Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

by wrxd • 5 months ago

177 168 5 months ago

_wire_• 5 months ago

Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.

To get a sense of this skim

sfba.social

which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.

jaggs• 5 months ago

Thank you for your opinion.

phaser• 5 months ago

Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?

bigthymer• 5 months ago

Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about

His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.

dekken_3• 5 months ago

For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Imustaskforhelp6• 5 months ago

cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.

But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.

Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.

I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?

Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?

I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.

gzread• 5 months ago

He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.

AJ007• 5 months ago

Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.

One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.

I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.

kgwxd• 5 months ago

The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".

8organicbits2• 5 months ago

mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring

My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.

The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.

Synaesthesia3• 5 months ago

sfba.social

Seems pretty cool TBH

DeathArrow• 5 months ago

Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?

I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.

izacus• 5 months ago

Ok random person with opinion on a thing.

pandini• 5 months ago

Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..

Imustaskforhelp6• 5 months ago

Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.

https://mirror.forum [0]

[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)

Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?

Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.

grosswait• 5 months ago

“So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of

boriskourt2• 5 months ago

I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.

cykros3• 5 months ago

Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants.

Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.

Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.

And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.

That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.

boriskourt2• 5 months ago

Then I don’t really care about them if they don’t want to hang out with me. It works as intended.

dgellow• 5 months ago

Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era

archagon5• 5 months ago

There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.

tamad• 5 months ago

We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.

I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.

0ckpuppet• 5 months ago

AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.

beepbooptheory2• 5 months ago

Weird sentiment to have for some guy that says "uncanny valley creepy crawlies." Did you get your friends good grades??

nailer3• 5 months ago

It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.

alance• 5 months ago

There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow.

(the rest of us edit and re-edit)

beepbooptheory2• 5 months ago

If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.

Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!

If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."

And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.

AreShoesFeet0002• 5 months ago

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.

On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.

dathinab2• 5 months ago

you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"

it's a manner of speech

a instrument of telling a story

a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies

AreShoesFeet0002• 5 months ago

My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.

jonathanstrange• 5 months ago

This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.

nailer3• 5 months ago

I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).

Synaesthesia3• 5 months ago

Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.

jfengel6• 5 months ago

The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)

That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.

The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.

dathinab2• 5 months ago

he doesn't want news from social media

he wants somewhat reliable news

and isn't getting them anymore from US news outlets

but found them (surprisingly) in the fediverse

----

putting that aside finding news on social media isn't really that absurd but it highly depends on you algorithmic bubble/followers. Through a lot of it can be people sharing links to new.

the think is many smaller independent news outlets have very limited means of reaching (new) people by them self, so like everyone else trying to reach people they will use social media

then there are people which share/retweet news. Prefilled by quality and relevance based on their expertise. If you have enough media literacy to be able to judge their expertise you can follow those which have it and even know what bias is involved in their choices.

And sure all of that only works if you yourself have expertise and media literacy. And tends to work best for specialized/expert topics, not for "simplified" everyman news. But you kinda need that media literacy for any news today.

A example around Twitter was in the past one of, if not the, best ways to get tech. computer security news (about vulnerabilities, attacks etc.). That is iff you followed the right people.

Ironically the dynamics for that where very similar to what he describes: "Proper" news outlets being hardly usable. But other people with expertise sharing relevant news for the sake of the information, not for cloud, ads, propaganda etc. (Just the reasons differ. For tech. security news the problem is a. lacking specialized technical understanding of outlets and b. also that most news are too specialized(i.e. boring) for most of their audience.)

satisfice4• 5 months ago

I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?

I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.

throwaway1492• 5 months ago

This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.

With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.

cassepipe2• 5 months ago

Are you not afraid of having picked the wrong community when choosing Catholicism ?

threetonesun• 5 months ago

It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.

