Robert W. Gehl
Latest #FOSSAcademic post: Researching the fediverse from the perspective of individual or instances. In which I draw on an article Christina Dunbar-Hester to talk about researchers' perspectives on the #fediverse, including my own.
https://fossacademic.tech/2024/03/14/Instances-and-Individuals.html
[replies to this post will appear as comments on my blog, unless set to followers-only or more private. CWs will work]
Nathan Schneider
@rwg @inquiline thanks you both for this work. It is exciting to see fresh conceptual frames arise through study and experience in open social.
One thing the "lossy" concept brought up for me was the anti-lossy character of Bluesky and the crypto socials that use Merkle Trees: https://protocol.ai/blog/transcription-bluesky-blog/ That actually shocked me, that the data structure is built around cryptographic preservation, as I think of social chatter as intuitively lossy.
Robert W. Gehl
@inquiline makes total sense!
Can-crisociality 🦀〰️🥫
@rwg Thank you!! Back at you--grateful for your work!
(Lol, a main reason I am more submerged here is in fact the asstodon antagonist: when he reported me at work, I stopped using even my abbreviated name)
Robert W. Gehl
@inquiline oh, my, goodness, I didn't realize you were you!
Thanks for the kinds words, and please do write that other article up!
I'm a big fan of your work!
Can-crisociality 🦀〰️🥫
@rwg Oh wow, thanks for this! I have a companion piece drafted, not sure if I will finish it, on moderation experience that accompanied this incident as I tried to get to the bottom of it (I see what you did there 😂). It is a little more instance-to-instance, tho still thru user's eyes.
Anyway agree fully abt how level/scale of where researcher looks affects analysis. (Usually in my research I've focused more on the mediating layer too, rather than end users; this had, uh, peculiar origins)
Luis Villa
@ntnsndr @rwg @inquiline a fediverse server that did deliberate loss[1] of old messages would be such a fascinating thing. I think a lot of people *say* they prefer disappearing content, but often the revealed preference is for permanence. (I wonder if @signalapp folks has ever considered deletion-by-default.)
[1] could be just taking private older messages, or perhaps complete deletion; perhaps for all messages, or just those that fall below a certain popularity threshhold; etc.
Nathan Schneider
@luis_in_brief @rwg @inquiline @signalapp I love the idea of taking old messages private—but for me, not for public figures I want to criticize:)
Can-crisociality 🦀〰️🥫
@rwg This little piece by @mel_hogan @stefanlaser et al. takes up "good wasting" tho not msg life in particular IIRC
https://easst.net/easst-review/41-3/the-environmental-footprint-of-social-media-hosting-tinkering-with-mastodon/
(cited in my paper as example of researchers migrating here & getting excited about new things to research)
Robert W. Gehl
@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr @inquiline @signalapp I might be mistaken, but I think Lurk does this out of necessity to keep their storage costs down. @rra, isn't that the case?
I know folks (including Lurk folks) who argue that we really ought to remove the expectation that messages will live forever, so that we can reduce the environmental impact of the fedi.
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