Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.
When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.
I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.
The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.
This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.
I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
(From this perspective, it matters much less whether someone is self-hosting the servers or not if the group is small, those two things just happen to coincide.)
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3ltda4vl5322z
It's just a different way of organizing communities.
There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.
Yeah, they were slow. Mostly due to the low speed of dial-up modems.
Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.
TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.
This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
Gradually, you "lose" neighbors to socialize with because people (and things in general) gravitate towards the path of least effort. Eventually you will have to go to the club too.
Centralization can be contagious.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible.
Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice.
The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
Sucks, but I guess this is why we can't have nice things.
Please explain what you mean by this then?
So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.
The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
Like I said:
> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.
> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting.
> you need to treat your thread account as not federated too.
But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do?
Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks.
Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.
Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.
How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)
The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)
Those are the trade offs
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.
But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.
anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho
They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.
In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.
It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk
That's news to me, as a Mastodon user. I just scroll my homeserver's default feed and get stuff from all over the internet.
you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it
you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours
If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?
You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.
Though, IMO Mastodon not the better of the fediverse platforms, but I don't love microblogging social media. But it's all going to end up being like Linux. Some people tried it once, didn't like it, and then 10 years from now it'll be totally different and everyone will wonder where it's been all their lives.
The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.
Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want.
Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be.
Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.
Edit:
> Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers
https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millio...
Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.
While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...
Will decentralized social networks fix this plague? I don't think so. The only thing that works is disconnecting. Just a few weeks into it, you'll realize you have so much free time. Time for hobbies, time for loved ones, time for finding peace and joy, time for creating and sharing. You will regret the thousands of hours wasted on that useless addiction. A few months in, you'll hear the birds singing again. You'll notice the evening skies. You'll find comfort and joy. The time you get back will help you build incredible things.
Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter.
I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.
Instead of a non-obvious "algorithm" with tailoring, just have a social app with a purpose (or per group purpose), and nothing but absolute direct control.
I.e. follow/link with friends, family or whatever in groups. The feed is time-weighted to recent posts or communications. Any other filtering or prioritization can be done, by selection. I.e. deprioritize reposts by default, except persons A, B and C. Etc.
There could be like/dislikes that accumulate into priorities, for those who think that is convenient, but those priorities are just private settings that can be observed and changed.
No hidden/obscure/unclear algorithms, no third parties, no ads, and no Zuck's with any ability to access/impact/insert into the feed.
A scrapbook group, that is just a scrapbook group. Etc.
When did software products/services start "needing" boogymen?
And if you’re unhappy with the selection, you’re free to create your own.
I still check Instagram every few weeks just to see what everyone is up to. And it's honestly really nice. I never think about it until I'm thinking "hmm, what is X up to?"
The best part is I don't burn through all the posts in 5 seconds and then get reels suggested. In a few weeks or a couple months, a lot of stuff happens! There's a bunch of cool posts from my friends from me to see, and no algorithmic BS.
I’m curious, what country is this from? I’ve been living in NZ and Japan last 5 years and people love their phones here too. But the gatherings (even random meet ups!) almost never have people with phones in their hands.
> Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.
This would be considered incredibly rude and would lose businesses here
I dropped Facebook over 15 years ago, instagram maybe 7 or 8 years ago, Twitter just before Elon took over, Whatsapp and Strava I guess might be the only things I use considered “social” and I have all group notifications muted on WA at all times.
I’ve watched this parallel reality grow and evolve over the years and I hate it. Everyone everywhere seems to be permanently staring at a screen!
A month or so back, I watched my wife awake in the morning, she didn’t realise I was awake watching her (lovingly) - I got Black Mirror IRL - instantly upon awaking, without looking, she reached for her phone and the endless scrolling started, she was so engrossed, after 10 mins not noticing her husband awake, intently watching her, I had to say “Morning”. Later that morning, alone, I wept tears for myself, for her and all of humanity.
