Attempting solidarity pragmatically.

I don’t believe in imaginary property.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s a very interesting thought, but it will always struggle to account for variables you can’t see.

    It’s always going to be designed top down to approximate your own development as human from the ground up. I don’t douby AI as a feasible possibility, but I don’t think we’re headed for digital clones. They’re always going to have some amount of the creators ghost or assumptions in the machine.





  • It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

    However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

    It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.



  • I think some of that devolution going to be inevitable or you’re going to face charges of censorship from some corners, which is just it’s own cycle of rage. The network gets bigger, people click what they click and the aggregate of what our animal brains react to has a lot to be angry about.

    What I worry most about is the acceleration of that cycle because we gradually gravitate towards instances with our preferred moderation or slant, which I can already see happening anyway.

    I guess, at best, that It might be a cure with some side effects because it’s necessarily going to play with in/out crowd dynamics.






  • Understandable, and yet if nobody contributes upvotes out of the same concern you end up with nothing standing out in your feed to come comment on. Kind of circular.

    On the other hand having an upvote actually attached to your (and I actually mean your handle here) name would likely give it credibility in a weird sense. There’s much less incentive to blindly upvote if it essentially shows what you saw like a slug trail, but if you’re selectively giving oxygen to the best of what you see then that trail is valuable to others who value you. It’s a functional change from competing to push things for their own sake.

    Im old! I come from an era where there was no such thing as OPSEC as soon as you interact with another party you cant personally name. For every consumer that was the phone company, or literally right out the door. If you transmit (login credentials, personal info, search queries) the expectation is somewhere, someone or something is logging it. Not even maliciously all the time either, sometimes I got to some of this out of boredom. The corporate Internet just kind of acts like a middle man, because that same problem never went away, just siloed into companies.

    Until we get to a future like Transmetropolitan where the expectation is your online presence has some dirty laundry (and hopefully leave out the other stuff), all the bits/bytes, not just upvotes, you transmit should have a limited expectation of privacy. This is just the best/latest reminder because every hack is the same problem, only the company has incentive to keep it quiet so it doesn’t hit their bottom line.


  • This is super interesting to me.

    I think you’re right in that the user base has the same expectations despite a huge change in the model. But it’s going to be the same on any server, your circle of trust now has to include your instance owner everywhere on the fediverse.

    In general there’s no expectation you can delete every email you ever sent either, just your local copies. Most of what you see here is similar with some new attached protocols (votes, markdown etc)

    I’m sure we’ll see some evolution, but the entire infrastructure is a call back to when a single service wasn’t directly linked to a single business, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

    In other words I’m not sure the concession isn’t the price you pay to not have reddit/twitter in charge. Because any other architecture that had the convenience of having a single point to delete from is also going to be a single point of failure.







  • I think this is just the leading edge unless folks are lining up to replace moderators in most communities.

    Systems tend to fail slowly, and then all at once.

    Most fediverse denizens have noticed how sane and measured the dialogue is, which is entirely a product of the audience who is here right now. But everyone’s got a threshold, whether Reddit loses everyone or not isn’t relevant if they couldn’t be profitable with all of us. There’s a death spiral coming, and if there’s anything left Reddit will have to functionally change.

    Easiest to think of Reddit as a party grinding on too long and starting to get rowdier, and the bouncers just quit.