Gareth321• 5 months ago

Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.

matt_heimer2• 5 months ago

I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much of it has no focus at all. It reminds me of this exchange from the Good Place TV show:

Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.

Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.

Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.

satisfice4• 5 months ago

I was on Compuserve and Usenet, both of which were no more difficult to use than Reddit. That was in the late eighties.

In 1986 I ran a FIDO server, which is like what the Fediverse is now, I guess. I had, maybe, 50 users?

I know how things used to be.

8organicbits2• 5 months ago

If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.

I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.

madjo803• 5 months ago

How did you choose the provider of your email address?

For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.

What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.

satisfice4• 5 months ago

I run my own mail server, thank you.

“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?

darqis3• 5 months ago

The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.

The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.

onion2k• 5 months ago

What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.

Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.

Angostura• 5 months ago

Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join

dvlsg• 5 months ago

Yeah, I also don't understand their take. HN also dictates what their users can and can't read. There's tons of stuff that can't be posted here without being removed. That's a good thing.

jonkoops• 5 months ago

And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.

Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.

Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.

snackerblues• 4 months ago

you can choose ... what you see

Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.

Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!

dawnerd• 5 months ago

I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.

jfengel6• 5 months ago

It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).

The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

'cancel culture' is when you decline to federate content users don't want, I guess?

krapp2• 5 months ago

The only true fascists are the ones who insist that actions should have consequences....

xigoi11• 5 months ago

No, it’s when you decline to federate content that some users don’t want (and many do).

Finnucane• 5 months ago

Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.

darqis3• 5 months ago

that's incorrect.

They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.

Most prominent example is the Ukraine. Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.

So there is political censorship. And the fediverse is super political. The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.

Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.

philistine3• 5 months ago

You are entitled speech, but not to force a theatre company to give you their stage from which their captive audience has to hear it.

xigoi11• 5 months ago

Mastodon does not have content promotion. It’s more analogous to the air that transmits your voice than a theater stage.

brookst• 5 months ago

I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.

People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.

It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.

tacitusarc• 5 months ago

Imagine, if you would, that the strict libertarians had much more influence in shaping the country. So much so that the roads are toll roads, the parks require a fee, and almost no libraries exist because the ROI just isn’t there.

Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.

If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.

Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.

…

I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).

Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.

trentnix• 5 months ago

Another example of "everything before the word but is horse ****".

bediger4000• 5 months ago

one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”

Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.

croes2• 5 months ago

I have no problem getting blocked but my only block on the Fediverse was accompanied by a block for all users on the same instance as me.

raffael_de6• 5 months ago

why not let people say whatever they want? you already hinted the appropriate solution which is that you don't have to listen.

cykros3• 5 months ago

"Market demand."

If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.

That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.

I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.

ashton314• 5 months ago

It’s not actually that concentrated.

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

wat10000• 5 months ago

If you don’t like how your server is run, go to a different one! That’s the whole point of the thing. You can even set up your own without too much trouble. If you believe servers shouldn’t be doing this stuff then you can make it happen. Nobody owes it to you.

sdsd• 5 months ago

I'm on infosec.exchange and there's plenty of content, especially since it federates so I get content from all over the fediverse. I don't mind that there are only several very large instances, since federating to them from a tiny or even personal instance is no problem.

t0bia_s2• 5 months ago

Fediverse on mastodon increase social bubbles. Especially when admin of instance has apathy to any kind of different opinions and censor anything like that.

Synaesthesia3• 5 months ago

I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.

I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.

brabel• 5 months ago

News used to be mostly neutral delivery of facts that occurred recently. It was not supposed to be following a narrative or whatever. But that is boring for many people and the American media found out they could make news much more interesting by adding their spicy takes on it, and it worked. Now people watch the news as a form of entertainment. I find that horrifying, the reason you should be informed about the world is so that you can participate in it effectively. News today is much more propaganda than information, and that gives the opposite effect of making you a more effective citizen.

