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
@mpopp75 The story that Trump tried to overthrow an election was roundly debunked by anybody who bothered to point out how the Electoral College process actually works.
So no, that conspiracy theory never had legs.
Trump committed crimes, I'm pretty sure of it, but that nonsense doesn't help convict the guy of the things he actually did.
In fact, people spouting that myth helped get him reelected instead of put behind bars.
@sun Yeah, a lot of people with that priority probably helped tilt the election in favor of Trump.
@parsley what?
RFK has stated publicly that he supports vaccinations. And it's not really up to him in the first place.
Those rumors are false and need to be called out.
@Legit_Spaghetti no.
But I do remember getting really good health insurance without an employer before the ACA, and then getting a job, and then after the ACA losing my good health insurance even though I had one.
So many of us lost out on health insurance thanks to the ACA.
We should not hide that. We should present it as the failure that it was.
@mpopp75 kind of under sells a lot of the really bad criminals we've had around here.
Trump's white collar crimes are goddamn stupid, but we've produced much worse in this country.
@realTuckFrumper Well part of the issue is that Lloyd Austin sets such a low bar that this guy is a step up.
We were never set up for anything good coming out of this presidential election. Both candidates were awful. The best we can do is try not to make things much worse before we can try again next time around.
@everton137 ... The direction in the US right now is skeptical of authoritarianism. That's the whole reason Trump got elected, because people wanted to fill the vacuum of authority that had let them down.
@nyquildotorg ever since I first started reading the AP standard documents I had similar hair raising reactions.
This seems to be a system designed by people who have never heard of big O analysis, people more interested in cobbling together off the shelf components rather than thinking about how the whole system would work if it were to scale.
I'm incredibly critical of the engineering behind AP and you're really capturing my attitude.
volkris
boosted
Long post whining about ActivityPub
I've talked about this a bunch in the past, but thinking about "fediverse improvements" always beings me back to when I learned what ActivityPub actually does and what its design goals were.
The number one goal sure seems like it was "very nearly real-time status updates, like Twitter has, but distributed."
Because that's what they wanted the protocol to do, it required doing things in a fundamentally inefficient way. Every single post you make results in an inherently uncacheable request sent to at minimum the number of instances your followers use, and in some cases, one for every follower on that instance.
The overhead of creating and cryptographically signing unique payloads to send to several thousand different instances in rapid succession, for every post everyone ever makes, is kind of bonkers for a lot of different reasons.
But that the mechanism includes an API request for an "outbox" that lists all the content that remote instances could fetch — but never do — is something I find completely offensive.
Then, anytime anyone brings this up, there's pushback saying doing that would defeat the entire purpose of ActivityPub, because the entire purpose of ActivityPub is realtime messaging.
If you start the conversation saying that the only way a post can end up in a follower's feed is if there's a unique event transfered in about the most network-inefficient way possible, it paints the picture that your concern isn't really about transferring peoples' posts to each other, but to do it with as little delay between clicking send and it appearing in a feed, no matter the consequences.
But here's the thing: because there's so goddamned many requests being sent to so goddamned many places, it's all handled with queues. There's constantly a big backlog of posts still waiting to be sent. If I have 50,000 followers, spread out evenly over the whole fediverse, that's still 10s of thousands of entries in the queue that are causing your new post to have to wait as well.
None of this is frickin' realtime!
In a lot of cases, each instance also has a queue full of incoming requests that need to be processed, which adds further overhead and delay.
The amount of work that needs to be done for every single post in "real time" via ActivityPub is pretty staggering.
@PattyHanson which, for example?
@wizardbeard I'm on my phone here, but maybe I can find some links when I get back to a computer.
Basically, under BlueSky the end user submits content to whatever distribution site or sites they want, and the person browsing retrieves content from whatever nodes they want, choosing between different algorithms as they wish, in contrast to the PubSub design where users submit content to an instance, and it all comes through a particular instance.
Like I said, this platform is centralized around instances while BlueSky avoids that, making everything between content posters and content readers decentralized.
@sabreW4K3 My qualification is that I've read the protocol documentation and seen the way it centralizes around instances?
It would be like that except they don't run and control it. It is released into the wild.
@jan I mean, arguably the BlueSky protocol is much better, so want to go over there?
There is too much resistance, often based on personal grudges, to adopt the better one.
And so we are stuck with competing standards. Nothing new under the sun with that, though.
@breedlov No not at all.
It's a well-established idea, and a pretty intuitive one, that by maintaining some discretion you'll get more cooperation out of witnesses in the future, and that's a good thing.
Now if we want to talk about literal criminal activity, that's a job for the other branches of government. The executive branch is absolutely should investigate Gaetz. But that's not the responsibility of the legislative branch.
Wrong branch of government for that task.
@evan unfortunately, this platform effectively makes everything public.
It's one of the big problems with this platform.
@manton Well I think that's really the thing.
2024 was a story of everyone being burned, or everyone wanting to burn down the nonsense that we have been subjected to for a decade now.
What's the solution? Meh, there honestly is no solution on the horizon because people don't understand how to operate the system.
We're just stuck with this for the time being, so maintain context and keep in mind that the broken government is not our lives.
The government has been broken for a long time, and we need to just keep going.
@sabreW4K3 Well that's a pretty nonsensical take.
The use of some decentralization techniques? It is decentralized because it uses decentralization techniques, and that's all there is to it. It is far more decentralized than this platform because of the techniques it uses. It focuses on users instead of centralizing around instances.
From the point of view of power dynamics? GTFO with that BS.
No, BlueSky is decentralized. It is more decentralized than this platform. These people are trying really really hard to bend things and find problems that don't really match reality.
And they need to be called out over it.
I really wish this platform was more decentralized, but that's not how the engineers designed it, and we need to call them out over 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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