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

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

matduggan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 217 posts

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#121

Post by lyu07282 »

jfengel wrote: post #59
Synaesthesia wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.

They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize. They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.

This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality.

Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy".

I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#122

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem.

There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.

There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.

It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.

There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.

I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/

Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).

I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.

I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#123

Post by t0bia_s »

darqis wrote: post #33

The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh imp…

Fediverse on mastodon increase social bubbles. Especially when admin of instance has apathy to any kind of different opinions and censor anything like that.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#124

Post by t0bia_s »

raffael_de wrote: post #101
Arainach wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource. When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die. Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spe…

> Moderators are a downright scare resource. if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators. > When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see? > Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it there is no…

if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

On mastodon, porn-like content is mostly welcomed. Especially with anime or fox characters. Not sure why.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#125

Post by GOD_Over_Djinn »

Arainach wrote: post #120
raffael_de wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems to me that the networking design is flawed. just to give a simple example: whitelisting (only seeing content of friends and followees) versus blacklisting (seeing everything ranked by an algorithm). wouldn't whitelisting already solve most of those issues? that would actually be my preferred modus anyway.

No, because that puts the effort of fighting bad actors on everyone. It means that every day you have new trolls spewing hate in your comments, and that your users have to constantly keep blocking trolls who follow them (and who recruit other trolls to join them) until they get tired and leave the platform. This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer -…

You would see comments from random trolls under a whitelist model. You would only see stuff from your friends.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#126

Post by GOD_Over_Djinn »

ses1984 wrote: post #91
lolurnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Free speech does exist in the law, not just as an ethical ideal. The law states that the government can’t infringe on your speech. Anyone who is not the government is free to block your ass if they don’t like you or what you’re saying. Not all speech is worth defending. The only people who benefit from free speech absolutism are the ones with only horrible things to say.

I don’t think that anyone has an issue with the block feature. The problem is when the platforms themselves decide to arbitrate which viewpoints are allowed. This was clearly visible during Covid, when divergent viewpoints were penalized aggressively.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#127

Post by satisfice »

threetonesun wrote: post #29
satisfice wrote: post #27

I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implicat…

It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.

I was on Compuserve and Usenet, both of which were no more difficult to use than Reddit. That was in the late eighties.

In 1986 I ran a FIDO server, which is like what the Fediverse is now, I guess. I had, maybe, 50 users?

I know how things used to be.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#128

Post by satisfice »

madjo80 wrote: post #103
satisfice wrote: post #27

I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implicat…

How did you choose the provider of your email address? For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their o…

I run my own mail server, thank you.

“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#129

Post by scoofy »

I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network.

I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#130

Post by neogodless »

xigoi wrote: post #111
Angostura wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join

Despite that, Fediverse promoters love to say “It doesn’t matter which instance you join”.

I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.

It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.

After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.

Post reply on HN