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
PS: and heck, instance blocking is effectively a very basic algorithm, in that it chooses for users what content they will and won't be shown based on source.
That's one way to capture this that might resonate with so many on Fediverse that came here expressing the want to leave algorithms behind.
You have every right to block whatever instances you want. It's your instance so do what you want.
However, realize that in doing so you're putting up these walls that not only block content indiscriminately, block even good content, interfere with even good conversation threads, and most critically to me, you disempower your own instance users, yourself included, to make decisions for themselves and choose where they participate through your instance.
Again, if you weigh all of this and still choose to defederate, then that's your right and up to you.
But it's not a choice that I think should be made lightly.
Personally, I'd want us to be empowering users to participate in the content they choose while avoiding the content they choose, rather than making decisions for them with sledgehammers at the instance level.
I'd say today's news vs factchecking of that reporting illustrates why so many have been losing faith in reporters for a few years now.
The hyperbolic reporting vs how the institutions actually function shows the gulf that people are giving up on and turning away from.
All of this furor over Thomas misses the nice feature of the Supreme Court that their opinions are public and their reasoning laid out for all to see.
We don't have to judge them based on personalities or messengers. We can view the arguments themselves to see whether they are solid or not.
With all of the shooting of Thomas as a messenger, there's awful little disagreement with his actual reasoning, and that silence is pretty telling to me.
@feoh And it's worth emphasizing that this is one very good reason instance owners should not be so quick to block instances.
We need to push back on normalizing it.
Instance blocking should be a last resort on the #Fediverse but occasionally people have pushed to promote it as something to be routinely applied.
No, if a Justice is misbehaving the proper response of the Congress is to impeach them.
These pieces of legislation are the wrong response since it violates the separations of powers structure of the federal government for the Legislative Branch to try to exert power over the independent Judiciary Branch like this.
Impeachment is the sole response available for very good reasons.
I can't see the article behind its paywall, but from what I've been hearing from them, it's more that they're looking to get back to prepandemic levels of spending.
So it's better framed as ending anomalous spending than cutting, in the face of financial turmoil that emergency spending has caused.
U.S. politics
From my experience watching conservatives, reading academic studies, and knowing Trump supporters myself, I would offer a different perspective from what so many have: Trump as the effect, not the cause.
Trumpism isn't an attempt to corrupt the government. He barely knows what the government *is* which is why so many of his efforts failed laughably. From his employees ignoring his orders through legal efforts that went to the wrong departments, he really didn't know how to get done the things he tried to get done.
Meanwhile, Trump's governing philosophy--both in words and in action--were utterly spineless, twisting to the caprices of the audience of the day.
Trumpism was an attempt to win a popularity contest, to become high school class president.
They were his voters, not Trump, who set up this situation, and the problem is that prosecution of Trump is giving renewed energy to those voters, who will still vote regardless of whether Trump is in jail.
To go after Trump like this makes it MORE likely that criminals will be in control, since the people putting them there will be energized to do it again.
Well that's just factually wrong.
This case, which I will link below so you can read for yourself, is about what multiple courts should do when a president reaches for unilateral power over broad swaths of the population.
It has little to do with vaccines themselves. This is about power, pure and simple, and about the rule of law.
Here multiple courts have told the president that if he wants to assert these powers then he has to go through the legal processes, that he can't just ignore the law and do what he wants.
Again, read for yourself here, and for goodness sake, stop going to places like Slate for honest argument.
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/22/22-40043-CV3.pdf
Ha, it's almost like "they" are training us to prefer apps over websites :)
Well, jokes aside, companies and marketing departments do find value in being able to lock us into apps, so there is something to it...
U.S. politics
No, all of the legal drama has only given him more attention and a larger place in our psyches.
His star was fading as people wanted to focus on the election of someone who wasn't such a loser, but now the legal stuff has put him back in the center of the story, where he likes to be.
IMO it would have been better to drop the legal mess and let him slink into irrelevancy. That people would ignore and write him off would probably have been the harsher punishment for someone like him anyway.
He'd *enjoy* being the martyr in the jail cell. He'd think of himself as so damn important that he had to be locked up. And that would keep him as a force in the psyche.
How would regulations be written to practically differentiate between the two, though?
@simon@toot.supertonerecords.com
It sounds like #Bluesky made core engineering and design decisions different from those made for #ActivityPub, and so it's not trivial to make the two systems play together nicely.
In particular, Bluesky puts more emphasis on user accounts over instances with solid account portability. It's not clear how Fediverse would/should react when seeing that an account has moved its hosting to a different repository, just for example.
Not an app. A website.
I emphasize this because one of the advantages of Fediverse is its openness. Similarly, we need to focus this sort of thing on websites, not yet more locked down apps.
"Vaccinate his workforce" is a phrase that would be bad enough if it described just any employer treating workers as a herd to be lines up and medicated, but it's especially problematic when the employer is a government official.
The courts have been respecting laws against that sort of thing.
We're just not all so comfortable with such power imbalances.
Yep, and the same issues apply.
I thought it was really funny how with this week's fracas over TikTok, so many were yelling about outlawing the thing, and for every twenty voices I heard yelling to make it illegal, I heard maybe one voice quietly asking exactly how exactly that would actually be done.
The federal legislature is no stranger to passing unenforceable laws either.
California can't enforce a a law against the sun rising tomorrow. But neither can the federal government, even with all the might of the US government behind it.
Well, I would point to Web of Trust over blockchain for this particular application, but yep.
Blockchain gets you confirmations of timing that aren't so vital for social media, IMO. Web of Trust gets you the authentication without the overhead needed to run a blockchain.
You're overlooking the realities of executive branches.
It doesn't matter what courts say if the key parts of the picture aren't even in the jurisdiction of law enforcement in the first place.
The legislature in California can pass a law outlawing jaywalking on New York streets, but regardless of what any court says, California's governor won't be having cops stopping pedestrians in CA that are crossing NY streets because there are no NY streets in CA.
Even if the law is passed unanimously with bipartisan approval, there still aren't any NY streets in CA, so the law is irrelevant from the get-go, as there's nothing the executive is physically able to enforce.
Laws can only be enforced if law enforcement can reach the people involved, regardless of any theoretical or abstract issues.
Exactly, and to be clear I'm not saying federation instead of decentralization is a bad idea or a bad compromise. We just need to recognize its pros and cons, that it is a compromise.
In this particular case federation means handing content to untrusted third parties and asking them politely to respect visibility notations. That's fine so long as everyone is aware it's based on voluntary compliance.
Had the system been designed around decentralized users instead of federated instances we could have cut out the third party. But that's not the compromise they settled on.
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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