Two to three months ago, I had realised that while I wasn’t addicted to social media, I was absolutely addicted to news media/politics/etc. Like a key in a lock, it clicked one day, i’d wasted at least a decade, nearly two of adult life obsessively reading, commenting and talking about UK, global events & politics.
Worse than that, I realised how all the negativity from that world was directly feeding my own negativity and then into those around me. Then after another week or two where I blocked it out entirely at home, I felt “recovered”. My fingers were no longer blindly typing in web addresses in moments of boredom - I’d dip into a book chapter of technical paper for 5 minutes instead. Political podcasts were all dropped, replaced entirely with music and podcasts that don’t engage with political comment.
I was only granted this moment of clarity as I attended a technical conference for a week, where I was up at 7 every morning to hit the early sessions and not getting back to my hotel till nearly 10 or 11pm. Amazingly, the whole week, there was barely a whisper of anything about politics - I think I might have heard the word “Trump” once.
I was so full of energy and excitement about what i’d been learning and talking to people about all week, as soon as I returned to my normal reality, the world of international politics suddenly appeared to me exactly the same way a bottle of booze did after knocking alcohol addiction on the head. The mere mention of any of the MSM trigger words suddenly produced in me a deep feeling of revulsion.
I couldn’t imagine not knowing what was going on in the world 6 months ago, now I actively avoid any mention or conversation that might go that way. The sky hasn’t fallen in, foreign invaders haven’t taken my country, what has happened though is I’ve been devouring books and technical papers like a mad man, learning new instruments, creating art on the computer and finally facing my demons and creating art on paper!
My life has improved beyond all rational logic, probably moreso than quitting alcohol, which was also a horrible, slow growing, hugely negative addiction for me. My emotional state feels more balanced than ever as I’m finally feeling totally free from all the emotional manipulation these things ultimate come with. If something awful happens out in the big bad world painted by the media, I’ll deal with it when it happens as it happens in my actual reality. The best tools I can arm myself with are knowledge, gratitude and love. Sitting around arguing on political blogs has achieved the square root of fuck all and will continue to achieve that.
People seem shocked when they attempt to talk to me about politics and I just shrug my shoulders now. I shudder to think now about the energy I blindly invested into that world, never making one single bit of difference, just generating negativity inside of me, which then spirals out to those I most love around me. When you flip all that negative energy into positive energy, and honestly it really is that easy, you very quickly start getting the insight that maybe you aren’t just human, you’re superhuman.
Trump said this? Supreme Court said that? Some poll is up? Okay. That doesn't tell me if we're in danger in my town, that doesn't tell me who's protesting, whose meetings to attend, what our threat model is
It's a sugar fix and it's frustrating when I step back and realize that really caring about politics would start with me leaving the house
maybe just thinking or being internet heroes doesn't matter. Maybe the real change happens at leaving the house.
But I wonder, if that is real change too. Like, maybe the system is so fucked up that even that wouldn't have an impact. Should I invest my energy into such a gamble? maybe, there is no right answer. a part of me who has watched movies and watched good guys win makes me want to say yes but uh reality says otherwise for the most part.
But maybe reality happened because there are people who are on the fence like me who said nah, noone else would do it, then peer pressure happened and welp nobody did anything and that became an evidence for the next generation who can again say nah and the cycle of suffering repeats.
But can this cycle truly change with just the will of one person like me? I doubt that my presense makes a change.
I have started to think that the best way I can make real change is maybe by open sourcing / working in a non profit / maybe helping them with some linux expertise in my community since I love linux. I can set up self hosted stuff for them so that they can control their infrastucture. I can reduce their costs from these bloated app subscription hell holes, maybe help these non profits and donate to the right causes and work on fixing my life too. Does this make sense?
News and politics was a big waste of time for me too. Before 2015 I just kept up to date with big issues, but Brexit and then Covid really got me addicted to news and politics.
I ditched Reddit (with the API thing) and news websites about a year ago. It really is nice not knowing about every tiny event. It's not even necessary for being politically aware as so much of the "news" is hearsay and random Tweets turned into content by the media.
