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
One issue is that spammers have at least an idea of a sustainable plan: pay this money to spam and make up for it in sales or scams or whatever they're selling in the spam.
It's not as straightforward to recoup the cost of buying that transaction capacity in the blocks.
It would be more of a one time, let's spend this money to screw with Bitcoin for a day! sort of plan, but I can't think of a way to translate that sustainably into a cycle that's funded.
Well, I'd say public vs private transportation solve different type of problems, so one isn't a direct replacement for the other.
Public transport is great for bulk transport of people with generally homogeneous needs, but it's inefficient for groups of the population who don't fit the mold.
Society, and our systems, have and need both populations to function well.
There is so much room for gains in efficiency of private transportation, so it's arguably worth investing in that direction.
@jeffjarvis @brass75 @paul @mihobu @mathewi @glennf
Maybe one issue is that conversations take time, and as the academics jokingly say, "You should be writing"?
I like to think that ActivityPub features can help make a journalist's time spent engaging more efficient, automating and organizing some of the tasks they'd spend their time on with platforms like Twitter.
*(To be clear, the "You" there is the general you from the joke, for anyone not familiar with the trope)*
Keep in mind that the attacker is losing money through those fees, though.
I'm not sure this would really count as much of an attack, more of yeah, that's how it's supposed to work.
(Though sure, maybe we shouldn't want it to work that way.)
It reminds me of the analogy of going to a small restaurant and implementing the attack of buying all their food so nobody else can get any.
And the small family owned restaurant keeps raising their prices so long as you can afford it.
Yeah, stinks for other customers, but it's how restaurants work, and the owners are delighted, and eventually you run out of money.
Anyway, yep, and miners can implement that sort of ranking to avoid this situation if they wish. The fees are the mitigation built in.
The main issue I have with your post is its sense that all this (waves hands) is a single, unified place, when it's really not.
It's not one club but rather a system of cooperating clubs, each of which has its own environment and norms.
I personally absolutely wouldn't be in one of the clubs engaging in that sort of exclusivity, mainly because it disempowers the members themselves. I would get less opportunities to engage with the would-be members who are excluded, so I'm out.
So join one of the wide open clubs and support the wide-open norms.
Which you can only do by first recognizing that there are different clubs here to join.
Oh yeah, the public has never voted for anything bad...
The world has a long, long history of such projects going horribly, horribly wrong due to everything from voters' ignorance through officials' conflicts of interest.
Ah, reminds me of the multiple times when the US seemed right on the cusp of allowing OTC sales of birth control.
@radiocron@mastodon.social @JohnMastodon
And yet we keep reelecting the people responsible.
We don't just elect such people to office; we have them around, they screw up, and we vote that yeah, let's keep doing this.
(one of my soapboxes)
volkris
boosted
me: *screaming into the abyss"
the abyss: this could have been an email
volkris
boosted
Inflation fell to 6.5 percent in December, but new House rules ensure that Congress will have to consider the inflationary impact of future spending bills.
https://reason.com/2023/01/12/the-best-inflation-news-this-week-actually-came-out-of-congress/
Yeah, imagine the workflow of even a freelancer submitting an article to a magazine that publishes it, with their publication system directly linking it into #Fediverse without jumping through any hoops, where the writer can boost it, driving the extra traffic right to the magazine website.
The magazine gets extra views, the article gets extra views which is good for the writer, and it all becomes self-reinforcing.
Writers would prefer magazines with Fediverse presence, magazines would publish more from writers driving that traffic, everyone wins.
This is just one example of how the openness of #ActivityPub helps transcend what #Twitter offered, but only if #Mastodon is not seen as the end all of the platform.
@brass75 I'm sure different journalists have different motivations, but if nothing else, many will be pressed to engage by publishers who consider the engagement to be part of their business.
And heck, even those journalists with motivations that we might not be so excited about might enjoy more powerful ways of trolling enabled by #ActivityPub
My point is that ActivityPub offers everything Twitter did and more, so when @paul wants to see more come over, this is a sellingpoint that should be highlighted.
FWIW, I'd say @brass75 's contribution here helps make this a time when I'd avoid talking about #Mastodon instead of #Fediverse
Journalists contributing to this platform have so much more ability than they had through #Twitter largely because #ActivityPub can do so much more, if only they don't restrain themselves down to only using Mastodon.
This is one huge sellingpoint to get them moving over, so it's worth emphasizing.
With ActivityPub a journalist can integrate Fediverse directly into their content publishing systems to engage with readers in all sorts of new ways.
I'm a bit surprised that the discovery of #Biden's classified document mishandling didn't get as much international mention as #Trump's.
It seems like the appointment of a special council to investigate a sitting president by his own Department of Justice, especially with all of the rhetoric around Trump, would have given that news extra impact.
Ah, well. #Journalism .
(And #USPolitics )
volkris
boosted
Personally, I think mastodon is a pretty poor choice of a Fediverse server platform for a #smallweb (single or few users) instance.
It is severely lacking in features that most other platforms have been delivering for a long time and perhaps the worst aspects are the resource requirements considering all you are really using it for, or those that a novice self-hoster needs to be saddled with.
