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
Do you have a good reference that goes into the law and the determination of it? I'm curious.
I'm especially curious as to whether those government officials simply have the law wrong, and so are creating a problem that's already been solved, making an unnecessary mess of things.
@Mikerotch75 if you're referring to the Electoral College voting for president, that's a different issue.
Either way, it's a political and legal issue, not a moral one.
No, I imagine those who'd feel the opposite of freedom--obligation to pay--would not be so on board...
Instead of trying to interfere in states' elections, the GOP would be on firmer philosophical and legal ground if it just expressed to the residents of those states that they were diluting their own votes with such choices.
If they decided it was worth it, then hey, so be it. They're their votes to use as they wish.
What people miss with this often repeated narrative is that #Bitcoin absolutely does not rely on energy and carbon-intensive digital mining. You could run a serious Bitcoin network on a couple of small solar panels and junked car batteries.
Instead, people choose for themselves to exchange energy for Bitcoin because they see it as more valuable than the energy. They spend more energy than Bitcoin requires because they see it as just that valuable.
So the idea of changing to a cleaner protocol doesn't really offer a solution since it's the people, not the protocol, burning so much carbon.
Ha, well for an honest reply to the joke question... :)
I'd say if it works, it's Mastodon. If it doesn't it's Fediverse!
If you use the edit function, Mastodon sends an ActivityPub message out saying the post has been edited, but who knows what other platforms are going to actually respect that message and reflect the edits.
Yay federation!
Despite what so many are reporting, that is not what's happening, and it's not part of how the US system works.
It makes for a dramatic story that gets clicks, but it's just factually wrong.
The rules of the Senate generally allow a majority to move forward on anything if they want to, even to end a filibuster.
The only reason Tuberville is being covered like this is because the rest of the senators that we elected are supporting this block, letting it continue, instead of voting against him.
I mean it's not up to the president to do something about it.
If anything is to be done it's by the folks we elected to represent us in Congress.
It's dangerous territory to talk about a president interfering in the judicial branch even if it's for some cause that we in the moment might get behind.
Technically, yes it is a challenging problem to address. No two ways about that.
But that's one reason I emphasize education. At the least I want users to know what they are getting into, and with the numbers of people I find surprised by it, clearly what we are doing so far to have warnings in UIs and such hasn't been enough.
The drama over Threads is bringing up that disconnect between privacy expectations and realities once again.
To be clear, I'm not talking about anything related to Meta. I'm referring to the longstanding issues of people posting things here without realizing that what they are posting has such little privacy guards around it.
It's just the core of how ActivityPub was designed, and there's not much to do about it at this point except make sure users are more informed about how it works.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta is MORE trustworthy and well-behaved than many ActivityPub instances out there since they are under public and legal scrutiny, unlike some random instance running in someone's bedroom vacuuming up even audience restricted content for who knows what purpose.
I don't know that the intense focus on Meta would bring effective solutions that would also address the general issues.
I think your last paragraph has some important distinctions related to instance admins versus their own users if they defederate.
When this kind of thing comes up so many people focus on instance level blocking and moderation, that makes decisions for users, instead of ways of empowering users to shape their own experiences based on their own perspectives.
So when you talk about choosing between following which group of people, it just makes me think of how that might really translate to following the groups of users who have been allowed by their instances to participate more fully in the Fediverse system, forcing those users to choose as well, and it just sounds like a big old mess to me.
If we focus on empowering users instead then that does a lot to unwind those tricky social dynamics.
I think you might be echoing my own observation that so many people are getting so upset about Threads without Knowing what substantial issues they are actually getting upset about. I don't think they understand the problems that they are yelling so loudly about.
But I also wanted to say that ActivityPub is built on an awful lot of trusting of other instances, so that Mastodon must be as well.
For example, respecting of post audience and deletion requests are all based on trusting the remote instances to do the right thing and honor those requests.
And I think more users need to realize that as they put their content into this system.
To be clear, the underlying ActivityPub protocol and the Fediverse as a whole is perfectly able to do QT.
It's just that Mastodon specifically has refused to honor it, even though some particular instances like mine have added it as a tweak.
@antifawarlord @astrojuanlu @J12t@social.coop
I mean, with the way ActivityPub is designed they are probably already mining the shit out of the platform regardless of whether they actually make a bridge for their users or not.
AP is just really not a privacy focused system.
Varied experiences is one of those things that's either a bug or a feature depending on where one stands.
The idea of users having completely different experiences is a problem when some of the experiences are lackluster, BUT, on the optimistic side (maybe a theoretical side) that also frees UIs to give users different experiences they'd prefer.
I do like the idea of application developers tailoring their UIs to the needs of different users, empower users to look for the experience they want, even if it's different from someone else.
That being said, yep, it is a problem that many of these applications are struggling to really fulfill that promise.
I think so.
The focus on instances instead of real decentralization by focusing on users is one of the big criticisms I have about ActivityPub, one of the reasons this platform just isn't so interesting to me.
It was a development decision made long in the past, though, so it is what it is.
Well, this is a bit more complex because scaling in ActivityPub is mainly based on number of instances, not number of users.
A post shared with 10 or 100 users on a single instance really takes about the same amount of processing, as opposed to the same users on 100 different instances, each instance having to be contacted individually to broadcast the post.
Presumably Meta would set up its service as either one or at least the minimal number of instances, so the scaling wouldn't be as unworkable.
Well, account migration is not really part of ActivityPub underlying the Fediverse.
So Threads will almost certainly not have such a feature because Fediverse itself doesn't really have such a feature.
Yep. It's determined by the people that we elect, so we probably need to stop electing and then reelecting the individual representatives that so badly fail us.
Either way, we vote for the people who decide if justices are misbehaving, so if they're judging wrong, well again, we should probably stop electing the same people to keep failing the same way.
@Svetlana2@mastodon.social
volkris
boosted
Is distributed computing dying, or just fading into the backdrop?
There seems to be much less excitement about distributed computing these days.
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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