<p>I’m on the train back to Montreal from New York, where I attended HOPE_16 over the weekend. I wanted to capture some thoughts while they were fresh, even though they might not be fully formed.</p>
<p>HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a technology and information security conference sponsored by 2600 Magazine. The SWF had two points of presence at the event this year: I gave an hour-long talk about the Fediverse which was streamed live. We also hosted the Fediverse Village, which turned out to be […]</p>
I’m on the train back to Montreal from New York, where I attended HOPE_16 over the weekend. I wanted to capture some thoughts while they were fresh, even though they might not be fully formed.
HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a technology and information security conference sponsored by 2600 Magazine. The SWF had two points of presence at the event this year: I gave an hour-long talk about the Fediverse which was streamed live. We also hosted the Fediverse Village, which turned out to be mostly a booth in the non-profits area of the vendors floor.
We had people streaming by all day long Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I had thought the Village was going to be more like a hang-out room, so I was caught off guard on prep, but I put out all the ActivityPub and Social Web Foundation stickers I had, covers for the ActivityPub book, and a stack of CoSocial.ca stickers to boot. But there was a definite stone soup aspect to the village area: people brought by schwag for Fediverse software like WriteFreely, instances like GardenState.social and Masto.nyc, and projects like DWeb.
I’d hoped to have more structured discussions, including a meetup for Fediverse governance and a hackathon. But it turned out to be a lot more loosey-goosey than I expected, and most of the weekend was spent talking to other Fediverse fans, and helping people who came up to the booth to ask about the Fediverse.
I think I expected because of the level of technical expertise that was shown at the event that we’d be speaking to only true believers. But there were many people there who hadn’t heard of the Fediverse, and who were excited to try it out. One thing that struck me that was an advantage for these people over commercial social networks was the option to get out from under the “real names” policies of many platforms. It’s hard to remember that the alternative to the Fediverse that most people are familiar with are services that require a real-looking legal name to be used, and force you to send a scan of a government ID if they’re at all suspicious.
The other thing that struck me was how many people came to the booth saying that they’d registered for a Mastodon account at some point, and were really excited to get it reactivated, but forgot which server it was on and didn’t want to register for another. I think that’s a real pain point for a lot of people — and one we should do better at solving.
I plan to come back to HOPE next year. I’d love to have more schwag for Fediverse software, services, and platforms. I’d like to have a way to get people signed up and onboarded for the Fediverse right at the table. And I’d like to have some more formal get-together events. There are spaces to meet at HOPE if you know how to set it up — I’m going to try to use them better next time.
Thanks to everyone who came to the Fediverse Village, my talk, or just talked to me around the HOPE event. I was energised by the people and the technology that was happening, and I look forward to engaging again.
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