Can someone explain to me what "Gobo" is in the 500 characters of a Mastodon post or less?
All I can figure on a Google skim is that it has something to do with the MIT Media Lab and something to do with the Fediverse, and that it is considered amorphously Promising.
@mcc two things.
1) it it is no longer based at the Media Lab because the PI for the project was one of a very few people who quit on ethical grounds after the Epstein stuff. He, and the project, are now at UMass Amherst.
2) it wants to be a mega-reader for the fediverse where you can plug in all your accounts on different services and have a star trek style omni-interface with excellent filtering, etc
@ethanz @oddletters @darius Thanks Prof. Zuckerman.
I see that the original Gobo appears to all appearances be a defunct project and I saw reference in another thread to a "Gobo 2.0". Is this Gobo 2.0 a going-concern project we should expect to hear more about later?
@mcc @oddletters @darius Yes, it's part of the challenge in moving universities - I don't have access to that old site. We will be releasing a new Gobo this spring.
@ethanz @oddletters @darius I will keep an eye out then, thanks!
@ethanz @oddletters @darius @mcc is there anywhere one can try it out? I found an article about it that contained a link that doesn't work. Or is this still a work in progress?
@loke @oddletters @darius @mcc It's in progress. We wrote about the last version here - https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/11/16/who-filters-your-news-why-we-built-gobo-social/ - new version should be testable this spring.
@ethanz I see various versions of Gobo have supported Facebook at various times— since you're no longer mentioning Facebook support, I assume API access was ultimately denied? It's too bad the social corps always seem to hold back third-party tools like this…! It's like, they don't fix the problems, and then they hold back anyone else from fixing them :P
@darius @mcc @oddletters @ethanz not only that but he helped give us tripod! (Former tripod employee 2000-2003)
@oddletters @darius @mcc Not intentionally wicked. I'm occasionally accidentally wicked.
Gobo hopes to be a "loyal client", which is to say, it answers to you rather than to any platform. It can be used to read and post to a variety of social platforms (Mastodon, Twitter and Reddit in the forthcoming version) and supports an architecture that lets you choose different algorithms to filter and sort the posts you see (the 1.1 version... though we put out a version with that functionality a couple of years ago.) It's designed to run either in the web browser or as a phone app, is open source and we hope to create an environment where people are creating different, auditable algorithms for filtering and sorting.