Added Video Sources, Updated MD Draft

Author: extratone

EssayDraft.md

@@ -50,4 +50,18 @@ When asked how Facebook determines when to open-source a project, guest and Deve
 
 > One of the reasons we have for open-sourcing a project is it's gonna make something better. It's gonna improve either something in the industry - it might be a new, novel approach to solving a problem... Something that we built internally and want to share with the world.
 
-Critics of Open Source development suggest that major companies like Facebook are often only interested in making projects public for the sake of “[free labor](https://www.vice.com/en/article/43zak3/the-internet-was-built-on-the-free-labor-of-open-source-developers-is-that-sustainable)” by outside contributors.
+Critics of Open Source development suggest that major companies like Facebook are often only interested in making projects public for the sake of “[free labor](https://www.vice.com/en/article/43zak3/the-internet-was-built-on-the-free-labor-of-open-source-developers-is-that-sustainable)” by outside contributors.
+
+## The Parallel Fediverse
+
+A documented history of Federated social networks  is lacking, but a 2017 report by MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative entitled “[Defending Internet Freedom Through Decentralization](https://dci.mit.edu/decentralizedweb)” offers the most comprehensive review I was able to find on the subject. Theirs begins with the invention of a hardware project by “open Internet activist” Eben Moglen in 2010 “with the aim of shifting away from large, corporate owned server farms to a more community-oriented model for managing communications online,” called Freedom Box, and its relationship with Diaspora, the first federated SNS. The Diaspora project was launched by a group of Moglen’s students at Columbia University, originally intended a “distributed social networking service that addressed consumer privacy concerns by enabling users to host their own content on a friendly community device, like Freedom Box.” This vision depended on Moglen’s heavy emphasis on self-hosted servers as the primary means for users to maintain their privacy, going forward. 
+
+In a *WIRED* article citing the study entitled “[Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work](https://www.wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyll-never-work/),” Barabas suggests that “most people do not want to run their own web servers or social network nodes.” Diaspora exists today entirely separate of its original creators after its “young leaders” faltered under pressure from investor pressure to “’pivot’ the project to a more sustainable business model,” now in the hands of “the open source community.” As of November 2020, ~76000 total users were registered on Diaspora instances (called “nodes” by the community,) with approximately 17000 active in the past month.
+
+
+
+## Big Social, Overtaken
+
+Since 2017, the relationship between Mastodon and Twitter has exhibited a complete role reversal in key feature additions. While almost all of the articles and essays on the subject are keen to point out that [Eugen Rochko modeled Tootsuite’s original UI after Tweetdeck](https://mashable.com/2017/04/06/eugen-rochko-mastodon-interview/) (now an optional selection called “Advanced UI,”) the “mimicry” between the donor-funded, Open Source platform headed by a single German developer in his twenties and the 15-year-old for-profit social network maintained by a company with nearly 5000 employees shifts in the other direction upon close examination of specific featuresets. Just five months after Mastodon’s first penetration of the mainstream tech conversation in April of 2017 – with its default 500-character post limit and support for up to 5000 – Twitter [announced its upcoming expansion from 140 to 280 characters](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-you-more-characters-to-express-yourself.html). In October, 2017, with [Mastodon’s second version release](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2017/10/mastodon-2.0/), support for image descriptions (alt text) for the sake of accessibility was introduced. While Twitter had long supported similar metadata in images, it did not do so on its main web interface (twitter.com,) Tweetdeck, nor its mobile apps until [May 27th of this year](https://twitter.com/TwitterA11y/status/1265689579371323392).
+
+Many Mastodon instance administrators and invested users had added feature requests on the platform’s GitHub repository for media posts to support audio playback intermittently throughout its development history, but Rochko initially resisted out of fears that allowing users to share audio files in posts would lead to Mastodon being “[branded as a pirate music sharing service, and [their] project would end up getting blocked in search results](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7495#issuecomment-389511213).” Feedback would appear to have pressured him into giving in to this decision, as audio file uploads were quietly allowed in [Version 2.9.1 of the platform](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.9.1), released on June 22, 2019.

notes/Mastodon Vs. Twitter Innovation.md

@@ -26,4 +26,9 @@ Mastodon's Delete and Redraft feature.
 
 ## Image Descriptions
 
-[May 27th, 2020 Tweet](https://twitter.com/TwitterA11y/status/1265689579371323392)
+[May 27th, 2020 Tweet](https://twitter.com/TwitterA11y/status/1265689579371323392)
+
+"image descriptions for screen readers," "[Mastodon 2.0](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2017/10/mastodon-2.0/)" (October 19, 2017)
+
+@TwitterA11y. "Adding descriptions to images is a great way to include everyone in your conversation. These descriptions, aka alt-text, enable folks who use screen readers to interpret images in Tweets. Starting today, you no longer need a setting to add alt text and it's available on 📱 & 💻." *Twitter*, 27 May. 2020, 12:01 p.m., twitter.com/TwitterA11y/status/1265689579371323392.
+

sources/Mastodon Changelog.md

@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
+
+
 Changelog
 =========