, if I need to learn something? I can get. The resources that I need content video. Uh, you know, AI, stuff, search, whatever, I can learn, whatever I need, and I can report on the results of my learning back to the original person or on to the next person who needs to learn. It acts as a filtering system. As as well as as a search and Discovery system because? You won't always find from the original Source. The resource that you need? You'll find a resource because it wasn't just doesn't just exist, but it was used by this person used by that person used by that person sort of a distributed version. Of the page algorithm for search ranking that Google originally used. So, that's it. Um, I could go on talking much more, but I really, really, shouldn't, but thank you all for your time.

[Speaker 4]
Oh, and you can ask questions.

[Speaker 1]
If you want?

Huh,

[Speaker 4]
It's really

[Speaker 3]
Interesting, I think. And in the last session we were talking about, uh? Twitter. That was a little bit and

[Speaker 1]
The

[Speaker 3]
Social fabric that was. And. I personally, I haven't quite gotten as deep into mastodon as I had been at the time when Twitter was something quite different.

[Speaker 1]
It's

[Speaker 3]
Not like any Twitter anymore, so I just. You know, I'm very careful not to have a blue

[Speaker 2]
Sky and lasted on. I guess those are not really your managing those accounts. Those are just your sources.

[Speaker 3]
But like the hope for the the home I had for a mouse to Dawn and? Activity Pub was that you could like subscribe to people's blogs. You can subscribe to people's chatter. Yep, you can subscribe to people's photo feeds,

[Speaker 4]
And

[Speaker 3]
It would all kind of come into one place and still a little I don't know. Have you seen that it's has that been realized, or

[Speaker 1]
That you can do that now? Yeah. My WordPress blog is Federated. Uh, I don't use pixel fed. Um, but? If I did, you'd get my photos. Um, I do use pure tube for some content. That's Federated. That also is accessible. They would show up in your Mastodon feed.

[Speaker 3]
So, Mastermind is the.

[Speaker 1]
Can be. Yeah, it doesn't have to be. Yeah. I mean. There's any number of online services that use activity Pub where you can follow these all these different types of services. But Mastodon does tend to be. One that people use as their primary.

But really, I think that, honestly, I think that longer term they'll use something like this. And use it to connect to all their different accounts. And uh, there's, I had a whole slide and discussion on. Authentication and identity, and how to make that work. And right now. It's, it's not good. Um. Did you think there would be any value in sort of having them all

[Speaker 3]
Like Blue Skymaster on something that YouTube, like, could it all be?

[Speaker 1]
Integrated into a single fee. I don't know your mileage may vary, as they say, right. Um, you know, for some people. Yeah, I'd be valuable. They're the again. There's, there's a service out there that does that. I forget the name of it, but um. I forget what it's called, but you could find it. But what it doesn't have is the editing and the forwarding, right? That's just it. Like, every

[Speaker 4]
Single

[Speaker 1]
Bit of the thing that I've done. Other people have done every piece individually, right? But nobody's put them all together into a single application that puts all of the signing on and connecting, and that into the background and just gives you a single interface for it all.

But uh, they will. I mean, this is the story of my software. Is that I come up with the software and then a few years later, it's invented at Stanford? And. All right. No, I don't do I? I, that was, like, the question they asked me at NRC, right? Because I worked for the government, right? So technically, Crown property. Said no patents. Oh, thank you. You know, no, no royalties. Nothing like that. I just want this to be out there in the world for people to see as an example, and they agreed with me. So? But yeah, you can be sure people at Stanford will patent their version of money, or or Harvard, or whoever. I mean, that's. That's the history of this stuff. Right, pretty much every major development was created first in some sort of open format by someone. And then someone from one of these Elite universities has taken. The concept created a business around it and locked it down. Every single one. I

[Speaker 3]
Can see obsidian doing it and then when you're making. When you're doing your sense, making could be adding it to like, good idea, adding your hashtags, and if

[Speaker 1]
You you're

[Speaker 3]
Growing your graph and it could go out.

[Speaker 1]
And yeah, like a local graph in and out. Yeah,

[Speaker 6]
Crystal Palace that has like that painful. Yeah,

[Speaker 4]
Beautiful. Yeah,

[Speaker 6]
I'm thinking of a student going through, like, a, you know, things my mind always goes to formal hierarch, but imagine instead of all these closed courses in an LMS, they they?

After. Yeah, it's very powerful.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, one. One of the sources I want to connect to it is, uh, press books. Because they're they're pretty open, right? And so, instead of a feed properly so-called, you'd get the contents of the Press book organized in some way so that you could read the whole press book without having to expand every page. The way you have to impress because so user hostile, but just read the whole book, and then select a paragraph or whatever, and feed that into something that you're going to write about. As well, Moodle. Um, take a Moodle course and present that as a feed again without all of that overhead. For navigation, you just present it as a feed, and then just go through it.

[Speaker 6]
It's created a support use page that is an intended to correct you in some way. It's your only. That's

[Speaker 1]
Right, yeah,

[Speaker 6]
Yeah. Similarly.

[Speaker 1]
Same with the editing window in this. This is where the activities go as well, right? So, if I write something or if we create something in h5p, right? Instead of putting it in the feed, put it directly into the editing window and then you can use external comma content or whatever and work with it that way.

[Speaker 4]
So, where did the title come from?

