volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Do anything about your posts? Why would he want to do anything about them? They represent exactly the attention he's seeking!
He'd love if you'd post even more about him; keep his name circulating as much as possible.
And yes, I actually DO think he's lurking on Fediverse, enjoying all of the attention he gets over here.
Fuming? No, that's not how trolls like #Elon work. They act out to get exactly the attention your posts are giving him.
He's loving your posts. Keep 'em up if you want more #Elon in your life.
Here's an example. I searched for the hashtag fedifence and saw a few posts about these divisions.
Some of it is like ideas about viral open source software licenses, where for better or worse people want to use network effects to nudge norms, to put it neutrally.
I hear people saying if X doesn't agree to block Y then we must all block X as well to encourage blocking of Y.
Hmmm, it appears that when an instance like #qoto posts a #quotepost using its custom feature for that, the quote isn't rendered on #Mastodon .
I was wondering how Mastodon would handle that.
Well, better to avoid that feature for now, I suppose.
(Or, ugh, #quotetoot I suppose. I hate the term toot.)
It's not about all messages reaching all members of a group. It's about group members being actively blocked from receiving messages they would otherwise want to see.
It's about active blocking of a journalist, actively standing in the way of their reporting.
If we agree that such censorship is bad, then it matters that there is far more opportunity for that on a federated system, with so many more potential censors with so much less motivation to behave.
As for the Moderation Problem you refer to, What exactly are you referring to? I don't want to assume.
@IPEdmonton @wongmjane This is my guess too.
#Mastodon and #ActivityPub have shown themselves to have scalability issues, overloading servers, and I believe I heard somewhere that the server will prioritize processing different messages.
If a server was running out of resources, it might prioritize posting ahead of sending out boost and like notifications since they will be considered more real-time critical.
I wonder if those favorite and boost counts will show up over time, as servers work to catch up on their task lists.
Hmm, I can put it a different way: if a journalist wants to ensure that they're not blocked from anyone on this platform they would have to check with 20,000+ instance owners to make sure they're not on any blocklist, blocklists that change from day to day, by the whims of the often amateur admins operating as personal or vanity projects.
If a journalist wants to ensure that they're not blocked on a commercially run centralized platform, they only have to engage with that one agent, probably dealing with a professional, and maybe even susceptible to lawsuits should an agreement be broken.
So it is complicated.
One of those places in life where the value of certainty stands to be weighed.
Beware anyone peddling anything.
Beyond that, try not to judge books by covers, messages by the messengers.
I'm afraid we pass up actually good opportunities because people have personal problems with individuals involved.
Sort of a cut off the nose to spite the face situation, to throw in one more idiom.
Let's see what Jack comes up with. And judge it on its own terms to see what it offers us.
There are SERIOUS problems with fediverse, and maybe BlueSky will offer something better, especially more decentralized.
Yes, there are already factions pushing for instances to ban each other, aligning over particular ideas about how each instance should behave.
I'm sure at least some of those regard the other as evil fediverse.
Well it's more complicated than that because ActivityPub federation gives individual instances the ability to not only block and censor disfavored groups of people, perhaps journalists, but even sets the stage for groups of people to be muffled by accident.
If one instance blocks another over some unrelated personal gripe of the administrator, any journalists on that instance will be blocked from users accidentally.
It's not the stark difference you suggest, but rather a messy one.
A site like Twitter is _more likely_ to have a single, predictable, professionally applied ToS, which could be better or worse.
volkris
boosted
From the outside, Twitter's content moderation decisions look haphazard at best. From the inside, they look worse, especially because government officials play an unseemly and arguably unconstitutional role in shaping those decisions.
Read more: https://reason.pub/3uVFIga
More like the guy looking for the attention and winning as you're giving him what he wants 🤷♂️
Yep! I'm only a customer of any seller if I judge the value of their offering to be greater than the cost, to leave me better off than I was before.
Advertising is a factor enabling those positive relationships, so yep, good for the customers.
@trueslicky I just thought this gem from @trueslicky was especially funny.
This really captures how off the deep end so many people sound these days, with #Musk getting all the attention he's after. From people you wouldn't expect to want to reward him.
I'm willing to bet that @trueslicky really stands behind this post, so he won't mind being used as the example.
I wish people wouldn't feed into Musk's persona like this. It just keeps him on the scene.
@trueslicky The other thing I notice from your writing is how thoroughly you conflate #Musk and #Twitter, as if they are one in the same.
I mean, that idea enables some dramatic storytelling, but it misses how the world actually works in important ways.
We're right to criticize the idea of corporate personhood. Well, it's just as wrong to promote Twitter to that title.
Question: one social media account vs curated multiple accounts by genre?...
@Howard I suggest thinking of it as one account per identity, not per subject or medium or anything like that.
Hopefully hashtags and other UI tools would take care of sorting out different categories of content.
By identity I mean the difference between a professional persona vs a personal persona. Or heck, maybe even a fun fictitious persona :)
Hopefully #Fediverse #ActivityPub and its software platforms will be integrated and capable enough that a person doesn't need multiple accounts in multiple places to handle different types of media. That's a goal anyway.
@trueslicky I just laugh that in your screed you managed to confirm that the boots were in response to violations.
You can argue that the policies were improper or improperly created or edited or stupid or whatever. I'd even generally agree with that.
But you yourself explained here how "Elon kicked off journalists!" is a very incomplete narrative, one that leaves so much out that it's basically false, or at the least very misleading.
So you illustrated my point in 17 bullet points.
@seldo
You seem to be still arguing against journalistic impartiality even when I went out of my way to clarify that journalistic impartiality is not part of my position.
Yes, I agree with you on this. I don't know why you keep returning to that horse.
You misunderstand. I'm not talking about some ideal of journalism without bias.
But there's an enormous difference between recognizing natural human bias vs embracing intentional moralizing from those purporting to provide objective reporting.
Newsrooms lost audiences and relevance as they seemed to charge ahead into that second, into preaching.
@LinqLover I'll chip in to say I was just grumbling about a similar thing, seeing out of context posts just because they happen to mention a hashtag.
Maybe that can be addressed by people marking posts as unlisted if they're not full expressions of a thought, that would make sense without the surrounding context.
Like this post :)
But yeah, chronological hashtag display is a bit too simplistic.
@realcaseyrollins
Ha, I'd counter that it takes some amount of ego for a person to decide that he'll skip all of those other instances and set up his own.
Big tech CEO is probably, to some extent, in it for the money. The guy running his own server, though, he's _paying_ for his authority :)
I'm half joking, of course.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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