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
I absolutely avoid those terms myself! :)
I try to use more concrete, more well-defined terms. For example, I might talk about people holding certain policy preferences that are relevant to the discussion, or I might use terms "Democrat" and "Republican" since at least I can refer to official party platforms.
Also, I absolutely hate when reporters frame Supreme Court justices as conservative or liberal especially since their approaches don't fit nicely into two categories like that, much less with connection to broader senses of those terms.
Yeah, the terms need to be retired in general conversation.
Well, we might actually be on the same page :) but just in case...
To illustrate, a Mastodon instance exchanges content with a PeerTube instance just as it would a different Mastodon instance, regardless of different design goals.
ActivityPub unifies them without concern for differences. Generally, anything participating in AP has to work with content from any other participants, as it thinks best for its readers.
Kind of different user interfaces to the same system.
I think you'll find that in American politics, terms like conservative and liberal have drifted so far over the generations as to have largely lost meaning.
Even just talking to self-described conservatives you'll hear vastly different political ideas.
That's just how the vernacular changes over time.
US Politics
Well, representative distribution is a big and complicated topic, but at the least we can simply say that the constituencies being represented are divided, even if we may have issues with the constituencies themselves.
CRS has a nice history of Speaker elections here. A member crossed the aisle in 2001, but generally members have always felt free to simply abstain, indirectly giving a hand to other candidates.
Either way, though, a stronger national consensus (of constituencies) would solve the drama. We don't have that, though.
I'd emphasize the authority part, not the consensus part.
It makes me want to allude to "consent of the governed."
The majority voting process is a test to make sure most of the House is really on board with the vision by which the Speaker aims his authority, and he will need their continued support over and over as he proceeds.
If the Speaker can't pass this test when being handed his authority, there's a good chance he will fail when he tries to implement the plan he's proposed, causing more trouble in short order.
Really, this is a vote on whether the House should proceed in a direction, and if the members of the House can't decide, then it probably shouldn't until they can.
US Politics
One way to put it is that if Americans were more on the same page, then the opinions of such a small minority wouldn't matter.
Such people exist in every Congress. They're just normally overshadowed by the general national consensus.
More importantly, though, the Speaker is chosen by consensus of our representatives to manage the House in the ways they want it conducted, and with so much division in the population, it's no surprise that disagreements are being represented.
We're all hostage to our own disagreements. It's no surprise that the representative body reflects that.
One reason is that they aren't voting for a mere representative but rather for an administrator who will have quite a lot of authority in the chamber. That's how the House is designed.
They need to come to active consensus about who is going to set the operations of the House, as they will all have to live under those actions.
Dropping candidates to force a winner doesn't make as much sense when the winner needs such buy-in from the members he oversees.
PLUS, there are legitimate and healthy negotiations tied to the election of a Speaker.
US Politics
It's really a matter of representatives reflecting a widely divided population.
After all, McCarthy is facing not only a few loudmouths in the minority but the entire other side of the aisle not coming to a consensus about the direction to go.
It's not the final voter that counts, after all, but every other vote in the room leading up to the last one.
It's probably in their best interests to let this drama stretch out through as many news cycles as possible.
And personally, I scroll past posts that are too short since they don't normally have anything to say.
To each his own, and empower our platforms to tailor our experiences for our needs!
@chartier I think you're looking at it the wrong way around: instead of constraining writers, empower readers!
Firstly, there aren't really corners of #Fediverse. There are instances, but it's nominally one big, integrated universe with content flowing to all corners.
But sure, for people who don't want to read long posts, have a setting to skip those in the timeline.
(Also, events are already part of the #ActivityPub standard as it is, and #Mastodon says it supports them)
volkris
boosted
Newly revealed internal communications show that Twitter, under government pressure, suppressed truthful speech about COVID-19 as "misinformation." https://reason.com/2023/01/02/under-government-pressure-twitter-suppressed-truthful-speech-about-covid-19/
My worry is exactly that people are not understanding that the theory is already wrong.
I know users are misunderstanding things like the privacy setting on posts, believing that it guarantees access only to the people according to the setting, when it doesn't. I know this because I've talked to people who were floored to hear that's not how this platform works.
If people think they have more control over their own contents, then are wrong, and they need to know they're wrong. They need to know that the security features of this system are not designed to work the way they think.
Like I said, the big example is a user deleting a post and expecting that it will be deleted entirely. Not an unreasonable expectation! But one that is just not in line with how this system works.
This has nothing to do with virality. It has to do with privacy and control over content.
Your article primarily describes civil actions, though, not ones that would entail a law requiring the government to correct lies.
Also, Trump is guilty of stuff too, but that's a different issue.
I think the important thing is how the US government behaved. I don't care much about what some private company did; but I do believe we need to hold government officials accountable for things like working to silence people promoting viewpoints they don't like, even if their abilities to actually see that through were limited.
The thing I find really interesting about your post and my reaction to it is that you frame #QT as talking about a person while I'd see it as very explicitly talking about the content.
If I quote something and expand on it, the major reference is to what was said, not the person saying it. The person is only included as an attribute, but the content takes center stage.
And to me that's the major point of QT: it takes some specific content and builds upon it in ways that can't really be done through other means.
QT isn't about the person. It's about the quote, and sort of furthering human knowledge by taking what a person has expressed to another level.
But then, I'm an academic, so that's just daily life for me :)
I think it's critical that we raise awareness of how any platform based on ActivityPub is inherently poor with privacy guarantees as that distributed platform is fundamentally reliant on different instances voluntarily respecting privacy features.
In general users need to be aware of things like post deletion being unenforceable. If you delete a post from your account, there's nothing to say other accounts won't ignore the deletion, and I think that's a big deal!
But when you talk about privacy controls for QT, everyone needs to keep in mind that all such controls on this platform are voluntary.
My point isn't to say that there's no reason to talk about this, but just to keep in mind the limits of what can be engineered here.
Well, there is no real fediverse policy other than the technical standard, but I'd say issues of expression like that are up to the person doing the expressing.
The content creator gets to create his content as he wants it to be.
I don't want to be dictating to people how they should express themselves per some policy.
I always had no use for #Twitter
Every time I dipped my toe into that platform I found it limited, constraining even, starting with its stupid character limit.
For me the appeal of #Mastodon is that it's far, far better than Twitter because of its interface to #ActivityPub / #Fediverse.
Here the platform isn't limited to exceedingly short posts, but can instead support long posts AND so much more: rich multimedia, and types of content that the standard hasn't even thought of yet.
For me the appeal of Mastodon is that it's exponentially better than Twitter ever was, empowering users and enabling forms of expression that Twitter never could match.
I think it's a HUGE problem that users won't know enough about Mastodon/Fediverse/ActivityPub to realize how this works, and they will expect exactly that deleting a post is effectively instant and guaranteed.
Users won't be aware of the technical model. They'll just be used to social media as it's always been, and assume this platform has similar behavior.
This has huge privacy implications.
FWIW, I'd rename the list from fediverse apps to fediverse platforms.
I think a lot of people would associate an app with a client running on a phone, so I had trouble finding the platform list.
But nice lists!
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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