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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

berk.es

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Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#201

Post by TulliusCicero »

arcade79 wrote: post #32
TulliusCicero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all. It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.

The problem is centralized rules. Different cultures has different rules. Joining it up to one platform and then enforcing one cultures rules on all the other culture is Not Okay. There are different views on nudity around the world. Nipples are normal where I'm from. There are different views and limitations on speech around the world. There are different views on copyright around the world. What's the term limit? T…

On some level I agree. However, a huge part of what made Twitter appealing to people is precisely that it was essentially one giant instance, with sort of shared culture and rules. While I think Mastodon is fine for some people, it may not have the same 'global appeal', limiting its ability to really be a Twitter replacement.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#202

Post by paul_funyun »

SoftTalker wrote: post #167
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day. But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts. Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still…

> I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts. Are you seeing your mom and dad moving over? Or your teenage kid and her friends? Or your non-tech friends?

Would you see it if they did? Finding people isn't as easy on Mastodon as it is in other places.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#203

Post by paul_funyun »

irusensei wrote: post #145
mariusor wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear that I’m glad people are enjoying Mastodon but I take issue when everyone seems to be omitting the tradeoffs. To make things worse im being seen as some kind of concern troll for pointing it out.

People moving to Mastodon fall into two groups, by and large - people who like it for normative reasons, and people moving there to see what the buzz is about. The first group sees practical concerns as an obstacle to be defeated; they would say you ought to move to Mastodon regardless of technical problems or lack of utility. The second isn't defending it in offsite discussion board.

In terms of utility for social networking, there's no defending Mastodon relative to a Facebook or Twitter. The small userbase is reason enough not to switch; what use is a social networking site if the people you want to interact with aren't on it?

That there are so few if any people who both recommend Mastodon and don't have moral/political objections to Twitter is damning. Where are the objectors who recommend it on purely descriptive grounds? It's a bit like GNU - it's cool, but don't try to tell people it's a viable replacement for Windows.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#204

Post by emaro »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #129
CM30 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places. Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be pos…

> If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. I don't direct people to my HN profile. I don't rely on that for identity. I don't try to build an audience on HN. > If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. These are ad-funded businesses, they have a financial incentive not to ban everyone they dislike. They also have a t…

It's a common thing in the Fediverse that controversial moderation actions are discussed criticaly. People who don't like it then move onto another server. That's a feature.

If I host a personal instance, it's good that I can ban anyone I want. If you host a public instance, you probably will try to enforce your rules somewhat consistently, else it's gonna be hard to earn the trust of your users.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#205

Post by thrown_22 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #197
thrown_22 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather the opposite actually. During the 19th century for reasons that have nothing to do with demography the British learned how to use the poor who would have died to do productive work instead. Then for reasons that have everything to do with child mortality people stopped having 7 children per woman _before_ contraception became widely available. This is the reason why France is smaller than Germany today. Their…

Yeah your approach is the more usual commonly accepted idea - poor people stopped dying moved to cities got educated became a productive middle class. The above quoted book tried to argue that the poor dying continued and the middle classes of victorian briton had more kids and hence took over - a sort of poorly argued eugenics wrapped in the usual "it's culture innit" argument. However Like I say I have only read en…

It's not an argument it's a fact that the rich had more surviving children than the poor. Repeat for 5 generations and you have completely replaced the original population with the offspring of the top 10%. That's a century. The middle ages lasted 8 centuries.

That a simple mathematical fact like that is considered eugenics is reality denial on par with the flat earth society.

The 19th century was special because people figured out how to use coal to do the work done by muscle in the middle ages. The previous centuries had seen a continued decline in capital costs. E.g. mediaeval interest rates were routinely 15% and more for secured loans.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#206

Post by ashildr »

geek_at wrote: post #166
kazinator wrote: post #162

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search. When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results. For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago. If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get no…

for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update…

On the contrary I found it quite easy to set up a dockerized Mastodon system using prebuilt containers. It took me half a day of tinkering from not knowing anything about it to compose a system that was integrated into the rest of my infra that I was comfortable to invite my friends to.

What I am now completely oblivious to is KPIs to judge the health of the components.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#207

Post by ilyt »

csande17 wrote: post #72
ilyt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent >I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them

From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app…

It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#208

Post by ilyt »

dsr_ wrote: post #96
ilyt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess. I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.

Banning a server because it won't shut down a spammer is effective. A server that doesn't take responsibility for its users will soon find itself shouting into the void... as long as enough admins react. Gmail is the largest source of spam because other mail systems won't ban it because it's too big.

Sooo the server is banned, problematic users move off it coz they can't get anything from outside on it and... move on

How that helps ? It just makes impossible for small server admin to take vacation...

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#209

Post by ilyt »

aghostincarrot wrote: post #86
ekidd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter." You can pay someone to host a server for you, starting at $4/month. (Well, MastoHost is a little behind on signups this week, but they'll catch up.) If you do this, then you'll have…

>If you do this, then you'll have total control over your moderation policy. My impression was that many apply transitive banning? So that if I peer with a “bad” server A then good server B will block me even though my personal posts may be fine.

Oh, that's even worse

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#210

Post by berkes »

berkes wrote: post #191
phoe-krk wrote: post #6

> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...) This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic. There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Ma…

You are right. But I deliberately kept this simple. I know I'm technically incorrect. My initial version had a whole paragraph on this. Then I moved it to a footnote. Then scrapped it entirely. It matters exactly nothing for the point of the post. It's entirely irrelevant for the story. I know that "technically correct is the best kind of correct". And you are technically entirely correct here. But it still doesn't m…

Also, probably interesting to mention, is that I'm obviously well aware of this, because I'm developing Flockingbird, which is fediverse "professional social network" (think: LinkedIn)
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