161–170 of 361 posts
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wtf is an "elite" anyway? The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me? The politicians ... but not the ones on my side? The athletes ... except for my team?
What a completely pointless and banal digression into divisive politics when nobody asked for it.
I think the last thing we want is another site owned and controlled by a for-profit company.
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> opinion, not an action Holding an opinion is not an action. Going on twitter and banging on about your opinion is an action.
You're confused. Expressing your opinion, even on twitter, is an act of (written, typed) speech. Preventing someone from expressing themselves, when they have done no wrong, is an action.
Preventing someone from expressing themselves is an action.
This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time.
But regardless I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure. It might not replace twitter, but it might actually turn the entire internet into one big social media federation.
My mind keeps putting ActivityPub into the context of the late 90s and 2000s when I was registered on countless message boards. Imagine if all those message boards could inter-communicate using a common protocol. That's where ActivityPub could lead us.
The usability aspect can be worked on, it can be worked around. The gain in internet freedom is worth the effort.
Right now it's clearly aimed at slightly more adept users. But imagine if Joe Sixpack could login to the modern equivalent of AOL, post a message, and that message is federated across hundreds of softwares and hundreds and thousands of sites and eventually Joe gets a reply from someone halfway around the world using a completely different software. That is what I find magical.
So I guess it's going to be a matter of seeing which of the Twitter esque replacement systems wins out eventually, whether it be Mastodon, Blue Sky or Nostr.
Nothing to do with the Musk takeover being seen as a negative or a positive, just perfect timing in the sense that there is suddenly a lot of attention being placed on Twitter right now.
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There are three problems with Mastodon: 1) It's hard to get on it, unless you know someone who is running an instance. 2) No-one I know is on it, and can't get on it since they don't know anyone running an instance. 3) The people who are on it all have names like xXxFuchsSturm1488xXx and think I want to see a constant rolling feed of politically-orientated furry pr0n.
1. I run my own instance, and it's not that hard to set up and get connected to other instances. Those that don't want to run their own instance usually either join an existing instance (there are about 10k servers out there), or just join mastodon.social (and that's where most people are anyways). 2. When I joined I didn't know anybody either, but in a short time I connected to a lot of new interesting people. Now I…
2) I don't want to connect to a lot of new interesting people, I want to connect to the interesting people I'm already connected with.
3) I don't see the fun in joining a social network where I need to mute 98% of all posts and profiles every single time I go on.
The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…
I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a so…
We have solved this problem in a much better way on Mastodon. Do you want your account to be verified? Do you have a personal or business website or blog that is associated to you? Then just add an to the page, add the link to your profile, and the connection is done - you have proved that you are the owner of that website. Do we really need anything more than this?
Probably more useful with how many sites these days are JavaScript blobs that don't really transmit over static HTML anymore.
It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest proble…
The way the Internet is built, it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to ever tell if a client app is being operated by a human or a bot. There are various ways to make automation harder, and there are heuristics to guess if the operator might be a bot, but neither are absolute. The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost c…
Remember when key exchange parties were supposed to be a thing ad we would build a network of trust and so on?