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The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

blogs.lse.ac.uk

201–210 of 239 posts

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

#201
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humans can't be trusted to not censure information they dislike. corporate or private people will all follow their own self interests. there is no version where this ends well.

Humans have dealt with serious society-wise cultural issues rooted in base emotional desires like these many, many times before, and evolved beyond them. We can still develop common sense and a culture that is highly cautious of these attempts to censor everything, the stuff motivated by an ever expand hyper sensitivity to anything in shades of grey of something they don't like. We've experience half a decade where b…

i hope so too!

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Twitter” and “tweeting” also sounded stupid in 2007.

God, remember how stupid the name 'tumblr' was back then?

Still better than all the companies named for the .io domain hack.

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

#203
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (safe to link to - and its following page via mastodon) > Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on…

Which URL is the one getting hammered? The HTML blog post? Or some ActivityPub resource? Why do all requests need to hit the database instead of being served by a (micro) cache?

Is there anything besides the inbox endpoint that actually needs to be real-time dynamic?

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

#204
I don't the answer to rent-seeking publishers is Mastodon. It's sites like Arxiv and libgen.

Mastadon is the answer to Twitter.

In general, I think a lot about hyper efficient marketplace companies. Like craigslist which is still have less than 50 employees.

Suppose we had a goal to connect consumer to producer and have the lowest fees, provide a well ranked marketplace that consumers and producers could trust.

1% fee w a $100 cap. A super app like WeChat - Umbrella to Uber, AirBnB, Expedia, MLS, Amazon.

With rise of AI, it could be possible. "The most efficient way to provide for human wants"

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

#205
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fediverse: We are open for federation and you to join! Meta: Ok here is what we are doing with instagram/threads. Fediverse: Not that kind of open!

Accurate except for the part where there is already not a single Fediverse because Meta aren't the first to offend the Mastodon hivemind.

Yeah but even those of us on Fun Fedi don't want Meta around.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be too sure of that. Plenty of instances have preemptively blocked Meta and it's likely that if and when Threads goes AP, more will follow. Some of us still remember Eternal September and would like to avoid a repeat.

People always talk a big game. But by then there should be well in excess of 200-300m people on Threads. Many of them will want to converse with Mastodon users and vice versa and I am sure there will be instances available that will be happy to allow that conversation to happen. Because ultimately it's all about users not instances.

And that's fine, but chances are that any instances which would federate with Threads would probably get defederated by many of the instances which refuse to federate with it. We've already seen this behaviour in fediblock drama, where merely being able to see content from "bad" instances is enough to get your own blocked by an entire union of censorious Mastodon admins.

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

#207
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…

> 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…

Your hatred is steaming out of your ears like if you were a cartoon character. Relax, some random poster on the internet is not to blame for your suffering. And just because they have a different opinion on something meaningless, doesn't mean they're an ass, "privileged", or ignorantly living in a "filter bubble".

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

#208
post #147
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.

Other than as a generic pejorative, what "fascists" are regularly on television? What tenets of Fascism are they preaching?

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

#209
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…

> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.

There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.

On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.

To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?

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

#210
post #51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> user-friendly moves Such as? Difficult onboarding? I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.) It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it. Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level. For example one of them had an option to…

This point is confusing to me because there are so many clients available. Not only in different projects (Misskey/Firefish/Sharkey, Akkoma/Pleroma, glitch-soc), but also from the various compatible clients in the web and mobile (Elk, Semaphore/Enafore/Pinafore, Ice Cubes, Fedilab). Many instances also tweak their frontend to make UX adjustments, which is a lot more difficult in closed source projects.
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