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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

#121

Post by dale_glass »

jmyeet wrote: post #74
dale_glass wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side: 1. We want to write software, not to wrangle with the laws of a hundred countri…

> Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side: I couldn't disagree more. First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation. Second, IMHO it's not even true. It's a bit like how you split a monolithic into microservices. Now you've created a bunch of versioning and orchestration problems where you have to deal with network issues. Federation m…

> First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation.

Did you quote the wrong part? Obviously, value proposition to developers isn't a value proposition to users a lot of the time.

Second, this is a dev-centric forum.

> There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.

It's exactly like that, yes. That's the very point: that if say, Verizon starts doing something unpleasant like spamming, they can find themselves cut off from the rest of the system.

Meanwhile, unlike with POTS, any alternative is accessible to Verizon users, so they could move over with minimal pain.

The ideal is that in a federated system, there's always alternatives, and no instance is too big to fail.

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

#122

Post by justinpombrio »

LasEspuelas wrote: post #116
justinpombrio wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it! Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up…

In my experience open access still includes a big publisher sucking up tons of money. It is just money paid up front by authors. Do you have an example of open access were that is not the case?

Some disciplines have started moving to Arxiv. And all the major programming languages conferences (PLDI, POPL, ICFP, more) switched to PACMPL, which is open acess and I expect is cheaper but am not sure how to check. I don't know much about this; mostly just wanted to make the point that peer review != publishing.

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

#123

Post by heavyset_go »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #102
Jerrrry wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. those people were formed due to and in part of a bubble; and denying them the opportunity to have their bubble popped as it causes you discomfort is the exact opposite of being able to express oneself at all - it always comes with the chance of making someone uncomfortable. "I…

I’m really confused here. Are you saying black people live in a bubble for not wanting slurs thrown at them? It’s not like black people are unfamiliar with that word or the word is particularly enlightening? Who are we making uncomfortable by barring calling black people racial slurs, here? This is absolutely baffling logic when applied to racial slurs and black people.

[flagged]

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

#124

Post by p-e-w »

kaffeeringe wrote: post #119
p-e-w wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Myanmar. USA. They only didn't succeed with their coup.

Myanmar has been in a nearly continuous civil war for decades. It's a failed state and always has been. That has nothing to do with social media.

And no US government in recent history, including the one before the current one, had killing people on their agenda. That's just complete and utter horseshit.

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

#125

Post by Moldoteck »

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…

Thing is, with current social media, bubbles are quite limited. Social media likes interactions and comments and the best way to gain those is by exposing totally opposite info to a person with certain views. This will also drive toxicity way up. The fediverse is more like some local cozy communities. Yes, there are some bad groups of ppl, but generally it's ok to be part of a smaller community compared to being exposed to constant hate, rage by social media algorithms to gain more interactions

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

#126

Post by p-e-w »

msmenardi wrote: post #109
p-e-w wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> 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. that veterinarian may be more different than the people you see in everyday life, but the point of a social media bubble is that the veterina…

Interested in one common topic. If I like crocheting, interacting with people in a crocheting subreddit doesn't create a "filter bubble". The people in that sub are still going to have wildly different opinions and preferences from myself on any topic besides crocheting. And large subs like AskReddit are obviously being frequented by people from every imaginable background.

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

#127

Post by TMWNN »

khaki54 wrote: post #15
mplewis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "blue haired people" mean?

Well it used to mean old ladies. In this context, he's referring to left leaning people who disproportionately dye their hair wild colors vs. conservative people.

Relevant: From 4chan, hair dye's effect on female brain https://i.redd.it/izl5ue0zmef71.jpg>

Also, see aposematism https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aposematic-hair-color>

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

#128

Post by glenstein »

p-e-w wrote: post #87
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, a…

Could not have said it better myself. The bubble idea is a myth and, as we've seen here, when people attempt to articulate it, it cashes out as something astonishingly shallow.

It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on.

Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism.

It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.

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

#129

Post by mariusor »

eropple wrote: post #25
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with federation is easily visible in e-mail: the server “owns” your address and therefore moving in very hard. It’s not much better than any other silo in that way. Mastodon is a bunch of small social sites in a trenchcoat. There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implemen…

This is one of the things that Bluesky's ATProto is trying to solve, and have been making steps towards it. We'll see if it gets there, but I find their thinking generally pretty persuasive.

> I find their thinking generally pretty persuasive

Is it persuasive enough to have multiple implementations and multiple instances running? How many instances of blue sky are there running out there?

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

#130

Post by glenstein »

saagarjha wrote: post #107
threeseed wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple made a guide for how to use Mastodon on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1668483560 So conceptually they are fine with it. And there is nothing you stopping your running servers on your devices.

Servers that can’t run continuously aren’t very useful, though?

Whether you think they're useful is one thing, but the point was that they're not in any formal sense forbidden by Google or Apple.
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