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
Ha, to me that strikes me not so much as Fediverse being better than users choosing to make Reddit worse, which is a different problem.
ActivityPub and http have very different design goals and so are designed very differently, especially in terms of push vs pull and resource usage.
Just to name one issue, ActivityPub is designed to protect scalability by trying to only send content to other instances that have actually shown interest in it ahead of time. So if my post is sent to your instance only, an indexer that's not already involved wouldn't even know the content exists to be indexed.
ActivityPub is only global in the sense that the English language is. Just because there are people all around the world speaking it doesn't mean they all hear a conversation I have in the coffee shop.
I do! The whole tone of mainstream conservative media changed once the indictments started.
Earlier in the year major conservative figures were really turning on the guy, bashing him day after day, discouraging him from running again. And even his announcement was met with criticism over campaign strategy rather than celebration.
All of that changed with the Bragg indictment as now people are backing him despite who he is just to stand up to what they see as confirmation that The Man really is out to get them.
These indictments are the best campaign fodder Trump could have hoped for, and the response of professional commentators shows it.
That might get a bit more dramatic as people with a lot of interest in keeping journalism funded might push back on it.
It's one thing to "steal" cat videos from YouTube, but there's a large constituency that's concerned about any move that further erodes financing of the press.
One reason I'm emphasizing that indictments are at the discretion of prosecutors is simply because we need to keep that judgment issue in mind when voting. Basic civics.
BUT, there are some other complications. What choice would we make if the prosecution made it more likely for Trump to win reelection? Is it really worth it to have him in court if it also meant having him as president?
Each person might answer that question differently. It's a complex topic.
It might be better for society as a whole to let one old, guilty man go without facing a judge rather than giving him this promotion, this megaphone for him to continue spewing bullshit into society.
That's the kind of question we ask prosecutors to weigh.
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.
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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