@derickflorian @gooseus
Glad to see more joining #qoto , one of the most-federated instances in the fediverse. Qoto has a reeeeeally large character limit and features/services others may not. Keep in mind that not all content you will see in your timeline(TL) will correlate with the views of others you're connected to. This is where one of the more common features other instances have as well- blocking. Blocking someone or another server does not impact others you are federated with, but gives you control over your own feed.

If you have any questions, I can try to help or at least point you in a general direction.

@lucifargundam @derickflorian yeah, def seems like there is a lot more to learn and understand in this federated social space.

Any recommendations for quality of life improvement settings or tips/tricks for using features like Groups, Lists, etc. for managing signal/noise?

@gooseus @derickflorian
I think the most important thing most servers will suggest will be to get familiar with how local/global timelines work and how to block users/servers per your personal preference.

Qoto has plenty of optional features that may take time to learn, but more can possibly (not guaranteed) be requested. Sometimes the admin might be kind enough to add requested emotes

If you have any specific questions, I can _try_ to walk you through them.

@lucifargundam @derickflorian @gooseus I'm new here but I'm seeing qoto on some suspended server lists floating around. Do you know why that might be?

@aut @derickflorian @gooseus
Qoto seldom ever bans other instances... Free speech is mostly allowed in all it's ugliness except when it means to cause direct harm to our own users.

Other servers may bam Qoto because of it's very open perspective on other instances. Meaning, to isolate server B from C (that's connected to Qoto D) B will defederate from both C and D even though there's no harm from D.

@aut @derickflorian @gooseus
Another way to put it is-

Your friend's friend may not be your friend as well- you may like your friend, but dislike their friends. If you dislike their friends enough- you might choose to not associate with your friend in addition.

@lucifargundam @aut @derickflorian That's an interesting dynamic that I imagine would create a weirdly fragmented network...

I'm also new here and I'm unsure if it's because qoto is a low-key haven for actual phrenologists... or if the blocking servers don't like that qoto standards _could_ allow actual phrenologists a space to peddle their ideas to the impressionable and naive?

I'd be interested in seeing some analysis of the Fediverse and the various servers and server relationships?

@trinsec Haha, nope, I'm in the web app, I was just looking at the character counter and making a joke about how long my first post was in comparison to the max post on Twitter.

For someone like me, it's tempting to write walls of text that then take up a whole lot of vertical space in another timeline of someone who might not be interested in reading a 2000 word essay on whatever random topic.

Curious about the other extra features though? Also, how much of the UX is Qoto vs Mastodon?

@gooseus Don't worry too much about the char count, I believe that very long posts get cropped and there'll be a 'Read More' link below. Of course, that's not an invitation for random spamming around. :D

For a list of extra features, go check out the 'About this server' link. It's a good idea to check it out regardless because the server rules are also listed in there.

@abde Hello, thanks for the welcome! It's been interesting so far, only been a couple of days, but it def feels more conversational and less like everyone just shouting into the void and bracing for a response.

On complexity, I like to share a book on the Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter -- https://archive.org/details/TheCollapseOfComplexSocieties

His thesis is that civs grow and evolve to become more complex as they need to solve increasingly complex problems, as well as maintaining the solutions to the previous complex problems.

Eventually this reaches the point where new solutions produce diminishing returns given the amount of effort; growth slows and turns into stagnation as the previous solutions aren't maintained (infrastructure, rule of law) and the civ begins to unravel until an external event that was manageable before, breaks the whole system (war, cataclysm, etc).

When it comes to computer science, I find the questions of computabiity and complexity as it relates to how the ability to compute scales with their size of the input(s) ... this relates to the first interest in collapse because I think of civilization itself as a computational system underneath all the shouting, laughing, fighting, eating, sleeping, and sex.

Tell me more about numerical simulations! I was in a PhD program for a minute before COVID kinda blew up my life. I was working on a paper doing categorical analysis of patterns in prime numbers.

@gooseus Alright, I had the definition of computational complexity in my mind when you mentioned it hehe, but it's still very interesting!

Indeed it can be related to computational complexity, moreover I can see that fitting more in dynamic systems actually. There are many theories that try to model societies, but I am not (at all) an expert on that. The logistic equation is a basic example of population evolution in a complex system with multiple communities!

My thesis is more about numerical approximations of partial differential equations that can represent a model of a physical phenomenon... mostly applied to fluid simulations, for example. The algorithm behind it is the finite element method, where the continuous differential equation is discretized in order to compute it on computers (basically). I actually ported it to the GPUs in order to accelerate it, you may check the paper here: https://etna.math.kent.edu/volumes/2021-2030/vol55/abstract.php?vol=55&pages=687-705