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 proof that Thomas's friend actually wants to do that?
It's a pretty striking difference, friend vs donor. Only one of those nouns is trying to push his own values on everyone else.
With a group like that, I wonder if federation really brings them advantages.
With a closed group a central server might be just fine.
Anyway, yeah, ActivityPub was pretty much built with the idea that everything published through it would be effectively public, so anything built on top of ActivityPub would share that feature by default. This includes Mastodon, Lemmy, and all of the other Fediverse interfaces.
It was a design decision of ActivityPub.
But you're falling for the sensationalized, but misleading, description of Bitcoin that far too many outlets have sold for clicks over the last couple of years.
Bitcoin does not have a gigantic environmental impact. Bitcoin can be run quite easily on a raspberry pi with a car battery. It would be fine. It does not have a large environmental impact.
HOWEVER people are finding so much value in the system that they are willing to trade energy for it in order to participate, even though the system does not require that.
This whole story about Bitcoin having such an environmental impact is akin to saying that artwork demands tremendous resources merely because people pay a lot of money for a famous painting.
No, just like the painting, the thing does not require that. It's just found to be valuable enough that people pay much more than it requires.
Misleading press aside.
These things take significant amounts of engineering and investment, so it's reasonable to expect that they will take time, assuming they are happening.
@BeAware@social.beaware.live
I mean, sometimes feedback can be useful, and some authors are specifically looking for it.
A problem is that authors of blog posts don't generally flat out say whether they are or are not looking for that feedback.
Some things are just simply not possible no matter how good or bad an idea they are.
It doesn't matter how good an idea this is, fact is that in a distributed platform where nobody has control over where content goes, there is no way to control content like this.
It's not about whether everyone can get the feature or not. It's simply about the realities of distributed social media.
If you have all of the content sitting in a centralized system, then sure, you can control access to it. But part of being distributed is giving up that control. That's part of the trade-off.
Believe it or not, there's more to the world than Donald Trump.
Folks like Cheney and Kinzinger lost their seats because they were kind of awful, regardless of Trump. They didn't represent their constituents well, so their constituents chose not to send them back to Congress.
As for age, there's nothing new with young people skewing that direction but shifting as they grow up.
Oh I was more interested in the whole conspiracy you were mentioning, not just the AI part.
I really don't think it's that significant what AI says.
People should just not ask important questions of AI just as they should not trust Wikipedia for important matters. That's pretty easy.
For better or worse, in a distributed social platform that sort of feature can't really exist reliably.
Part of being distributed means giving up control. It means there is no single system that can police such a feature. Instead the information goes left and right, and everybody who receives it can do what they want with it.
It's part of the trade-off we make when we use an instance-oriented platform like Fediverse.
What's an example of those examples?
Well the reason we know that isn't true is because of the absolute numbers who are getting behind Trump.
It's not that they have hounded people out of the party, because there are still so many people in the party today. Had they hounded people out of the party then there would be fewer people in the party than there are.
I would say so many people today are supporting Trump because they see him as the victim of an inappropriate attack by the justice system.
It's just that simple, whether it is appropriate or inappropriate, that is how so many people view it, so they are supporting him out of a sense of fairness.
It's not my taste, but that is how a lot of people operate
Basically check out arXive and what it does, and graft that onto ActivityPub protocol concepts.
I mean, it's called propaganda.
Because that's not how the Senate works.
Under Senate rules there is no way for a single senator to do anything without the compliance of the rest of the chamber. At any moment the other senators could vote to move forward if they wanted to.
We need to hold them accountable for this, we need to reject their lies when they say that a single person is holding things up, when in reality they are absolutely free to move forward if they wanted to.
These myths should not be promoted.
@Pat sounds like you have not talked to a lot of MAGA folks.
I have. I know quite a few of them personally.
Your claims here aren't in line with the discussions I've had with them, and honestly just sound like you are promoting negative stereotypes.
This is a little off-topic and axe-grindy, but:
I was just having an exchange with someone over the notion that #Fediverse is without algorithms.
But it DOES have an algorithm! Fediverse clients, like #Mastodon, tend to do a chronological display, which IS an #algorithm, just a really simplistic one that doesn't serve a lot of users particularly well.
The reason this is more than a pedantic point is because, as you say, it's a controversial topic but shouldn't be.
Should I propose an algorithm that would serve users better, I'd have to show its benefit, but also, I'd have to overcome the hurdle of it being an algorithm *when everyone is already using an algorithm*.
So it's an artificial controversy that stands in the way of improved algorithms to make user experiences better.
So yeah, I don't have an actual answer to your question, only a point that we have an attitude around here that prevents solutions to the problem you bring up. Grrrrr.
And stepping off my soapbox :)
To understand the state of #USPolitics, and US society more broadly, a person has to realize that the process against #Trump isn't merely two camps who want the guy found innocent or guilty after a weighing of the evidence.
No, it is as if there was a murder trial where one side believed they were having beers with the purported victim as the trial was going on.
It's not a matter of legal technicality or weighing preponderances of evidence or reasonable doubt; it's a matter of the country being divided over fundamental fact, here whether a person is alive or not.
It's not a political division. Sadly it's a reality division.
Jesus, Twitter was NEVER a good place for academia.
A short-form medium specifically limiting academics' abilities to explain the world is a terrible platform to embrace for that kind of thing.
It was only useful and engaging for content that was so superficial and bland that it could fit into the character limit without decent discussion capability.
Yes, I have feelings about this.
Good riddance.
So? Who cares who they are. Either their arguments are good or they're bad, regardless of who's doing the arguing.
This sort of ad hominem attack is really not healthy.
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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