Just awesome.

They are well paid pirates. 🏴‍☠️

Is this Transno structure the ‘relational notes’ approach, like a wiki or Zettelkestein something something?

When Jack posted that idea, I remember seeing Christopher Lemmer Webber & Evan Prodromou mention ActivityPub to Jack right there. Oh how this world works :(

I agree. It is hard to see how a centralized powerful entity would cede that power to a decentralized system if their aim is not to turn decentralized communities into name-only but centralized in practice.

Obligatory XKCD

I like the publicity this gives to fediverse. I do not think ignoring existing protocols right from the start inspires hope in as much as Twitter and Harvard do not explicitly mention existing options. I hope I am wrong in the long run.

Twitter (at least their CEO) claimed they were interested in a decentralized form to allow more communities. ActivityPub, Matrix, Status etc were mentioned. But it seems these harvard people would like to build a new one instead of joining and improving the existing.

I do not know exactly what effect you are after, since all I did was paste the url link, but the editing options on web version are easy to use.

I must admit I felt they were out of place because only a handful of people might be able to understand them without a translator.

I think it is the other way round – in using whatever language they choose, they are seeking individuals who understand said language. If no one on the platform can understand the language, it is a miss for them, not you. For some reason, and even though I don’t mean that you are doing it, this sounds like those convenience store “speak English, this is America” moments. But the discussion it elicited is really helpful in understanding language issues on platforms.