211–220 of 273 posts
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auto updating podman containers.
so you're saying there will never be a breaking change when the or bugs when the software updates? ever? That seems unlikely. I've managed my own servers many times before and that's never been the case.
More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
Seeing this now makes me wonder if it’s more to do with life in general.
More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
It's a nice essay but like so many in this space, it's really missing a key force that encourages consolidation, fights diversification, and pushes companies to centralize as much as they can into as few services as possible: Users. Users demonstrate, by their behavior, again and again, that they want simple, they want turnkey, they want inter-operation, and they want stability. And the big corps generally succeed in…
This didn’t have to be the case. It was purpose built around these megalithic designs by these large companies. Now advertising and culture curation ensure it’s always displayed in a positive light. Google, Apple, MS, all know to use angelic white light in their branding (slight hazy, blurry, seems to penetrate where it shouldn’t be). Apple stores even mimic a church design. It’s not that people don’t want to. They d…
I agree, because it was the easiest way to solve the problem of providing value to users. Redundancy and coupling of unrelated implementations is expensive. In the extreme, its O(N^2) expensive if you're going to bridge every separate system. Far easier to just build it once.
> Having to do more work wouldn’t be a thing if the protocols were designed to aid communication outside of corporate channels.
Sure, but rephrasing that would be "if companies did more work at no direct benefit to themselves, it would be easier for people to not use their software." Where is the benefit to them? And if this were easy to do, why hasn't the open source community done it? The only thing stopping them is when they build it, nobody (modulo the rounding error of dyed-in-the-wool computer fans) actually wants to use it.
> It’s not that people don’t want to. They don’t know any better and are addicted... People are afraid, not unwilling. Big brother says it’s not safe, so they go to the cozy sphere they know and regrettably trust with too much of their lives.
I used to believe this. I have come around to the thinking that after spending decades telling people what they should want, maybe I'm wrong and people know what they want better than me.
Mastodon is free and (relatively) easy to install and maintain. Why do people stay on Twitter? It's not because Elon Musk is tricking them.
I think you make a point regarding Big Brother, but it underestimates the benefits of staying in the maintained channels. If someone steals my money out of my bank account, the FDIC makes me whole. Who makes me whole when someone steals my Bitcoin? If Facebook did something illegal to me, they're a big enough target for the FBI to intervene. Who intervenes if my Mastodon admin uses my PII against me? They're judgment-proof, and criminal investigation doesn't enforce on small potataoes like that.
Larger, consolidated firms are bigger targets and easier to keep in line. A lot of crime happens in the ecosystem of small communities not in the spotlight.
> People lived under monarchies for a long time before a streak of luck, war, and land changed it.
People have all the tools to change out of corporate systems right now; they don't because it would make their lives worse, materially. They're not waiting for a savior to walk them off the plantation; they had the option to wander off in the wildnerness and they chose to live (virtually) where people are.
There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.
The reinforcement learning algorithm of facebook, instagram, youtube, tik-tok needs to move at the edge for that to happen. Nowadays, this seems much more probable than any other time in history, i.e last 15 years. Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of soc…
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RSS handles syndication, but how would their deep-dives be discoverable if they had been posted to personal blog sites? That's a missing piece of the puzzle for the distributed web; curation and recommendation are ad-hoc and don't scale.
They'd be discoverable by search or linking. The distributed web is compatible with feeds. It's what's happening on this site too. Except the content would be packaged and redistributable and wouldn't disappear when the original service goes down or such.
It feels like a chicken and egg problem to me -- realistically you need to meet people where they're at and appeal to the current channels' algorithms to get your content discovered, but in doing so you also reinforce the strength of the walled garden itself and participate in the diminishment of both search and the "wild" internet at large.
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The reinforcement learning algorithm of facebook, instagram, youtube, tik-tok needs to move at the edge for that to happen. Nowadays, this seems much more probable than any other time in history, i.e last 15 years. Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of soc…
TikTok is actually the only one from your list which gives a real chance to newcomers through the algorithm. That's also one of the reasons why the app is popular, the algorithm is just very different from anything else.
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Start an ssh-only bbs.
I have considered something like that in the past. The problem is that you can't stop someone else from making a web frontend (with ads on it, of course) and now you're back to were you started.
That starts in the USA with enforcing the 1st Amendment. If you work for the Government or if your employer accepts Government money in any form, then you can not censor your employees in their private lives.
I can post the most repugnant thing you have ever read, and the 1st Amendment says you can not even discuss it with me at work. That's the way freedom works.
The enshittification of the Internet starts and ends in HR.