cakeistheanswer

It’s a very interesting thought, but it will always struggle to account for variables you can’t see.

It’s always going to be designed top down to approximate your own development as human from the ground up. I don’t douby AI as a feasible possibility, but I don’t think we’re headed for digital clones. They’re always going to have some amount of the creators ghost or assumptions in the machine.

I’ve checked the frontpage from time to time just to monitor what’s changing, but I have yet to log in.

It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.

I’ve got 2, largely out of curiosity for what defederation meant as far as user perspective.

When exporting comes online I’ll likely make an effort to spin up an instance if it’s still feasible… So there will be a 3rd cake?On the positive side I don’t think you’re going to find many people wanting to sock puppet mild takes and noise rock.

It’s a well founded worry.

Activitypub represents the lowest dev entry costs and as a bonus it comes with an audience. If Facebook is standing up a cheap competitor just to take advantage the barrier to entry is miniscule.

Given the trouble some users have noted deleting content (erasing also kills your Instagram account), it might also be a play to deprecate a duplicate platform under their control.

Isn’t the key operating word here business?

With no advertising on the line and no operations currently in place operating at anything but a loss there isn’t a commercial interest at stake.

Understandable, and yet if nobody contributes upvotes out of the same concern you end up with nothing standing out in your feed to come comment on. Kind of circular.

On the other hand having an upvote actually attached to your (and I actually mean your handle here) name would likely give it credibility in a weird sense. There’s much less incentive to blindly upvote if it essentially shows what you saw like a slug trail, but if you’re selectively giving oxygen to the best of what you see then that trail is valuable to others who value you. It’s a functional change from competing to push things for their own sake.

Im old! I come from an era where there was no such thing as OPSEC as soon as you interact with another party you cant personally name. For every consumer that was the phone company, or literally right out the door. If you transmit (login credentials, personal info, search queries) the expectation is somewhere, someone or something is logging it. Not even maliciously all the time either, sometimes I got to some of this out of boredom. The corporate Internet just kind of acts like a middle man, because that same problem never went away, just siloed into companies.

Until we get to a future like Transmetropolitan where the expectation is your online presence has some dirty laundry (and hopefully leave out the other stuff), all the bits/bytes, not just upvotes, you transmit should have a limited expectation of privacy. This is just the best/latest reminder because every hack is the same problem, only the company has incentive to keep it quiet so it doesn’t hit their bottom line.

This is super interesting to me.

I think you’re right in that the user base has the same expectations despite a huge change in the model. But it’s going to be the same on any server, your circle of trust now has to include your instance owner everywhere on the fediverse.

In general there’s no expectation you can delete every email you ever sent either, just your local copies. Most of what you see here is similar with some new attached protocols (votes, markdown etc)

I’m sure we’ll see some evolution, but the entire infrastructure is a call back to when a single service wasn’t directly linked to a single business, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

In other words I’m not sure the concession isn’t the price you pay to not have reddit/twitter in charge. Because any other architecture that had the convenience of having a single point to delete from is also going to be a single point of failure.

Fully expected to be buried since I’m late to the party.

That’s really only half of it, there is no real erasure possible when everyone’s holding a cached copy. Personally… I kind of like it, I don’t hold any value to the words I contribute here as long as they’re for everyone.

But everything and everyone is living in concentric glass houses here.

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

Ahh always nice to revisit my first dose of propaganda.

I would have downloaded a car if I could have.

I think this is just the leading edge unless folks are lining up to replace moderators in most communities.

Systems tend to fail slowly, and then all at once.

Most fediverse denizens have noticed how sane and measured the dialogue is, which is entirely a product of the audience who is here right now. But everyone’s got a threshold, whether Reddit loses everyone or not isn’t relevant if they couldn’t be profitable with all of us. There’s a death spiral coming, and if there’s anything left Reddit will have to functionally change.

Easiest to think of Reddit as a party grinding on too long and starting to get rowdier, and the bouncers just quit.

Long term science.

Nobody’s taped someone to a table and shot em with those rays. And there has never been more of them going around, so there’s no comparison either.

When we say something is a cure or cause it’s born out of a ton of testing and time.

Alright, more of a eli5 as I’m more folk knowledge than a scientist.

It’s a narrower (more dense) wavelength.

If you think of signal, any signal, how close you are to it, the total power of that signal and the quality of your receiving gear are going to be your three major factors in “speed”.

5g gains the ability to broadcast more waves iif you’re close, at the expense of distance.

If you’re looking to send communications further; wider (lower density) waves face less resistance. Just the same way you can seemingly get AM radio (bouncing off our atmosphere) anywhere vs FM radio (line of sight), each has a function.

You can find rural houses like mine, or the futures trades riding from the burbs to downtown with microwave (narrower than 5g) connections. They’re pretty atmosphere resistant but require tuning to hit relays the size of about a soda can.

I don’t think the longitudinal studies have been done on what frequencies over long periods of time produce negative results, the areas of spectrum we are working with have no real analogues in scope I’m aware of. Which is exactly why there’s room to scaremonger over it.

Anecdotally I’ve worked a decade in an adjacent field and never heard of anyone contacting the plague.

In the days before Reddit ‘won’ you used to be able to find tons of niche sites/boards cultivating smaller audiences. Beer advocate/rate beer, headfi and whatever the latest splinter was there in the audiophile community both come to mind. There’s generally more division by which each might find more ‘aligned’ or maybe their friends are on one first.

I don’t know if it’s possible to predict, social dynamics are weird and this is going to be new for a giant segment of the audience.

I love this scene.

If anything my point was mostly self indicting. To anyone with a firm ideology I probably represent part of the problem.

It’s just a pithy truism, the reason is hopefully the higher rate of concern.

I mean from what I’ve seen the less abrasive frame would be ‘find a space for constructive discussion for the marginalized.’ I’m not really their audience, but I have eyes, they take an abnormal amount of shit in their day to day life.

I don’t think there’s a shortage of places in that universe to speak your mind, and I wouldn’t try to set someone else’s house rules.

Nothing more typically lefty than a good infight. Seen plenty of that to go around.

Honestly while the entire architecture is in it’s infancy we’d do well to remember being here to have a voice (or at least a front row seat) is a feature not a bug.

Better now than when the corporations get to the fediverse.