volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@The_Onliest @paul @HistoPol @fediversereport @fediversenews @david @Bluedepth @darren @juneussell

One problem is that this sounds like the financial recentralization of an effort to decentralize social media.

Really, this is sounding like a social solution to a technical problem. The scalability is a technical problem that needs to be worked on at that level, not at the level of setting up whatever committees and legal institutions and whatever else to try to move money around to paper over technical concerns.

@nicolewolverton

From what I've seen, the story that the train regulation rollback contributed to the OH disaster have been debunked as those regulations didn't cover what went wrong in the accident in the first place

@craigpc

But FDIC sounds fairly confident that they won't have trouble covering depositors' deposits.

Depositors who made uninsured deposits, well, why would they be protected by insurance that they ducked?

@MollyNYC

That's why it's a good thing to turn the equation around and look at it the way so few do: not employment rate or labor shortage but rather laborforce participation rate.

Historically high numbers of people aren't bothering with the laborforce at all. That should put a spotlight on an environment that doesn't make it worth their while.

@John

Ha, true enough. Who would have noticed a few drops missing from the firehose? :)

@HistoPol @darren @david

Let me put it a different way.

Because of how Fediverse is engineered, every instance is perfectly free to engage with another instance *while treating its content with skepticism* due to that instance's culture.

So, Facebook links up? Alright. Existing instances can engage with all of that content while still treating Facebook users as second class, as outsiders, without full access to existing instances' systems.

Facebook users who wish may apply and be granted accounts on existing instances if they fit in, and that's the way to onboard them.

So you get the best of both worlds. You're protected from the unwashed masses while still engaging with them, just at arm's length, while encouraging them to come over.

All of that is possible based on how Fediverse is currently designed and operating.

Make sense?

@axkira @helge @supernovae@universeodon.com @John

Well, it's not even just about performance.
It's about the possibility that depending on how the userbase scales up, it might literally become physically impossible to transfer and duplicate all of that content all around the world.

The design of ActivityPub has issues. I'm critical of how it was set up. But, given what it's working with, there's the real possibility that the whole system would collapse should they try to make sure every reaction goes to every other instance all at once.

This is the downside of more distributed approaches. They are necessarily less efficient. That's the tradeoff.

@helge

Oh, no, not at all. That's not how this system works.

Mastodon doesn't receive those replies, boosts, and likes at all. It's not an implementation choice; since Mastodon doesn't receive the signal it couldn't display the reply/boost/like whether it wanted to or not.
@supernovae@universeodon.com @John

@supernovae@universeodon.com

Mastodon doesn't have any control over missing replies, unfederated likes, etc.

It's like blaming your iPhone when the cell phone tower goes down and you miss a call.

Mastodon doesn't receive those likes at all because Fediverse/ActivityPub doesn't hand them to Mastodon, so it's due to Fediverse, not Mastodon.

THAT's why it's important to distinguish between the different pieces here.

Otherwise you're just calling up Apple to complain when they can't do anything to fix the cell phone company.

@HistoPol @darren @david

Well that's what the federation of instances is about. That's one huge benefit of Fediverse not being one big mass but rather different instances that are coupled together dynamically.

So people get on big generic Fediverse instances first, and they can apply to move to better, more focused, more culturally homogeneous instances later.

There's no cultural revolution there. It's how it was set up, and how it is now.

It just needs to be emphasized.

@Bluedepth

Yes, people do understand, and they talk about how they prefer Facebook or Twitter or Fediverse or TikTok or whatever based on the different ways that algorithms choose different content to present to them.

You illustrate this pretty well as you seem to like that "sense of a system as you are living in it over time." A TON of people are not looking for that experience and are turned off by it!

Like I said, a diversity of preferences. Some like the firehose and thrive in it. Some hate it as overstimulation.

It's like introvert vs extrovert, not to mention practicalities of how it fits into peoples' daily lives and what they have time for.

@HistoPol @david @darren

@ct_bergstrom

But then, the report wasn't about communicating new science, so we should be careful about framing the language that way.

It needs to be viewed in the context of operational briefing and even political vocabulary. The language was intended for often nontechnical administrators, primarily, trying to get across to them a certain idea about what the analysts came to believe.

It's like how "preponderance of evidence" has particular meaning inside a courtroom. The context needs to be considered.

But yes, that confidence statement should NEVER be left out of the reporting.

@supernovae@universeodon.com @John

And FWIW, I am OK with those things in terms of the federation model.

Your local instance is tight knit, but those factors come up when leaving the boundaries of your instance and venturing out into the crazy world outside.

Also, those elements are there for technical reasons, as part of the idea of moving toward a decentralized platform.

They're the tradeoff, and I'd say a reasonable trade.

@helplessduck

In theory, it's more likely.
But in practice, not so much.

After all, this is exactly how the federal government is set up, to push back against partisan instincts by setting the executive and legislative branches against each other, giving them opposing incentives.

Partisan alliances fracture when the executive and legislative branch figures have opposite goals, as by their positions they do.