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

The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 239 posts

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#91

Post by abdullahkhalids »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #90
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limewire, the filesharing software was installed on one-third of computers worldwide in 2007 [1]. The problem is that software-engineers have lost their way. Limewire was a one-click install. Mastodon requires twenty arcane steps. Once you let average-joe one-click install and host, Mastodon will very rapidly rise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Limewire gave people for free what they were acclimated to paying for. People already get social media for free. There's no reason for them to switch.

The popularity of discord servers and subreddits, or for that matter closed facebook/telegram groups, speaks otherwise. People want control over their communities.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#92

Post by zoogeny »

This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.

I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.

That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.

But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.

Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#93

Post by marcinzm »

p-e-w wrote: post #89
marcinzm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bubbles are safe until the day you realize a bubble that would like you dead has now grown large enough to vote in a like minded government in your country. Then nothing is safe.

Jesus Christ the hyperbole. Name a single example of a country where a government that "wants certain people dead" has been voted in recently, other than such countries where this has been happening for decades anyway without social media even existing.

That's the pint isn't it? Social media is relatively recent however I'd say all those countries you tried to discount essentially had real life bubbles of various sorts.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#94

Post by MichaelZuo »

john-radio wrote: post #88
nindalf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one questions that living in a bubble is comfortable. But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you. They’re now in a bubble (or “safe space”) where everyone agrees with them, so they’re more convinced than ever that they’re right. And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is…

This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "…

> sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.

When they exit, the remainders are going to more and more normalize these, as more and more of the moderates exit. Eventually it could even become the default norm.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#95

Post by Jerrrry »

john-radio wrote: post #88
nindalf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one questions that living in a bubble is comfortable. But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you. They’re now in a bubble (or “safe space”) where everyone agrees with them, so they’re more convinced than ever that they’re right. And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is…

This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "…

>sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.

those people were formed due to and in part of a bubble; and denying them the opportunity to have their bubble popped as it causes you discomfort is the exact opposite of being able to express oneself at all - it always comes with the chance of making someone uncomfortable.

"In order to be able to think, you must risk being offended." -JP, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BW9haau6Hw

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#96

Post by shagie »

calamari4065 wrote: post #44
jmyeet wrote: post #5

Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users. Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscriptio…

I'm not sure how much you actually know about this stuff, but this take reads like you fundamentally don't understand the subject. Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. We can all agree that as user count goes up, abuse and moderation scales as well. A centralized platform takes all of that moderation load at once. You need a team of people or some…

> Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.

https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (safe to link to - and its following page via mastodon)

> Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.

> The server is basically unusable for 30 to 60 seconds until the stampede of Mastodons slows down.

> Presumably each of those IPs is an instance, none of which share any caching infrastructure with each other, and this problem is going to scale with my number of followers (followers' instances).

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#97

Post by 8organicbits »

fy20 wrote: post #51
echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> user-friendly moves Such as? Difficult onboarding? I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.) It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it. Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level. For example one of them had an option to…

> the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks.

One interesting outcome of Reddit changing their API pricing was long-time 3rd-party Reddit apps shutting down. Some of those added Lemmy support to their existing UI and importantly thought through new user behavior (like showing a default instance vs forcing users to sign up).

There's still work to be done, but if we're talking about the different between the Official Reddit client and the (now defunct) Boost for Reddit, the latter had better UX. Now that Boost only supports Lemmy and the Reddit app keeps getting enshittified the UX argument is harder to make.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#98

Post by boyter »

coldacid wrote: post #41
threeseed wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries Weirdly enough this is likely to be Meta with Threads. Once it adds ActivityPub integration we should start to see a lot of cross-pollination with Mastodon users.

Don't be too sure of that. Plenty of instances have preemptively blocked Meta and it's likely that if and when Threads goes AP, more will follow. Some of us still remember Eternal September and would like to avoid a repeat.

    Fediverse: We are open for federation and you to join!
    Meta: Ok here is what we are doing with instagram/threads.
    Fediverse: Not that kind of open!

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#99

Post by Foreignborn »

kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

This "filter bubble" is not true, and does not seem to be the issue people think it is.

We interact with more diverse people online outside of our bubble. It's actually our real life that's the bubble, and bubbles aren't necessarily bad.

Link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2207159119

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#100

Post by redserk »

anigbrowl wrote: post #72
redserk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features are missing? The big barrier to adoption is people and content. Mastodon has been an okay twitter replacement with its feature set, it’s just missing people. Threads appears to have succeeded by bootstrapping their platform with major accounts, brands and popular personalities. This isn’t a thing more feature development can solve.

It's missing people because 98% of people can't get past the 'pick an instance' stage, when it's not at all obvious why you should pick any given instance or what the repercussions will be. Imagine if you had to pick a particular node to access Facebook, or select a particular data center before you started shopping on Amazon. Consumers just want to find people and exchange a mix of public and private messages, they…

A bit over a year ago, sure, but this is a bit incorrect in the month of December 2023.

Mastodon is, by far, the most active software and both their app and site now guide you to Mastodon.social.

https://joinmastodon.org/

Post reply on HN