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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

#31

Post by andreyk »

peterweyand wrote: post #16

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease…

Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.

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

#32

Post by arcade79 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #21
AustinDev wrote: post #2

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

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? There are different views on what constitutes animal abuse around the world. Try posting about the local bullfights on facebook. Or try posting videos from the cockfight from the cockfighting arena.

Different mastodon servers, and heck, maybe different fediverses, will fuel diversity in this regard, without One Set of Rules to Rule them All.

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

#33

Post by silviot »

MiguelX413 wrote: post #29
xg15 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned. At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it. Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read…

“GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux” tbh Therefore “Linux” is always correct where “GNU/Linux” is, but not vice-versa. In contrast: Mastodon and Pleroma, PeerTube, etc. are simply elements of the same set.

> “GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux”

Can you elaborate on this? I really don't understand why you say this. In a GNU/Linux distro Linux provides the kernel, and GNU the userland tools. How can GNU/Linux be a subset of Linux? Your next sentence makes it clear you don't mean superset, so I'm lost at understanding what you mean.

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

#34

Post by lifeisstillgood »

thrown_22 wrote: post #22
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale. This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere. But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they co…

That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown…

Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China...

But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture".

Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trade network, and you grow different crops further out and bring them not to the river / coast but to me to feed me. That probably will be more efficient but just look at the network of trust and possible disasters required - only very stable politics would allow anything like that - and that stability was rare. China probably had more of that for more of the past 2000 years than anywhere else - and that may be the cause of the invention of the bureaucrat!

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

#35

Post by irusensei »

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money.

It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

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

#36

Post by HollowEyes »

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one.

It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station.

The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much.

Who moderates offshore content?

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

#37

Post by rhn_mk1 »

AustinDev wrote: post #2

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

Mastodon has censorship tools built in. It's up to instance admins to use them.

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

#38

Post by jimbob45 »

AustinDev wrote: post #2

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.

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

#39

Post by nells »

JonathonW wrote: post #13
dustedcodes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the…

There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers. There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.

That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.

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

#40

Post by anonymous_sorry »

silviot wrote: post #33
MiguelX413 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux” tbh Therefore “Linux” is always correct where “GNU/Linux” is, but not vice-versa. In contrast: Mastodon and Pleroma, PeerTube, etc. are simply elements of the same set.

> “GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux” Can you elaborate on this? I really don't understand why you say this. In a GNU/Linux distro Linux provides the kernel, and GNU the userland tools. How can GNU/Linux be a subset of Linux? Your next sentence makes it clear you don't mean superset, so I'm lost at understanding what you mean.

Not the GP, but I guess you could say a subset of systems that use the Linux kernel also provide the GNU userspace tools.

Android is an example of one that does not. Although when someone describes an OS as Linux, to me it implies GNU/Linux, so I wouldn't really call Android Linux, even if it uses the kernel.

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