DauntingPear7• 5 months ago

Pretty much all US news is just blindly stating “what’s happening” which lends credence to the current admins (seemingly) illegal/poor behavior. Just accept that the president can start a war, no notes.

Leno1225• 5 months ago

Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.

ArchieScrivener• 5 months ago

Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes.

Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,...

Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome.

Vent. Move on.

amelius• 5 months ago

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.

Wow.

dionian• 5 months ago

The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.

DFHippie• 5 months ago

Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.

jfengel6• 5 months ago

“But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,”

-- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025

buster• 5 months ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-gre...

madjo803• 5 months ago

The president of the United States literally said that they were going to get Greenland, one way or another.

If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?

jfengel6• 5 months ago

Like anyone is going to listen to anything for 20 minutes.

cassepipe2• 5 months ago

Partisanslop podcast would work. I hear Joe Rogan is quite successful nowadays.

mnmalst• 5 months ago

I laughed so hard. The whole articles tone is really enjoyable to me.

zaps• 5 months ago

Holy shit that’s a lot of windows

znpy• 5 months ago

So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses.

I stopped reading here.

This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases.

Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.

lyu072823• 5 months ago

It's a bit ironic that I want to point people so badly to Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's work on the propaganda model to explain why the current war propaganda in the west in support of Operation Epstein's Fury is nothing new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

PKop• 5 months ago

I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.

And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?

smitty1e• 5 months ago

See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.

A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle.

Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.

kkfx• 5 months ago

Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored.

But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people.

Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ...

It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades...

The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...

skybrian• 5 months ago

I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.

anotherevan• 5 months ago

True, although I wonder if that was one of the points he is trying to make.

In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.

sqrtminusone• 5 months ago

Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.

I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:

a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;

b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;

c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.

It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...

And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.

Besides:

So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.

Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.

I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".

timbit42• 5 months ago

Why do you follow people on the Fediverse? You can follow hashtags instead, or some mix of that. That's what I do. That way I get what I'm looking for without getting all the unrelated cruft of following people who post on a wide variety of topics.

jauntywundrkind2• 5 months ago

Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem.

There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.

There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.

It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.

There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.

I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/

Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).

I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.

I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.

archagon5• 5 months ago

It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.

jauntywundrkind2• 5 months ago

I agree that the sprawl of objective, trying to cover more and more, is quasi horrific in the ways we have seen it: seen through market captures and monopolization and acquisitions of Instagram, etc.

But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website (or go even lower level to reinvent), with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.

This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). (Mastodon was never one of these & is not now.) This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.

Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control (absolute authority, can-move/credible exit), that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.

It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies bring, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.

That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society. Both are expansive & space filling, but their characteristics are as far apart as I can imagine.

@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing (https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing), a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.

It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit

I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.

Tl:dr: actual humans have lacked the means to explore and build the techno-social, and it is absolutely nuclear hot fire that I have all this from little apps a bunch of creative friendly awesome neat people built that lets me capture this stuff (https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso/). This is proof that we have a general social networking system right here today available for use, experiment, & play. Not proof, but imho the roots are strong & good. This is how we escape the capture-entrepreneurialism. We have lacked fertile soil & good foundation for new things to get started on. I'd characterize the distinction as alive, adaptable, usable systems, versus stagnant dead systems, and imo, stagnant fixed systems aren't serving us well now, and over time decay & en-badification to serve us worse. Hence my advocacy of aliveness & possibility. (And my disdain for Mastodon as barren anti-ecosystem.)

scoofy6• 5 months ago

I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network.

I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.

sph2• 5 months ago

I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable.

I think about this when people say that contributing to Linux is difficult and they should adopt more user-friendly ways of accepting changes, rather than mailing patches from the command line.

The friction is a feature. You don't want too much, but no friction just invites the spammers and the trolls wasting everybody's time. If anything, as the Internet grows and machines compete with humans, you want even more friction than ever before.

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

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