I have started looking at the BBC News business section every now and then. This really shows what a content factory other news media sites are. The BBC business page adds new articles maybe twice a day. There is no point checking more often than that (unless you go down a comments rabbit hole).
Sites like The Guardian have new articles hourly and sometimes multiple "live blogs" going on at once. That sort of output can happen in just the "business/economy" section, never mind the rest of the site.
Like social media there is just no way that amount of content can be useful, in fact it's most likely the opposite.
Please read the previous comment that I have posted on hackernews for some reference about "freedom", basically its about freedom and how I feel like a lot of issues are political and thus I don't trust the people of the world to do whats right and therefore the world won't always grow/ I am not an optimist , also here's a cookie if you did read my whole post there!!
I feel like politics is the (truest?) way of making real change. Unfortunately, I doubt that I can enter into politics and I also doubt that people in my area would vote for me. I bet that they would much likely more follow racial, caste based issues rather than tackling real things. And I doubt I will ever get funding from someone for speaking against the absolute rich in my country. maybe my life would be in danger, that's more likely. My appearance is also really nerdy and I love tech. I doubt if people would think of me as a leader. I loved giving speeches in class but I wonder if I can bring real change in the system.
To me, its this system that feels so convuluted man. Like we have freedom and not at the same time. Do we have the freedom to bring real change?-> I feel yes But can I bring real change though? -> Maybe Is it worth trying? -> I don't know
I feel like news essentially boils down to the is it worth trying? option. No need to be a hero, I feel like I wanted to be different / mature so followed news, but I mean, from a completely logical point of view, Idk man.
This is what I have in question. Is it worth trying to do discussions and bring a political reform as to what I believe/ experts say at the same time into reality. Like georgism, nuclear etc. Is it worth discussing these things even though they might be a headache but maybe the mere discussion of them increases their likelihood of being spread and maybe adopted. Are my thoughts having a real impact.
I feel so tiny in this world man. I feel like money buys influence but I am not a sociopath who can play a billionaires game for my "good" political ideas to be implemented, and If I become something like that, then what's the difference b/w me and them.
I feel like a lot of billionaires are freeloaders. NO Matter how much risk you take, it shouldn't be rewarded as such. It almost feels like the freemarket isn't efficient in this sense. I genuinely don't know :/, but the fact that you can almost buy presidencies is... wild.
Should I still watch the news? like, uh, are you getting what I am feeling? I feel like I can't bring real change so why bother but a part of me believes that the fact that I am saying it is wrong and needs to be proven wrong. I wish to be an optimist, I wish for the world to be saved, because I see people suffering. I wish to bring an impact, or maybe die trying. Would the french revolution had happened if people gave up on news? Or have the people getting news from sources whose only agenda is to stop anything like french revolution from happening (billionaires?) and they want us all to fight each other.
Man, I don't know, can we bring real change? I have seen people do it, but can I? Should I? I don't know. Its so messy and breaks my heart. Definitely hard to explain as I wish to be an optimist but am stuck being a pessimist/realist (almost murphy-esque in the sense that anything can happen, will happen) with my logical deductions.
The questions boils down to ,
is ignorance bliss? or should I pursue the truth of knowledge even if its bitter, maybe I can live my life built around that bitterness, that things are real, that I don't have to be an optimist. You have picked ignorance, and there is no wrong answer but I wish for a discussion so that someone can help me pick my answer.
I thought that we have changed for the better, if not, then well, I am forced to accept it. But it is so fucking sad that we have to accept that same rules of money drove society and it would continue doing so. That's really fucked up if we think about it.
My question to you is - Is following the news even a form of participation?
I would argue that news has an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. Most news anchors and talking heads and commentators talk a lot but convey very little. It's obvious they understand very little and ultimately focus on regurgitating what is "commonly understood" that everyone else also repeats. Plus usually there's heavy biases involved - so many implicit assumptions every time they open their mouth. Hardly any nuance is conveyed.
Anyways let's forget news for a second and discuss how to make some kind of impact, some kind of change.
