Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flipboard Begins to Federate

flipboard.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 123 posts

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#111

Post by iteratethis »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #85
iteratethis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the default "just move to another instance" take of Mastodon. It's impractical if not hostile. It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do. This attitude is exactly why there's a trend towards ever larger instances.

If the majority of the populace is happy with large, badly-moderated instances, more power to them. That doesn't mean the very real people well-served by small instances with enforced moderation policies should have that taken away from them. We only have problems when large instances get block-happy. There's some weird stuff going on in fedi admin circles, but so far, it hasn't been as harmful as (… think of a non-F…

Nothing will be taken away from small instances with strong opinions.

Saying that the larger instances are poorly moderated is highly subjective. Most social media users want to connect to people and content without limitations.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#112

Post by iteratethis »

Dalewyn wrote: post #101
esperent wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard. I made several attempts to get onboard with Mastodon about a year ago when I stopped using Twitter. I used a tool to copy over as many people I follow on Twitter to Mastodon. Technically, it's fine. The issue I have is that it felt exactly the same as Twitter, and I always disliked Twitter. However, Twitter had reached a network effect threshold where…

I doubt the specific communication medium is going to impact the conversations therein much if you're talking with more or less the same group of people on any of them. Or to put it another way: You interacted with people who post hot takes on Mysterious Twitter X, you went to the Federation of Mastodons and followed the same people who post hot takes. Now you're saying all you get are hot takes on both of them. Is a…

80% of the Mastodon userbase are Twitter refugees, the other 20% of hardcore users are misfits and nerds.

You can't really say that Mastodon is a neutral network, like all networks it has a vibe. The vibe on Mastodon is progressive orthodoxy, doomer-culture, endless dunking and virtue-signaling.

It sucks. Even if you look beyond its depressing culture, it doesn't deliver for news, sports, or frankly anything popular.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#113

Post by capableweb »

none_to_remain wrote: post #89
capableweb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long is a rope? There is already a bunch of "completely detached" networks out there, organized via wifi links. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are three examples of such networks, where you can basically avoid the current internet infrastructure as long as you get hooked up to the mesh network. Lots of interesting services deployed on these networks too :)

I've read about the NYC mesh in the past, I don't remember it being disconnected from the wider internet?

Usually the meshes have parts of the network that is connected to the internet, and you either automatically get access to those nodes so you can route via them, or you can request access to be able to reach the wider network.

Really depends on the mesh, I don't know the specific answer for NYC mesh.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#114

Post by calamari4065 »

sigmar wrote: post #91
calamari4065 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

>But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate. If you post a profile publicly on the internet, people/companies can easily scrape it. Regardless of what is in the threads ToS and whether you're federating with threads... am I missing something?

That doesn't mean it's not still a dick move

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#115

Post by calamari4065 »

iteratethis wrote: post #109
calamari4065 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

"But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media." This statement cuts to the heart of the matter and is at best a half-truth. "Most people" on Mastodon are Twitter refugees. Well over 80% only joined after November 2022. This is a fundamentally different group from the much smaller longtime users. I do agree that the hardcore users dictate the culture…

>but this same mindset pretty much ensures that the status quo of the Fediverse (or Mastodon) remains: niche, tiny, anti-growth.

That's a feature, not a bug

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#116

Post by calamari4065 »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #94
calamari4065 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

> Meta will scrape all available data about your account I genuinely don’t see the problem here. If it’s publicly available, why can’t Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc scrape it? It’s like complaining that the wrong folks are reading the poster you just put up: well duh you put the poster up in public, of course it’s gonna get read!

It's still a dick move

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#117

Post by indymike »

apitman wrote: post #35
indymike wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but surely most of them never would have used XMPP in the first place. There was a time that Facebook messenger was XMPP and Google chat was XMPP, so there was a time it was gaining a lot of traction. Most people just think their email is email. They don't see it as using SMTP/IMAP/POP3.

I guess what I'm asking is was adoption by big tech a net negative? If you add 50 million users then take away 50 million users, then maybe no harm done. Unless there were other effects as well.

This was a classic play where big tech used XMPP to grow their user base, but as users changed left to escape various paper cuts (ads in the UI, lack of utility, etc...), big tech realized they could not force people to stay on their platform. So, big tech does what it does when it has more to lose than gain - it went closed.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#118

Post by kelseyfrog »

apitman wrote: post #98
kelseyfrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E. The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

Embrace isn't the time to worry, Extend is, and then only conditionally. If they come up with sensible features, then maybe the standard should evolve. But if it starts becoming too complex to implement or gives too much power to Meta, then I'm ready to join you in raising the alarm.

Just one quick question, can you point out an example where that worked?

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#119

Post by rchaud »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #96
rchaud wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium absolutely has login walls. Scroll past a couple of paragraphs and there it is.

That’s a paywall, which is what I said above.

It's not a paywall, it's a "member-only" story, hence a login wall.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#120

Post by tonystubblebine »

rchaud wrote: post #119
tonystubblebine wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a paywall, which is what I said above.

It's not a paywall, it's a "member-only" story, hence a login wall.

I'm not sure where the disconnect is. What do you think the difference is? I don't see one. Membership requires payment, hence it is a paywall. Also, there is no paywall or membership wall on this story that I submitted.
Post reply on HN