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The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

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Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#81

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10
pipeline_peak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers. Fediverse doesn’t really have anything on FAANG. It needs people to run it, who’s gonna pay them?

> Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers. Free software became successful in as much as it reduced the cost for companies selling other things to consumers. Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server. Linux enabled them to have a free operating system to run all their data tracking for a…

> "Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server."

Google and Facebook could afford to pay for expensive servers, even more expensive datacenters to house them in, and fat compensation packages to their employees and execs, so obviously yes. Plenty of industries exist that have high capex costs and manage to get off the ground just fine. Continuing to give away free software to startups with millions of VC dollars raised that are growing to billion dollar businesses no longer makes sense.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#82

Post by abdullahkhalids »

haolez wrote: post #22

My opinion is that it's hard to make the Fediverse work content-wise. The Big Techs have very expensive systems to do content moderation. I (kind of) trust Instagram, or X, or whatever to prevent my daughter from seeing gore or weird porn stuff. It's hard to trust these other platforms. But I'll change my mind if good arguments come up :)

It makes a lot of sense to have Mastodon instances that only accepts verified under-18 people from a single country. Far far easier to moderate such communities.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#83

Post by marcinzm »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #70
kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions. You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed. > regression towards the normal mean. Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.

Bubbles are safe until the day you realize a bubble that would like you dead has now grown large enough to vote in a like minded government in your country. Then nothing is safe.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#84

Post by jmyeet »

calamari4065 wrote: post #44
jmyeet wrote: post #5

Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users. Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscriptio…

I'm not sure how much you actually know about this stuff, but this take reads like you fundamentally don't understand the subject. Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. We can all agree that as user count goes up, abuse and moderation scales as well. A centralized platform takes all of that moderation load at once. You need a team of people or some…

> Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up.

It's the opposite. We have monolithic services because all of these problems benefit from scale. Is it easier to build one system for site safety and the ability to report illegal content or to build more than one?

> Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.

It doesn't load balance anything. It just multiplies the work, particularly given that any such service is going to have a long tail of low-distribution content. Are you going to replicate that preemptively? Or cache-on-demand? If it's the first, it's more work. If it's the second, it's not clear it actually works and certainly adds propagation delay. By this I mean, you can't really produce a feed of content you don't have, for example.

> If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you.

Famously, POTS has no issue with spam because of this.

> Bad actors aren't much of a concern.

Just like POTS, just like email, just like SMS.

> As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users.

Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would.

> But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand?

But it's not. You still have to deal with all the traffic from the rest of the network. Otherwise, what are you displaying to your users?

> Fediverse is far from perfect.

It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#85

Post by [deleted] »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #70
kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions. You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed. > regression towards the normal mean. Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.

[deleted]

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#86

Post by abdullahkhalids »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #33

The Fediverse is something that we already tried in many different fashions and it was never mass-adopted because it doesn't have the features that people want. It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough. It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it…

Limewire, the filesharing software was installed on one-third of computers worldwide in 2007 [1]. The problem is that software-engineers have lost their way. Limewire was a one-click install. Mastodon requires twenty arcane steps. Once you let average-joe one-click install and host, Mastodon will very rapidly rise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#87

Post by p-e-w »

kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles.

The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, and roughly the same level of education as you. Your colleagues, by definition, all work in the same business as you. You have (subconsciously) hand-picked your friends to align with you on a multitude of levels.

Meanwhile, on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#88

Post by john-radio »

nindalf wrote: post #79
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions. You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed. > regression towards the normal mean. Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.

No one questions that living in a bubble is comfortable. But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you. They’re now in a bubble (or “safe space”) where everyone agrees with them, so they’re more convinced than ever that they’re right. And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is…

This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "Society is about to get torn apart by me getting treated this way" but thinking it does not make it so.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#89

Post by p-e-w »

marcinzm wrote: post #83
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions. You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed. > regression towards the normal mean. Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.

Bubbles are safe until the day you realize a bubble that would like you dead has now grown large enough to vote in a like minded government in your country. Then nothing is safe.

Jesus Christ the hyperbole. Name a single example of a country where a government that "wants certain people dead" has been voted in recently, other than such countries where this has been happening for decades anyway without social media even existing.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#90

Post by jazzyjackson »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #86
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #33

The Fediverse is something that we already tried in many different fashions and it was never mass-adopted because it doesn't have the features that people want. It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough. It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it…

Limewire, the filesharing software was installed on one-third of computers worldwide in 2007 [1]. The problem is that software-engineers have lost their way. Limewire was a one-click install. Mastodon requires twenty arcane steps. Once you let average-joe one-click install and host, Mastodon will very rapidly rise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Limewire gave people for free what they were acclimated to paying for.

People already get social media for free. There's no reason for them to switch.

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