In all fairness, if your aim is to approach #silo level habitation for your users (you said it isn't), then mastodon really does start to shine around the 20,000+ user account level where performance and stability under such loads would require significantly more horsepower than your probably likely to be pleased with spending on hardware - virtual or otherwise.
Lack of support for other types of text input, the paltry stock per post of 500 character count limitations, and a "local-only" post option that is absent for community based instances, among many other limitations, provides many compelling reasons for choosing other #Fediverse server options.
For example, since your objective is to provide yourself with a #single_user_instance, one of the lightest platforms with a few of those missing features might be that of
https://MicroBlog.Pub - engineered from the ground up to be a very lean, easy to install, and simple to administer platform.
Other "low energy" and simple to install alternatives might be #Calckey or if your not adverse to having an over the top feature set that can provide two way communications with other networks like twitter and Diaspora, Etc., then #Friendica affords extremely simple installation for anyone who's ever installed even a #WordPress site - because it only requires a simple and straight forward LAMP stack that most #Linux distros are already endowed with by default (basically, simply dump the files into a directory and your running).
#Pleroma and its family of fine forks is also very conservative on resource requirements and is a very stable and quite performant on an old #Raspberry_Pi in your home LAN (although installation is a non-trivial affair).
I'm any case, for the time being, you've chosen a platform to roll with, so the best advice I think anyone can give is to read up on the docs and ask plenty of questions as you go. Folks will be generally anxious to offer assistance.
One more thing. If you find that your okay with the resource hog that you've chosen, and become comfortable with administering your instance, but wish to avail yourself of the many other features that everyone else has available to them, there's an alternative you should really look into that's pretty awesome: The #Hometown Fediverse server platform has many rich features mentioned above and much more, while having the added advantage of already being familiar to you, since it stems from a fork of mastodon and is actively developed and maintained by a former Mozilla fellow. It's worth checking out 🙂
I hope that helps!
#tallship #FOSS
⛵
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It is severely lacking in features that most other platforms have been delivering for a long time and perhaps the worst aspects are the resource requirements considering all you are really using it for, or those that a novice self-hoster needs to be saddled with.
In all fairness, if your aim is to approach #silo level habitation for your users (you said it isn't), then mastodon really does start to shine around the 20,000+ user account level where performance and stability under such loads would require significantly more horsepower than your probably likely to be pleased with spending on hardware - virtual or otherwise.
Lack of support for other types of text input, the paltry stock per post of 500 character count limitations, and a "local-only" post option that is absent for community based instances, among many other limitations, provides many compelling reasons for choosing other #Fediverse server options.
For example, since your objective is to provide yourself with a #single_user_instance, one of the lightest platforms with a few of those missing features might be that of
https://MicroBlog.Pub - engineered from the ground up to be a very lean, easy to install, and simple to administer platform.
Other "low energy" and simple to install alternatives might be #Calckey or if your not adverse to having an over the top feature set that can provide two way communications with other networks like twitter and Diaspora, Etc., then #Friendica affords extremely simple installation for anyone who's ever installed even a #WordPress site - because it only requires a simple and straight forward LAMP stack that most #Linux distros are already endowed with by default (basically, simply dump the files into a directory and your running).
#Pleroma and its family of fine forks is also very conservative on resource requirements and is a very stable and quite performant on an old #Raspberry_Pi in your home LAN (although installation is a non-trivial affair).
I'm any case, for the time being, you've chosen a platform to roll with, so the best advice I think anyone can give is to read up on the docs and ask plenty of questions as you go. Folks will be generally anxious to offer assistance.
One more thing. If you find that your okay with the resource hog that you've chosen, and become comfortable with administering your instance, but wish to avail yourself of the many other features that everyone else has available to them, there's an alternative you should really look into that's pretty awesome: The #Hometown Fediverse server platform has many rich features mentioned above and much more, while having the added advantage of already being familiar to you, since it stems from a fork of mastodon and is actively developed and maintained by a former Mozilla fellow. It's worth checking out 🙂
I hope that helps!
#tallship #FOSS
⛵
.
A lot of it depends on subjective goals, though, and this screencap illustrates that.
Is it better for the House to pass more legislation or to give our representatives more say in what goes into legislation, even if that means not passing as much?
For example, is it more important or less important to give Democrats more chances to propose amendments to legislation?
The changes to the #House rules will allow for more minority party input, at the expense of getting less passed.
Whether that trade is worth it is in the eye of the beholder.
@undefined @ChrisWere @hacknorris Well, what would you say are the advantages of Matrix over XMPP?
volkris
boosted
Interesting details from @aral on how expensive and computationally intense Mastodon can be.
At the time, he had 22k followers. Every post he made, and each reply, kicks off ~3k Sidekiq jobs.
He's on a totally self-hosted server with just him. A €20/month plan won't cut it, nor will a €50/month plan.
Pricey pricey.
The difference is that the House committees will have people testifying under oath, under threat of jail time should they lie.
And there are checks and balances, where Biden's DOJ could prosecute people for lying under oath to disseminate false conspiracy theories.
This is time for the GOP to put their claims to the test, so we can finally get to the bottom of what they assert, with real penalties hanging over their heads.
It never was, though.
So being an awful place was obviously not a reason not to use it.
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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