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
Personally, I think designing the system around instance owners was an unfortunate decision, so I'm critical of that. But it is what it is.
It paints a pretty different picture, though, from attention democracy when users have to choose which instance owner to be subject to, or become an owner themselves with all of those drawbacks.
I just don't want to oversell a dream.
This place isn't nearly so democratic and gatekeeper free. The power imbalances are still front and center, even if you might say they're not as bad as somewhere else.
Another issue for niche forums is cost. They may have the financial resources for managing their little group, but ActivityPub requires significant resources and adds significant overhead, that the little group of people might not be interested in affording.
And then there's the issue of niche groups showing ads on their sites to fund their servers. ActivityPub risks undermining that source of revenue.
I'm not saying one way or the other since it's definitely a case by case decision to make.
Although I will say this is one place the overhead and cost of ActivityPub comes up, so I'm critical of that.
Ruthless GOP power plays? Democrats' strategic missteps shaped the court today.
From RBG's strategic retirement plan through Obama's insistence on nominating Garland, who could not pass confirmation, the ball was in their court, and we need to hold those people accountable for their errors.
Anyway, blocking future expansion also protects the Court from legislative interference once the pendulum has swung the other way.
That's the advantage of it being a constitutional amendment and not a simple law.
Well, keep in mind that this isn't necessarily true.
#Fediverse delivers a firehose of content around to the different instances, but the people running the instances decide for themselves what to do with it, whether to show it to users, which users to show it to, etc.
There absolutely ARE gatekeepers, as many here embrace and promote deferation and blocking of users. And there's nothing stopping a instance owner from accepting money from an advertiser to promote certain content.
Fediverse is just the communication technology. The instance owners are in charge.
I think it's important to be really aware of what this is and isn't.
Maybe it's for the best that we don't look to unelected private actors, particularly those with power over finances and abilities to act as gatekeepers to financial tools, to don the hats of police?
Yeah, when the bank owner isn't telling people what they can and can't do with their money, some people will do bad things with it.
But that's for law enforcement to address through transparent channels that respect due process. It shouldn't be for Jack Dorsey to go vigilante and take the law into his own hands.
Coffee, but my personal anecdotes are hardly significant.
These articles are about people #Bitcoin mining, right? Every one of those miners is an adopter who is not only engaging in trade using Bitcoin but is finding the currency so valuable that they're willing to pay both fixed and variable costs to acquire more.
The narratives complaining about Bitcoin mining are necessarily highlighting the adoption and value of the system.
It reminds me of the old line: Nobody goes there anymore--it’s too crowded.
But that just goes for another round of the same.
Sure, it's not useful for transactions, except for all of the times when it is, it's not useful for remittances, except when it is, etc.
It really comes across as gaslighting when folks insist on the nonexistence of what we see with our own eyes.
The news of zero adoption is quite surprising to all of the adopters.
It's a ridiculous argument, amounting to, Except for all of the benefits, there is only cost!
It does drive clicks, I suppose.
But this argument seems to miss the very importance of the network effect, so it comes across as both circular and Pollyannish.
The network effect drives growth and provides value. Heck yeah, that's the thing the successful platforms have going for them, but to say Fediverse will match that value once it has lots of people misses that without first having that value it will have trouble attracting those lots of people.
It's like saying the only thing dollars have over Bitcoin is that they're accepted so broadly.
Well... yeah.
*shrug* the owner feels like those voters need to be called out for their role in electing the guy.
That's not a positive sentiment, but it's not orders of magnitude different from criticizing the politician voters elected.
Heck, maybe we need a little more focus on the responsibilities of voters in this democratic system.
It's almost as if these proceedings are doing little but playing into Trump's hands.
Right, but that you were surprised by this outcome means you were wrong about something, and if I were in your position, I'd do some self-examination to figure out where I was wrong.
If you were wrong about this, I'd be wondering what else you are wrong about, and how you could have gotten to that point during those years of advocacy.
I'd say that even if he is arrested, still not worth the energy.
Seriously, the more attention we give to the loser the more it plays into his sticking around.
If he's arrested then fine. Let the cops deal with him. Let's go focus on more important things.
Meh. Stupid state government deciding that stupid state government should do stupid things.
The key is just to recognize how stupid the government is and ignore it, as it's just a stupid institution being stupid, and the less room it takes up in our minds the better.
It's because such a law would be undemocratic.
If voters decide to vote for such a person, then that's how the election has worked out, and it would be problematic to overrule the democratic vote because the government doesn't accept its outcome.
Given the likely charges against him, Trump wouldn't be subject to bail anyway.
I'd say there are two independent but interrelated issues here: artist/author/creator intent and reader preference and empowerment.
Both are important.
As a writer, it matters to me to keep my work and personal personas separate for both practical and philosophical reasons. I'm a strong supporter of people having multiple accounts to match how they wish to have separate personas on social media. That's empowering of creators.
As a reader, I want to be able to shape my experience here and control what content is presented, and that's separate from the personas of people I follow.
That's where hashtags come in. On Fediverse, that seems to be the best way for readers to have power to get the experience they want.
So: accounts for personas and hashtags. They empower content creators and consumers, respectively. And they help empower us all on this platform.
Honestly, this was a pretty predictable result, so if you're shocked by it, perhaps you should reconsider whoever you're listening to for information about the Supreme Court.
There's so much misinformation out there these days, so much of it about SCOTUS.
What in the world?
Have you listened to much of the Federalist Society's content? They spent an awful lot of time rebuking "Christian right nationalist agenda!"
When you actually listen to them, so many of them seem to take particular joy in sticking it to exactly that sort of person.
volkris
boosted
tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough,
Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough,
code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
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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