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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

#161

Post by robertlagrant »

ploum wrote: post #147
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…

We all live in bubbles. But, for some reasons, people think that some places are "bubble free". They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".

> They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".

This does feel a little like a bubbley description of things.

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

#162

Post by OfSanguineFire »

justinpombrio wrote: post #111
zoogeny wrote: post #92

This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific probl…

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…

Last time I read such an HN comment thread, one poster claimed that Sci-Hub was morally wrong because “how will peer reviewers get paid if people just pirate the papers?”. Tell me you don’t know anything about academic publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about academic publishing. Seems to be a widespread misconception.

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

#163

Post by OfSanguineFire »

p-e-w wrote: post #126
msmenardi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A forum on a single common topic can still create a filter bubble. For example, I know some music and outdoor-sports forums where the participants now post about not only those topics, but also a limited spectrum of US political rants or social-justice advocacy. If you come from somewhere else and you have different views or do not participate in such discussions, you can feel outright excluded from the club.

On any anglophone forum, it can happen that just enough participants are North Americans with the same views, that their political and social concerns are considered relevant and important. Some Reddit subs have seen this, too. Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.

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

#164

Post by red1reaper »

rev_simulation wrote: post #139
Jerrrry wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids call the kid the n-word because they are in a bubble where that was okay. Until they get their bubble popped. But you think it's better to all live in separate, but presumably equal, bubbles.

Maybe this is some cultural difference, but I kinda don't get why using n-word is different from using any other slurs. Most people would agree (I hope) that slurs are not part of normal, civil discussion, and I cannot understand why would anyone try to create a safe space for discussion with someone who calls them "motherf*** fa**". I think such person has no interest in polite conversation, unless, of course, in ot…

The problem is that like there are safe spaces for people to not hear slurs, there exists safe spaces for people to say slurs without backslash. The first is not a problem but the second very much is.

If you can exclude the ppl that say slurs, the ppl that say slurs can do the same, ending up in slurland, were they get worse and worse until they go to the street and kill someone.

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

#165

Post by throw_a_grenade »

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.

Fun fact, both of those countries don't use SI for everyday measures.

There are two kinds of countries, I guess. Those that ~landed on the moon~ voted in fascist leaders and those that use metric system.

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

#166

Post by IanCal »

bradley13 wrote: post #146
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…

You are on point: paid journals bring nothing to the table, except that they have somehow established reputations (of varying levels), where people publish their papers. But the journals themselves do very little. It's largely or entirely volunteers who review papers and select the ones that get publish. The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destinat…

> You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination.

Just as a quick counter - you'd want to base this on something more permanent. CLOCKSS[0] or something similar is a necessity with DOIs pointing to the papers. Otherwise you're back to "the source code is here: (broken link to old academic site)"

I agree that the use of journals for the literal job of publishing seems antiquated.

(disclaimer, worked previously for the parent company of FigShare, other providers are available)

https://clockss.org/figshare-preserves-with-the-clockss-arch...

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

#167

Post by mcv »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
jdlyga wrote: post #4

The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.

> main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is More awareness won't help while the churn is so high. The Fediverse seems to be happy staying small, actively disdaining the sorts of user-friendly moves that would give them mass appeal (but in the process, perhaps, destroy something its current users find special).

The Fediverse is not a single entity. Anyone who thinks it can be improved, can improve it. There are lots of different systems that are part of the Fediverse. It's not all Mastodon, and some of them have a completely different approach.

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

#168

Post by OfSanguineFire »

mariusor wrote: post #133
jmyeet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

> Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would. That's not really the case. Blocking a user is done when the user is mallicious, blocking a server is done when the sysop is malicious, the server is host to bad behaviour, used for spam, etc. Domains and IP's are blocked in SMTP all the time, and the fediverse is just email with social elements attached to it.

The founding generation of the fediverse may operate with definitions of “sysop is malicious” and “bad behavior” that make little sense to most of the world. For example, back when centralized blocklists were still in vogue, some insisted that servers that failed to ban discussion of libertarianism, ought to go on the blocklist. For whatever reason, some of the founding generation see libertarianism as beyond the pale, as equal to fascism or hate speech. Even as someone who has been annoyed for decades by the libertarian idealism occasionally encountered on nerd forums, that strikes me as a bizarre policy.

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

#169

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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…

> But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you.

Whats the alternative? That most shared discourse happens in a single space? I think its fairly clear that that doesn't work so well when everyone has write access to that space: it either dissolves into q conflict zone, or bubbles form within it, or both.

Before social media there was less of a problem because of gatekeeping by traditional journalism and state regulation, and because print media moves too slowly to permit high-freqency positive feedback loops to form.

I'm not suggesting going back to the situation before social media, but I'm not convinced that "comfortable bubbles" are the main problem. I suspect that the frequency and scale of discourse are at least as important.

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

#170

Post by User3456335 »

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…

> veterinarian in Azerbaijan

This is not the average vet in Azerbaijan. It's the vet telling a story that fits the values of YOUR bubble. There are probably Azerbaijanis in your own city who you don't know and wouldn't even listen to because they don't live in the same bubble. They might be struggling to put food on the table and they may think that you are a privileged ** and that you think you are morally superior because your bubble also contains privileged **s who happen to live in other countries.

You'd probably get more outside of your bubble by getting acquainted with a person at your local bus stop. But the reality is: you wouldn't want to because they don't live in your bubble.

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