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
You've misunderstood the argument, as it is not what you've framed and then criticized here.
You're fighting a strawman.
You're making a bunch of claims to support a questionable position, but with no particular basis for proving the claims themselves.
This is a silly post.
Yeah and the other part of that story is that when you set the privacy for your post, your instance still sends it to all of those other instances just with a little note saying who it's for, again basically politely requesting that the other instances don't share the post outside of the target recipients.
But same thing, there's no actual way to enforce that, so other instances are completely free to share private posts with everybody.
The system didn't have to be designed to work that way, but it's part of the design where it's not really decentralized but rather centralized among the instances. There's a lot of trust between instances, and I would have preferred to put users at the top of the hierarchy.
Well the way it works is that your instance broadcasts the posts to all of the other instances that it thinks might want to see them, so copies of the post live on all of those other instances, and they are free to do whatever they want with that content.
When you try to delete something your instance sends out a message to all of the other instances requesting politely that they delete from their own storage as well, but there's no way to make sure they actually do.
Basically, everything you post to this platform should be regarded as posting to the public with tags politely requesting privacy. And that might be good enough for most people, but I just want to make sure people are aware of that as they use the platform.
Well keep in mind that there's no way to force the deletion of posts in #Fediverse / #Mastodon either.
I'm always worried that far too few people are aware of that privacy issue.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. You included a link in your post that certainly showed up for me.
@WritingFactory Indeed! The facts are the facts, and you are here saying things that so many of us know to be factually wrong.
It's funny how you don't seem to mind that.
I don't know why you would be so interested in insisting that #Bitcoin isn't a currency, to the point where you would reject objective reality to get to that conclusion, but it seems pretty backwards to me.
So exactly, you say to be a currency it must be a medium of exchange that people accept, and a lot of us have experienced exactly that, trading Bitcoin for goods and services because people accept it.
This is why I mention that the argument has something of a gaslighting feel, as it makes claims that are contradicted by our own experiences.
Many people actually do buy things with Bitcoin. Many do accept Bitcoin as payment for their goods and services. So as for your definition, that sounds like a currency to me.
If you think his speech projected unity then you are very much not engaged with the larger political climate out there.
Biden's speech may have played lip service to unity, but it went out of its way to unnecessarily touch third rails that were obviously going to be divisive, and that word divisive.
Conservative outlets had a field day with the content he put out there in his speech, again unnecessarily, as they used it to show how he was taking positions that were divisive at least and out of touch in their perspectives.
Biden did not have to give the conservatives all of this ammunition. But he did. Presumably his speech writers decided to focus on gaining points with his base instead of avoiding those divisive topics. Given his poll numbers lately that's not surprising.
But yeah, this was not a unifying speech. It could have been, but he chose to go into topics that were going to split voters along party lines.
I'd go the other way with it.
I think a huge problem is liberals who have been refusing, often explicitly, to engage with the extremist arguments and point out why they are wrong. It has created a vacuum that allowed the extremists to grow, that allowed the conspiracy theories to stand without the debunking that they really needed.
It was all so predictable.
As liberals/progressives/democrats chose to exit the fight this was my warning that they were basically indulging crazy conservative conspiracy theories that would only grow in that darkness. And it worked out exactly the way we might have expected it to work out.
Who is proposing any cuts to these programs to be attached to borrowing authority?
It just sounds like such a straw man, such fear mongering, since I don't hear anybody actually proposing such cuts.
The thing is, I'm talking to you, so I want to know how you define it. Even if you are adopting some standard definition, that's fine, but I want to know what you mean by the term so I can talk to you about it.
How would you define currency?
You get into this sort of gaslighting situation where people who actually in their real lives use Bitcoin as currency are being told that they don't do the thing that they absolutely do.
And that's why those arguments don't really carry much water. People know for a fact based on their own personal experiences that the argument is false.
Yes, Bitcoin is a currency. It is an investment. How do I know? Because I know a bunch of people who personally use it as a currency and as an investment!
It's like claiming water doesn't run downhill as I am watching some water run downhill.
volkris
boosted
Hello #fediverse! Why not try some #indie #synthwave #music?
This is my track "Atlantis", released last summer. World love to head hour opinion.
#spotify #electronica #electronicmusic #musodon #outrun #futuresynth #newretrowave #retrowave #80s #80smusic
https://open.spotify.com/track/32r8Vkl1HUtJfyOvoLXO8T?si=-JWlyiMKT5iaDYIAhZJwRA
@mookie@orangebunny.net
I'd say the real key there is actual decentralization instead of the centralization around different instances that we get with this federation.
And yeah, I really wish #ActivityPub had gone a direction more along the lines of what you are describing.
@doctorjaymarie@mastodon.world
Turns out there was no case?
Railroads are highly, highly regulated...
I always react that Mastodon absolutely uses an algorithm. Chronological order is an algorithm. It's just a particularly stupid (or simple if you prefer) algorithm that cannot help you get to the content that you want to see.
That's for better or worse.
These days I'm having to do an awful lot of scrolling to get to any interesting posts as people are using hashtags a bit liberally.
volkris
boosted
@stux #socialdiscovery has suffered a bit although and requires the #extensive use of #hashtags to help spread the #word and have the same #reach.
This is possibly problematic because #hashtags aren't moderated at all, allowing other parties to infiltrate and overwhelm feeds by spamming irrelevant posts with a specific hashtag.
"That's the #freespeech," some would say. Well, others say it degrades the quality of your #timeline. Some would reply that you should just follow the people that you want and associate with #instances and #federations that you are interested in.
It is a difficult thing, and the idea of #groups as some has proposed might be a good idea. Because I myself don't see anything relevant in the #hashtags in the #mastodon app. Where an algorithm could help a bit, but then again, that information needs to be extracted from somewhere, again coming down to #privacy and #moderation.
I would like to see a page of hashtags people I follow are following.
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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