To my mind at least 3 options occur to me:
1. Writing. Don't write to a wide audience, write to a narrow one. Really get in deep on a political issue.
2. Start local. Participate in town council, or similar, get involved as an active member in local politics to gain practice/exposure. Don't need to be a politician or be elected yet.
3. Or my favorite - focus on some technical solution for helping people to organize perhaps..
I do watch a lot of atrioc and I think that he's a decent enough source to be trusted compared to journalists in the sense that I get both fun and news at the same time but yeah.
Like I said (I think) I am way more interested on things financially and so plain bagel who I consider to be an excellent finance youtuber who isn't a grifter and literally has no incentives to sell you a course or something. ( crazy that I feel like I have to mention it, that's how scummy most finance youtubers are)
Even then, even such amount of news which I consider to be a signal makes me depressed. I may have a left leaning bias but that's because of the incompetence of the govt. and I am not even an american but its interesting to watch american politics because it impacts us all and my countries politics is a shit hole that its not worth watching, both parties suck, (tbh america is same, bernie is the only person that I trust for the most part imo)
My point that I was trying to make is that maybe mass scale of people depress me with what is happening in the world. I wish to be ignorant but I wish to know if that makes sense.
Regarding 3rd point, to me 3) is also my favourite as I love finding technical solutions to organize/build etc., yet I find it that I am not an effective oranizer for stuff, maybe I am better off just helping non profits in their mission that might align with my political beliefs, but I wonder if I can do it without it being my full job or taking full time efforts. Like, decentralizing the communications by moving to matrix or helping them in self hosting their stuff comes to my mind. Does this make sense? Do non profits need this?
It isn't entirely our fault. It's deliberately made and constantly adjusted to be addictive, for the sole purpose of selling ads, swaying votes, counting more MAUs, and increasing valuations.
Still, knowing something is bad for you isn't enough to make you stop, right? Yet, once you are out, you can choose to help others, especially the ones you care about.
Suddenly, I've been having much more free time in the morning!
bit1993•5mo ago
alexisread•5mo ago
dingnuts•5mo ago
jazzyjackson•5mo ago
johnecheck•5mo ago
https://atproto.com/specs/did
ItsHarper•5mo ago
johnecheck•5mo ago
bawolff•5mo ago
Personally i'm a little doubtful that bluesky is decentralized in a way that matters.
bee_rider•5mo ago
l72•5mo ago
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
didibus•5mo ago
1. Cross-platform engagement
Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.
2. Moderation choice
Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.
3. Data portability
Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).
4. Advertising disincentive
Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.
5. Algorithmic choice
Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.
It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.
bit1993•5mo ago
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
l72•5mo ago
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
didibus•5mo ago
Also, I think many users would now appreciate more control over the moderation policies they want applied, and also be able to choose between different feed algorithms to find one that promotes things that they prefer.
Would most people still probably use the one big "instance"? For sure, but I think you'd still have a good 20-30% that would use alternatives.
Assuming it all just-worked. Which I think is what this article is trying to say, the AT protocol can provide these features and ease of use. I don't know if that's true, but it seems to be the claim.
Kye•5mo ago
Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
[0] https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
blooalien•5mo ago
Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
cramsession•5mo ago
blooalien•5mo ago
cramsession•5mo ago
dokyun•5mo ago
bit1993•5mo ago
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
l72•5mo ago
bawolff•5mo ago
blooalien•5mo ago
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
rectang•5mo ago
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
binary132•5mo ago
KingMob•5mo ago
You can run your own name server, but there's no good way for large numbers of people to voluntarily opt out of the existing system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
binary132•5mo ago
KingMob•5mo ago
What you originally said could be interpreted as either DNS-the-system or DNS-the-protocol. I assumed the former, since that seemed more likely.
Sure, the protocol could be used without the resolver hierarchy, but I would argue that's not a useful way to think about it, since it won't happen in practice.
rzazueta•5mo ago
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo•5mo ago
This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.
That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).
That among other things.
This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.
abdullahkhalids•5mo ago
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire