cakeistheanswer

Fully expected to be buried since I'm late to the party.

That's really only half of it, there is no real erasure possible when everyone's holding a cached copy. Personally... I kind of like it, I don't hold any value to the words I contribute here as long as they're for everyone.

But everything and everyone is living in concentric glass houses here.

Ahh always nice to revisit my first dose of propaganda.

I would have downloaded a car if I could have.

This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.

Advertisers gonna advertise.

The most wonderful part of this, for the unfortunately uncoordinated like me:

scrolling and accidently clicking a random card is now always a random post and not an ad launching a browser window I immediately close and curse.

It's amazing how bad it got for awhile out there.

When the barrier to entry is technical in nature you get a selection of the competent in that space as your representation. It's not perfect, but it beats zuck, musk and Huffman.

Nothing more typically lefty than a good infight. Seen plenty of that too go around.

Honestly while the entire architecture is in it's infancy we'd do well to remember being here to have a voice (or at least a front row seat) is a feature not a bug.

Better now than when the corporations get to the fediverse.

I mean from what I've seen the less abrasive frame would be 'find a space for constructive discussion for the marginalized.' I'm not really their audience, but I have eyes, they take an abnormal amount of shit in their day to day life.

I don't think there's a shortage of places in that universe to speak your mind, and I wouldn't try to set someone else's house rules.

Good to see Streisand in full Effect!

Probably true. it's the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.

No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.

Alright so I'm skeptical we'll keep a useful level of signal to noise the whole time (Usenet). But, for the first time in forever I'm optimistic, there's a lot more technical talent and awareness of how bad it can go this time around, which is amazing to see.

I still don't think people have grappled with the fact there's no total "erase" button even if you can port your data.

But we have open standards again, it feels weird.

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

Drops in a bucket.

The sad reality is your average tax cheat will fight tooth and nail for every penny. Because even if right up to 99.9% is clawed bank, it's all profit. Somehow it's still hard to sell the right on having refs powerful enough to police the game.

Edit: stray word

It keeps them from participating by demoting them to the kids table, but you're still in a glass house to some extent.

I think this is the right answer, but the structure is going to require some amount of frequent drama just like this every time. You can keep an open federation policy until proven malicious, or you can verify partners, but I don't see the way around discussions.

Alright, more of a eli5 as I'm more folk knowledge than a scientist.

It's a narrower (more dense) wavelength.

If you think of signal, any signal, how close you are to it, the total power of that signal and the quality of your receiving gear are going to be your three major factors in "speed".

5g gains the ability to broadcast more waves iif you're close, at the expense of distance.

If you're looking to send communications further; wider (lower density) waves face less resistance. Just the same way you can seemingly get AM radio (bouncing off our atmosphere) anywhere vs FM radio (line of sight), each has a function.

You can find rural houses like mine, or the futures trades riding from the burbs to downtown with microwave (narrower than 5g) connections. They're pretty atmosphere resistant but require tuning to hit relays the size of about a soda can.

I don't think the longitudinal studies have been done on what frequencies over long periods of time produce negative results, the areas of spectrum we are working with have no real analogues in scope I'm aware of. Which is exactly why there's room to scaremonger over it.

Anecdotally I've worked a decade in an adjacent field and never heard of anyone contacting the plague.

My, if it isn't the consequences of his own actions come to find Elmo again.

I'm cynical as ever, but I think it's a cash out.

There's not a better incentive to build a better product when they ran most of the independent boards into the ground, leaving them at a relative high.

I don't think there's a universe they can compete with free when interest is going up. All the reversals and user hostile policies are going to drive people away, how quickly that bothers Hoffman, the board and ohanian is probably just a matter to how quickly they can unload through the IPO.

In the days before Reddit 'won' you used to be able to find tons of niche sites/boards cultivating smaller audiences. Beer advocate/rate beer, headfi and whatever the latest splinter was there in the audiophile community both come to mind. There's generally more division by which each might find more 'aligned' or maybe their friends are on one first.

I don't know if it's possible to predict, social dynamics are weird and this is going to be new for a giant segment of the audience.

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.

From a lifetime of small message boards It's easier to drive engagement in smaller groups. If there's less overall exhaustion with the basics in any niche, splitting the new members is a good way to keep differentiated material. Also growing communities can end up boxing out their regulars. It might be hard to get started, but the small communities tend to be resilient at some point, they just migrate service to service.

Most of the people who moved here were especially motivated to overcome the barriers to entry to, so I'm not sure the numbers still hold.

Wow, I didn't think they'd implement anything more cancerous than various site preferred paywalling. This reeks of needing some good numbers to blow out headed into the IPO.

If it's this bad already, get ready for a circus.

I've seen the cubs win the pennant and gwar talk to/about Terri Gross. Expecting horsemen any minute for the checklist.

Fixed wireless has been a godsend if it's around you. I'm rural but sitting one airborne hop from backbone fiber. I can vouch its the same tech as the futures trades ride downtown.

In IL there's a few providers that spun up in the wake of a tornado. Its not competitive with what I could get in the suburbs, but its better by far than the wireline out here.

Long term science.

Nobody's taped someone to a table and shot em with those rays. And there has never been more of them going around, so there's no comparison either.

When we say something is a cure or cause it's born out of a ton of testing and time.

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.

Normally not a comment I'd apply wordy science too, but let's see if I can do better than an upvote. Because this is exactly what I can't let go lately.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/18/1/013029/pdf

Authorship of paper is 2016, and we're always talking about larger populations than CEOs, so there is going to be 0 scientific rigor that can be applied to any study.

Still given the perspective of social behavior being about the product of advocates/bigots on any platform; where are the good, non rent seeking social media CEOs? The standard bad behavior of social networks is always around the issue of monetization, the first wave of 'well meaning' people have been replaced with a mandate for profit and a limited playbook. The social contagion was taking buyouts, now it's turning screws to users.

Weirdly Zuckerberg looks like a model citizen, he's still playing the growth game.

If we didn't live in a universe of an obviously (over)reactionary electorate this might be the ideal.

The problem is consensus building takes time, as long as political wins are narrow you're reinforcing the outage cycle.

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.

Isn't the key operating word here business?

With no advertising on the line and no operations currently in place operating at anything but a loss there isn't a commercial interest at stake.

I think we'll all be around to find out. Whether they end up federated with everyone else is up for debate, but the products still follow the eyeballs.

Advertisers especially are going to note how high engagement is compared to the other platforms, the rest will take care of itself eventually.

One can hope, even as far back as Usenet the overall general self interest is always a pile-driver to the platform.

I've got 2, largely out of curiosity for what defederation meant as far as user perspective.

When exporting comes online I'll likely make an effort to spin up an instance if it's still feasible... So there will be a 3rd cake?On the positive side I don't think you're going to find many people wanting to sock puppet mild takes and noise rock.

I used Feedly before defaulting to reddit as sites slowly collapsed RSS functionally.

Curious to know as well, but most of the time I see a couple sites mentioned that I haven't been impressed with their ability to sift the trade mags and studies I was in it for.

I've checked the frontpage from time to time just to monitor what's changing, but I have yet to log in.

The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.

Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.

I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.

I love this scene.

If anything my point was mostly self indicting. To anyone with a firm ideology I probably represent part of the problem.

It's just a pithy truism, the reason is hopefully the higher rate of concern.

So I didn't make an account here for precisely this reason, I'm not really at risk of being targeted or triggered, so at the 'edge' of your community I can at least try to knock down some of the BS.

I have a feeling this is where the 'eternal vigilance' is going to be needed.

The trolls are gonna troll.

Just keeping them out of your discussions may reduce the noise, but it doesn't stop them from conglomerating on the platform. Pointing out where they come to play feels like the only way to separate the good actors from bad at an instance level so they don't wander in.

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.

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.