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
A lot of us criticize ActivityPub as being not so much decentralized as centralized around instances.
I WISH it was more decentralized. Bluesky seems to downplay those concentration points from what I've seen.
Does it make a difference (and I'm not saying this IS the case, I don't know) if the system is actively courting that experimentation, intentionally being open to people answering those questions as best for their applications?
In other words, if this is complete, there's just not as much to it as a person of a certain preference might want?
US Politics
I don't know if you've come across it, but I have: a lot of people were questioning whether Trump had changed, pointing to some recent media appearances and changes to his campaign staffs.
So giving him the hour of air time helped people realize what plenty of us have been saying for years: he has not and cannot change.
The airtime helped people see for themselves that he's just as awful as ever.
If you've talked to people on the fence like that, you might see how beneficial the airtime was for informing them, with their own eyes, that he's not even able to be normal in this setting.
I think she's in a tough place these days.
It used to be she could be just a rather academic administrator, following data to make informed decisions, but her new position is political, not technocratic, so she's having to balance what she knows to be right against what the political system gives her to say.
One could argue that she should just quit if the role is so compromising, but even then, she'd be giving up a major chance to influence the politics in the right direction even if the outcome isn't great.
It ends up being a tough call.
@BernieWonIowa@mastodon.social
Well, Democrats had every opportunity to provide funding for their programs when they passed their appropriations bill, but they chose not to, leaving us in this position.
I wouldn't focus so much on rewarding GOP as holding Democrats accountable for actively setting this situation up... but we reelect the people responsible for it, so I guess we're cool with it.
I do, in fact, think unemployed people should be counted as unemployed people, yes.
BLS chart shows that prime-age participation remains below trend from its pre-pandemic recovery, showing quite a lot of people don't have jobs but aren't reflected in the unemployment numbers you're crowing about, even excluding a lot of the unemployed people you'd rather not recognize.
Echoing a couple of other people here, I can't imagine a different way to get end users the experience they probably want and value.
So to build up, what are the alternative ways of doing this, if not big-data-centralized? Is there a way to get around the efficiencies of having it all in one place for processing?
Just keep in mind that other people have different ways of communicating, ways that are better for them, and #QT is a tool for communication that doesn't really have a functional equal through other features of #Mastodon even after jumping through hoops.
It's fine that you don't personally like QT, and thanks to the federated system we can talk about filters to ignore QTs, to give you the experience you want while still empowering others to publish their content more effectively.
There are criminals on TV. Just because you're on TV doesn't mean you're not one of them.
Heck, it might even be that people on TV are more likely than the average person to be criminals.
In any case, I'd say the big outcome from the appearance was the guy specifically showing, once again, that he's pathologically incapable of being normal.
re: venra.social and fediverse groups
I bet such an extension could be added pretty trivially. It would just take a note of metadata tagging it as a group. And then, of course, UI would need to do something with it.
As I recall, ActivityPub is explicit about entities on the system not necessarily representing individuals, so it seems to be actively intended to be used for stuff like group accounts.
We just need to make sure we implement that functionality well.
Too rarely mentioned is that the #Title42 immigration statute, that's big in the news this week, is a law with certain guidelines, not just something one president made up that another can end.
One reason to emphasize this is, of course, so we can call for revamping of the law if need be.
And to hold presidents accountable for actually following these laws.
The BLS stats call that claim to question. See the link below.
But YES, I want to look at the overall participation rate since otherwise you're just saying, "there's very low unemployment! ... except for those unemployed people, but nevermind them."
If you happen to believe there's good reason to ignore unemployed people in the picture of unemployment that you're selling, great, but just be honest and clear about it.
venra.social and fediverse groups
Last time I looked into it the group features had one downside that a user might respond to a group thinking they are responding to an individual, which caused some amount of drama.
Is that still the case? Or has there been a way to mitigate that issue?
They may be implemented that way, but they don't have to be, especially here on instance to instance basis.
So here's another way of thinking about it: I might choose between #QT and linking based on whether I want to bring that content into my expression or keep it at arms length, depending on what it is and my intention in sharing it farther.
Specifically, I might bring the content into my feed with a notification to the originator that the content is being built upon, similar to a boost notification, or I might not care for them to know, so I would use a link that would not trigger the notification.
You could say, Oh well mention the person, but again that sort of unnecessary kludge skips the chance to have semantic information attached, letting the person know exactly why they are being notified.
QTs convey meaning that requires hoops to sort of make up for throwing the meaning away
The use case I'm describing is sharing content, not sharing previews. It's here is some content that you can follow back to its origin, not here is a link that leads to some content elsewhere.
To me these are strikingly different concepts, both in terms of meaning and in terms of implementation.
You can get into all sorts of things ranging from screen reader adaptiveness through organization of feed display with the semantic clarity, but only if you allow it to exist.
"Just throw in a link!" Is not the same, losing author intent, and making it harder for readers to engage with the content on the platform.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your personal preferences for what counts as quality are themselves not shared by all.
An awful lot of us might find the quality of discourse much better even as you say, "See! Worse!" just because you personally don't like it.
But hey, that's the great part of this federated system. We have more ability to make things work the way we each prefer.
We're not so bound to the one size fits all experience, whether that's fitting you or fitting me.
No problem: A simple use case is resharing another toot with a note of explanation without having to have the link or preview there in the body, instead having it integrated into the feed as first class content.
This is preferable both semantically and practically, especially because it is proving to be quite an annoyance to click on that link and be brought out of the interface instead of seamlessly moving to the content.
So that solution strikes me as having most of the downsides you fear but with extra annoyance for users.
I would go the opposite way with that: more flexibility for people to tailor their experiences in ways that bring them value also suggests that like-minded people would form increasingly distributed communities.
Want to have an experience that involves no QTs? But major instances don't support you in that preference? Great, set up on another instance, exactly in the process of getting away from centralization.
I wouldn't even say it's center chase since it's not like people are required to adopt any particular experience, given the distribution of instances.
So I really think you have this one backwards.
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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