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Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
131–140 of 217 posts
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#132Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era
There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Air is static and no one has to pay to keep it there. A mastodon server is private property, and needs maintenance and money to stay on. You cannot force a private entity to host your speech. They always have a choice.
Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?
Uh, you mean like a spam filter? I would not use an e-mail service without one.
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”. People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.…
I have no problem getting blocked but my only block on the Fediverse was accompanied by a block for all users on the same instance as me.
So start your own instance. You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard.
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#135Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much o…
How did you get that 'good sense' with forums back in the day? I did that by reading into the community. Just look around on the server, see the posts on there, and see if there's a connection. You can do that with Mastodon servers too. And it's not that high stakes. You are not stuck on that server, if you find out that it's not quite the right fit, you can move to another server. In fact, if I were to look at my fo…
For forums you can look at them for a minute or less and figure it out. It's same with HN and sub-reddits. They are information dense and don't require signing up or customization to figure out if you can curate them into something you might like.
Compare that to mastodon, step 1 is pick a server https://joinmastodon.org/servers Very few are actually topic focused. Even the ones with themes have a lot of deviation. Even picking the popular safe choice - https://mastodon.social/ , I can't tell if I would ever like it. I don't like what I normally see but considering I can see 2 posts at a time and a significate portion are animals or other topics I wouldn't visit a forum about, it doesn't feel like I would.
And the animal thing is common across most of the servers. I understand it, I have dogs. But it's a side effect of the medium not having a coherent focus. It feels like I'd have to spend so much time to turn it into something that I'd like that I'd be better off staying with forums.
Mastodon seem great if you want to follow people and be social which is kind of the point of social media. I want to follow areas of interest, not people.
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#137Earlier 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 -…
I feel like a simple reverse-recommendation algorithm could fulfill the role of auto blocking content.
“It looks like you hated that Nickleback song! You’ll probably also hate this Chad Kroeger solo project!”
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#138Mastodon 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.…
It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#139I 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 p…
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Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?
Uh, you mean like a spam filter? I would not use an e-mail service without one.
No. A spam filter still allows you to view the e-mails and reply to them if you want to.
Also, I would certainly not want an e-mail service where the spam filter is based on the admin’s political opinions.