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
That being said, maybe more to your point, the head developer guy of Mastodon shows himself to really want the platform to be the way HE wants it, regardless of others' requests.
His statements against QT is one example of that. And looking into audience a bit farther I came across this comment of his that also reflects his kind of closed-minded shutdowns of others' ideas.
And so, as he insists on having his way for his project (not entirely unfair), it's going to really reflect his own values and attitudes, including not feeling the need to put priority into audience selection.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8950#issuecomment-428748943
But that doesn't change that it's still up to a prosecutor to choose whether to charge.
Even if it's a major crime breaking an important law, it's still up to the discretion of the executive to decide whether to move forward with the case, given the totality of the situation, everything from his own resources through evidence through his own personal opinion of the law.
And their likelihood of showing good judgment in that is part of what is to be considered when picking the person who is to have that power of choice.
Ha, honestly I find the audience functionality of both Mastodon and ActivityPub to be such a mess that I wouldn't read into it.
ActivityPub makes it pretty complex on its own, and Mastodon adds another level of complexity on top of ActivityPub, making it that much messier.
You can see the overview in the link below if you're interested in the technical background.
Basically, public and followers-only are the super simple tags for Mastodon to add to posts with anything else being orders of magnitude harder for them to debate and then program, so I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped at those two out of pure laziness... errr... lack of time to get around to it :)
No, laws give officials permission to indict, but it's still up to their prosecutorial discretion which cases to pursue and which indictments to charge.
At all levels of US government executive branch officials decide every day that some instance of law breaking isn't worth pursuing, for a variety of reasons.
One simple illustration of this is that we don't say cops have to go after every single driver breaking the speed limit. They use their judgment to decide which ones really need to be pulled over.
Think of Lemmy as being just a different Mastodon client that happens to display things to their users with a different skin.
You interact with content on a Lemmy instance the same way as you interact with content on a different Mastodon instance.
(Technically they're both ActivityPub clients, for the more correct terminology)
There do seem to be some kinks to iron out between the clients, though. The ! thing might be one where they disagree on how to handle it.
@candletrading@emacs.ch
It's important for people to realize just how public everything on #Fediverse is, regardless of the privacy setting.
Any post you make will likely be transmitted from your own instance (that you presumably trust) to other instances which are free to do anything they want with the content, relying on voluntary observation of privacy settings of the post.
Users should basically assume that all content here is being broadcast to the world, just with suggested audience tags that will hopefully be respected.
That's not quite the situation.
Firstly, he wasn't charged over classification. The prosecutors used a different law where classification status doesn't matter, sidestepping questions about classification.
Secondly, they charged him with things beyond simply retaining the documents. The alleged lies were themselves criminal, separate from the retention.
But to your main point, no, nothing became illegal retroactively. Rather, Trump's statements gave prosecutors evidence to prove what had always been illegal, allegedly.
It's like, if you publicly brag about robbing a bank leading to your prosecution, it wasn't that the bragging made the robbery illegal retroactively but that it helped prove what had always been illegal.
I don't think it's really a norm for anti-discovery as much as discoverability is a legitimately difficult engineering problem for a distributed system, one that hasn't been sufficiently solved to make it an option in the first place.
I suppose some may prefer it that way, but I'd say the norm is mainly due to lack of a really viable alternative option.
It's like, it's not that I'm anti-fusion power; it's that there isn't a fusion power option available yet.
Bingo.
Meanwhile all of this benefits the guy, playing directly into his rhetoric and fundraising.
These indictments may have been the very best way to improve his chances of becoming president again instead of leaving him to fade away on some golf course somewhere.
Lately they have been communities ripping themselves apart with fractious ideas about which causes are vital enough to shut things down.
It's been bottom-up drama, not top down control.
But those are social problems that probably don't have technological solutions.
If your group of members prioritize things other than participating in a community, well, it's hard to force that community to continue to function no matter how good a programmer you may be.
and you also lose the focused development resources raised and then managed by those operations.
Distributed is inherently less efficient, with duplication of effort and communication overhead. Sometimes the advantages outweigh those costs, but this applies to the development effort itself as well.
How do you figure search results will be richer?
It's a lot easier to index one standardized, centralized website than an undefined number of instances doing their own things and hosting content that's a mix of unique and redundant.
It seems much more challenging to make searching that have the same level of utility.
@omegaman, one would think so, but there are those who just REALLY REALLY hate the idea of QT so much that even opt-in is more than they can accept.
Their argument is that QT would ruin the whole vibe so much that even if they opted out, even the non-QT content would be brought down into the mud.
I've gotten the sense that their side is losing the argument, though.
Result: interesting, my reply from a Mastodon instance showed up, but on the web interface I don't see my username.
Maybe a little rough edge to look into.
@ValueSubtracted
I believe it is possible! Although they may have some rough edges to work out as of now.
I just commented on a Lemmy thread from a Mastodon instance, and it more or less worked.
Depending on how they do it behind the scenes, they might be helpfully tagging the data with an indication that it's a reply and not a post, so that it really becomes up to the client UI to decide how best to handle it.
A lot of things on Fediverse are like that, with ActivityPub protocol giving the information, but leaving it up to the user interface developer to figure out how best to serve users with the incoming data.
Also, some modified Mastodon instances have QT functionality.
This one, qoto, does.
A lot of people involved in Mastodon have extremely strong anti-QT feelings, BTW, so this is a quite dramatic topic for man.
Maybe people in the Mastodon world absolutely do not want QT available, believing that it's a blight upon speech.
I disagree with them.
If you're interested in a little more behind the scenes info on how this works, (and since I want to make a test post to see how it shows up in Lemmy):
Since there's no central clearinghouse for content in the distributed Fediverse, each instance broadcasts its users' new posts, but only to other instances that need to see that content, generally because they host at least one user interested in it.
So you'll see times when your instance won't have received any older content before its first user followed the remote account. After that, the remote instance knows to start sending content to your instance, to that user really, but then your instance knows about the content.
In other words, your instance begins its subscription to the remote account by having any user begin to follow it.
I think that might be giving the guy too much credit for either understanding his situation OR not actually gaining perverse pleasure out of it.
Roses are red,
The troll is fed.
I think you underestimate the downside and disruption here.
It's not merely letting people know so that they can decide their own stance. Taking down communications platforms as a strategy for communicating is much more actively shoving things into peoples' faces than you frame it... and also a bit absurd?
Anyway, the might as well stay on the platform that gives them more value. For so many that won't be Fediverse, and the disruption will have been just imposition and annoyance by people with an uninteresting cause to push.
@RedditGoneWild
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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