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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

#61

Post by turtleyacht »

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…

These kinds of insights for old-school roleplaying (OSR) games. Hard to farm out of books, but very insightful having stumbled upon it. And it's not just needing to be true in an absolute, historical sense, but a useful mechanic to save for later.

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

#62

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

bawolff wrote: post #58
haunter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not. That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really reall…

Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.

This is why I think a big player needs to get involved. As soon as Google hosts a Mastodon instance, that will ease the entry for a lot of people.

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

#64

Post by ilyt »

ceejayoz wrote: post #53
nells wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores. Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.

It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to".

That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers.

Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

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

#65

Post by goodpoint »

seydor wrote: post #12
hnarn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.

> it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

> freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

This is absurd. Mastodon is a network of severs run by volunteers. Admins have every right choose what servers to federate with.

Besides, if you don't like "the whims of democracy", try freedom of speech under a dictatorship.

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

#66

Post by homarp »

seydor wrote: post #12
hnarn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.

> it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

except a Mastodon instance is a private property... so no freedom of speech protection there https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...

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

#67

Post by ilyt »

ForHackernews wrote: post #49

I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it. Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity…

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

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

#68

Post by ilyt »

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.

IIRC originally it was reference to "GNU userspace tools running on top of Linux kernel"

So Debian Linux is GNU/Linux. Proprietary app running on top of linux kernel in some embedded device is "just" Linux without GNU userspace.

It

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

#69

Post by denton-scratch »

zasdffaa wrote: post #57
thrown_22 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The "doubled in price for every 20 miles" bit is extremely interesting, do you have anything I can follow this up on, thanks.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...

Brett says that moving grain by road would double the cost for every 100 miles. He has quite a few articles on premodern farming, and may have given a different figure in other articles.

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

#70

Post by oaiey »

ilyt wrote: post #59
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #50

I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where y…

I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. 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…

And what is the difference to SMTP? That is literally the decentralized messaging platform which is alive for 40 (?) years and still kicking.

There will be problems but there is evidence that it can work.

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