volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@drewda

I think I'd be pretty skeptical just from the association with NYT

They haven't exactly been positive players in social media.

@GTinNC @doctorcdf

The vote would have been 200 to 20 against those fringe members until the Democrats chose to vote alongside them, giving them room to make demands in exchange for reopening Congress.

200 to 20 against those people.

Until the Democrats actively intervened to prevent that outcome and save them.

@AmberWavesofFlame

Keep in mind that the Democrats were the ones extending the drama.

Had they not voted the way they did the whole thing would have been resolved days earlier with the 200 to 20 vote.

I'm not saying anything about why the Democrats chose their voting strategy, I'm only pointing out that they had the ability to end this at any point and they chose not to.

@helgek @gimulnautti @jan @darnell @nickapos

No you're wrong. Image previews have nothing to do with the protocol issues we're talking about.

@leeolds

I don't know if I have ever heard him speak before, but he came across as a really bad SNL character. His speech was just plain silly and his delivery sounded like he thought he was in a beat poetry jam.

At the end he seemed way too proud of himself for finding a whole bunch of pairs of words that started with the same letter, like he just discovered the concept of alliteration.

It was not a serious speech appropriate for the setting, and it made him look just really unserious.

But then again, such an immature person fits with the Democrat caucus which just voted in alignment with Republican hardliners to put in place rules that will stymie Democrats' legislative efforts for the entire session.

These are not smart people.

@gimulnautti @jan @berkes @helgek @darnell @nickapos

Remember, this is not theoretical. This is actual experience hearing from real people running instances and finding themselves having to unexpectedly shell out more money for higher hosting prices that they weren't expecting.

The protocol requires poorly scaling processing and bandwidth.

And that's not even getting into expensive design decisions that Mastodon in particular put on top of everything else. For example the intentional decision not to redistribute image previews but instead require each instance to go out and pull its own image preview, duplicating that effort throughout the whole platform.

It seriously sounds like [almost] nobody involved in this from protocol design up through platform implementation gives a second thought to what's going to happen at scale.

And I may have said it in this thread, but when I was in school for computer science we were hammered with big-O analysis of algorithmic scaling but someone recently told me that's not emphasized in school these days. It sure looks like that's the case.

@luxalptraum

I imagine part of the reason is just the high rate of false negatives of the rapid tests make them a bit unreliable for that use case.

I say this in part just to remind people that the rapid tests have such a high false negative rate.

@PaulDitz

It's such a stupid thing to equate the election of a Speaker to insurrection. It's literally following the rules, literally maintaining and bowing to the functions of government on government's terms.

And it just shows how much people have cheapened the term insurrection when it applies to 100% capitulation to governmental processes.

@GTinNC @doctorcdf

Firstly, maybe they should have if the alternative was to put Republican hardliners into gatekeeper positions. Because that's the choice they made. And now they will be shut down immediately because they forced Republicans to embrace those hardliners in the rules if the House was to actually open.

They could have used those hardliners as a shared enemy to get Democratic priorities included in legislation, but they went the other way, ensuring that Democratic priorities will not be included in legislation.

Secondly, no, they didn't have to vote for anybody, a few Democrats answering present instead of voting would have allowed the better outcome to happen.

For the Democrats to choose this outcome with roadblocks to their legislative priorities over engaging with someone who's personally distasteful is cutting off the nose to spite the face, giving up on legislative priorities because they don't like the guy they would have to deal with to get things done.

@0x1C3B00DA

I think you're right, and unfortunately, that description reminds me of so many other projects that started off open and beloved but over time closed off even with a vague notion of, well there's an open source version if you really really want to use it.

I don't think Mastodon is all that great at the moment, but when you describe it like that it makes me fear even more for the future.

@matt @josemanuel

@darnell @Homebrewandhacking @nickapos

Right but that's the difference between keeping small and keeping isolated.

Roll your own if you want to, if you have some particular reason to, if you want to play with the system yourself or if you want to do it as a hobby or whatever.

But on the other hand we need to emphasize that there is tremendous value in joining others. You lose that if you roll your own.

@notsurprised

Well the way the House works is kind of backwards from that.

In the procedure for electing a Speaker people don't really attempt to get a job so much as the job hunting committee attempts to find a candidate. There's no job application, there's no signing up for candidacy, there's no standing up and arguing for one's own selection.

So yeah, the House can't get itself in order because we elected a whole bunch of idiots to staff the chamber. But that's what we get because of the way we voted.

@adamasnemesis

It reflects a divided population that not only doesn't agree with each other but is so far apart that even compromise and consensus is difficult.

These days I often end up thinking that yeah it only makes sense for rancor in the representative legislature when the legislature is representing such a rancorous population.

@Homebrewandhacking @darnell @nickapos

Well keep in mind also that one of the multipliers in the scaling issue is number of instances.

We should not be pushing people to start their own instances for a couple of reasons, one of which is the network effect of having like-minded people on a local timeline which is defeated by splitting them off into their own instances.

But for the sake of this discussion, the more instances the more resources required to share a post to all of the instances.

People are of course free to start their own instances if they want to, if they have a good reason to, or if they want a nice weekend project whatever. But, we should not be pushing them to do it for no reason as that is both costly and undermines some elements of the user experience.

@GTinNC @doctorcdf

Yep, and I just really want to keep beating the drum that Congressional Democrats have an enormous amount of blame for this situation.

They chose to vote in a way that empowered the fringe group to demand these rules changes that will end up blowing back on Democrats instead of using the fringe group as a bargaining chip to get Democrat priorities recognized in legislation.

The Democrats really really screwed this up, and we need to constantly remind them of it as this session works out.

Every time a far-right congressperson blocks a Democratic motion we need to yell at the Democrats for effectively putting that person in power in the first place. And we need to have these people voted out.

@noellemitchell

I have a question for you because I was discussing this with some other people on here, did you expect costs to be so high? Did it seem like they rose unexpectedly out of control?

I was trying to make a point about the costs of instances being exponentially higher than what people were predicting at the beginning, so if you have any input on that statement I think you might be capturing what I was trying to say.