[Speaker 1]
The Sea list. Oh, um. So? Federation. So, because Master activity Pub defines a soft or a, you know? A messaging Federation. Um and verse because everything's a verse. Right? So it's the Blogger verse. Um, cyberverse, or I guess it's cyberspace, but nobody's had better space. Could have been, but versus better. So that's where it comes from a Federated Federated Universe.

Absolutely,

[Speaker 4]
So we'll be watching, but we can use the service if we

[Speaker 3]
Want. I saw when you go there, it says login, it

[Speaker 1]
Says, create account. Yeah, you can use it now. It really, seriously exists. There's no conditions. But because think about it, if you go to that website. And it's on your browser. The entire application is now sitting in your browser. You can actually just save that web page now. If you try to run it off of your desktop, you will run into some cross-origin scripting problems. I have another page in my presentation about those. But, but if you load that content onto your own server somewhere, it'll run. Or you can just choose mine. I don't care because all you're doing from my perspective, all you're doing, is downloading a web page. You're not using any of my system resources.

So I can support a million people if not one page. Now, my KV store, maybe not. But, uh, yeah.

[Speaker 4]
Thank you, thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Thanks, everyone are.

[Speaker 7]
Tomorrow, right?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'll be back.

[Speaker 8]
Talk

[Speaker 9]
To it.

[Speaker 1]
Just so long as I'm there for my ball game. It's, uh, quote unquote work from Dome tomorrow. Uh, so what you're supposed to do is take your work with you and go watch the ball game. It starts at three.

[Speaker 9]
You're still going to be happy with concerts, I think so. Yeah,

[Speaker 4]
Recording stopped.

[Speaker 3]
I'm gonna rush back to my hotel in

[Speaker 9]
French, similar Good Japanese.

[Speaker 3]
Thanks, Stephen. Thanks!

[Speaker 7]
Yeah, it's 6, 30.

[Speaker 9]
I think most people have one Academy at the time.

[Speaker 6]
I'm going to be just sort of hanging out in the library, probably, or going and getting.

[Speaker 9]
Are you? Are you using this? Well, if you

[Speaker 6]
Want to hang out, we can try to find something like where we could go to local place to have a place

[Speaker 9]
Okay? Do you decide for dinner? Are we still, we're going to? We are our house, we are, yeah,

[Speaker 7]
Okay.

[Speaker 10]
Anyway, thanks so much. Um, so I, I think the open pedagogy thing was interesting, or maybe we can, um, and talk that a little bit at the end, like the vision, so it's not a student created content. It's the student creating content, but I, I think that that's kind of an interesting sort of Next Step discussion.

If you get to have your little slides on this? You're interested.

[Speaker 8]
Yeah, no, I share everything. I mean, that's how it works. It would be so silly to create all those flags. It's, like, oh, you can't help them.

[Speaker 4]
Yeah.

[Speaker 10]
Foreign.

Uh, according to 30, because I don't. I've unless they go back to my office and go online. Yeah, Steve. Are you going to the dinner?

[Speaker 8]
I was thinking of going, but I never, never followed through on it. I was thinking. Three games against the Phillies. They're usually a pretty soft team, so probably shoot some wins this year. Best team in the major right now. I know, yeah, and they spoke the days last night. Six runs in the first inning. Yeah.

What can you do? Yeah. Might be better. Tonight might be better tonight, various, I think maybe. Maybe, yeah, I think we'll miscuse me. I don't think I think we've catched the last day of the. Of the Athletic series.

[Speaker 4]
I'm not sure.

[Speaker 8]
Yeah, probably. I'll have. The roof open tonight. It'll be a nice, nice night. Should get some home runs on this.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah,

[Speaker 8]
The ball is flying last night. Yeah, hey, hey, David Snyder? Nice. I see, uh, barge is doing well, too. Now, I, I was. I'm living in Vancouver now and. So, I watch the Canadians, you know, here and there. And when I can and? Um, yeah, a couple years ago, barger. I was like this guy's gonna be a blue jay, but for sure, yeah. Yeah, and yeah, his track looks really good. Yeah, so him and? Um, Bernie Clement, right, yeah, both of

[Speaker 4]
Them, not powered. Yeah.

[Speaker 8]
Yeah, that's awesome. The other one I saw with the Canadians and I, I hope he, he recovers that. Titoman, the pitcher lucky pitcher. And can you throw? Yeah, and he just had some. Uh, I don't know if it was a tonicon. Or, I think it was, yeah. Just too bad. But yeah, I mean, if he makes a full recovery, he'll still be a he's got a long long, uh, Runway, ahead of him. I

[Speaker 9]
Think they had something like five over seven, had to go for Tommy John, yeah. They're all pitched in 95, 96, that's the thing they never used to do that. No, and, uh, it's just it takes a call. Yeah, especially on the left.

You

[Speaker 4]
Have to go.

Hey,

[Speaker 9]
Can I get there? Right? Yep. Um.

I

[Speaker 4]
Really enjoyed the session today. Of course. I have. No storage. Are you going to be around tomorrow? Yeah. Yeah, it was excited when I played the program.

Always.

Anyway.

Yeah, all right. I'll see you tomorrow, I will. Yeah. Oh, of course, it is.

All right recording in progress. This is Stephen Downs.

Yes,

[Speaker 3]
Thank you.