Notices by Open Risk (openrisk@mastodon.social)

@Gargron for as long as our affairs down here on Earth are such a deteriorating mess it feels frivolous to pursue such vanity projects. There isn't much science or relevant technology to be had with insisting to roundtrip frail human bodies in deep space. If we have to, robotic missions much more to the point.

But such is the power of projecting hegemonic strength. The Chinese also keen to make headlines. Like peacocks wasting enormous energy to demonstrate fitness... 🦚

@dalias @Wifiwits @carnage4life

imho we don't adequately label social networks according to whether they promote publisher/follower patterns or reciprocal/discussion patterns

Journos, businesses, institutions etc. first want to push things out to as many as possible, then to see "mass engagement" (likes and memes) etc. that doesnt require them costly (and risky) replies

The underlying protocols and UI may support both patterns (at the same time!) but its a totally different experience.

@MartinEscardo if your calculator burns half of the planet to operate you could get your correctness to 90%. Would that help?

@Ruth_Mottram

"no algorithm nudging you toward rage"

Umm, not so sure about that part.

The fediverse is full of "rage", some of it reflecting what is happening in the world but a lot of it performative, I suspect simply nudged on by the *implicit* algorithm of posting, boosting, see and be seen etc. To the point that mastodon had to introduce the "think before you comment" UI.

But it is indeed from this base that we need to think forward towards more meaningful social media.

The early Web had a quality that has been lost ever since: it was *simple*

Download #httpd , #netscape write some #html by hand and boom, the concept of a networked digital society is born.

It first started going pear shaped with #LAMP . The complexity of a full blown database was not justified for most use cases. As proven decades later by the popularity of #sqlite and #ssg approaches.

The final blow was when #bigtech got into the act. Immense complexity for the simplest things became a moat

From own experience, small tip for anybody upgrading #nextcloud and seeing the process stuck in the last step (updating database schema):

It is *really* slow, even for a small / vanilla instance, and does not provide adequate warning to that effect.

Let it run for hours (overnight) before assuming the installation is broken 🤦 and embarking on time-consuming reinstalls...

@Gargron @Vivaldi vivaldi also autodiscovers #rss feeds on a page (small detail yet speaks volumes about their value system).

It will be heartbreaking to part ways with firefox after decades, but alas mozilla does not seem to have a way out of its enshittification predicament. Pacts with the Devil eventually extract their pound of flesh.

The "timeline" interface on #bluesky and/or #mastodon is not particularly useful if you follow many infrequently posting accounts (the so called long-tail where the real beauty of online networks resides).

A simple way to solve this (partially - it is read only) is to convert your follow lists into #opml and then import into your favorite #rss reader. You then have visual guides on recent posts.

A couple of simply #python scripts automate this work for you

https://github.com/open-risk/atp2rss

#fediverse

@evan

up to 4+ billions is ok as it can be stored neatly in a long unsigned int.

[0, 4294967295]

more than that and you get into long long int territory and we cant have a societal wealth distribution that needs non-standard or compiler-specific extensions to be represented 🤓

@Gargron the moment Facebook begun raking in billions from advertisers for targeted surveillance of their idiot, consumerist "product", we entered the Twilight Zone.

Or maybe that happened when corrupt politicians the world over saw what happened and said: "hey there, Zuck, nice biznis you came up with, too bad if we were to regulate it".

Whatever the precise moment we got trapped, we will not exit the Twilight Zone unless Meta goes bankrupt. It is so simple and stark.

#surveillancecapitalism

@bonfire

It will take some effort to make 'social' actually be social and its not going to happen by iterating for the n-th time on twitter.

So bonfire has a fighting chance, godspeed.

@tchambers @imdavidpierce

Just read that discourse is also releasing the activitypub plugin that was in the making for some time. Seems that we are well underway towards a new phase of the fediverse. Now is the time to carefully monitor how those integrations work out and how to make them more useful for users. This could become a killer future for activitypub based networks.

@Mastodon it will be tricky to liberate people from legacy social media platforms. People that embrace the values and vision of the #fediverse have already migrated years ago, despite the usability issues. New opportunities do come when there are major shocks, like political events but luck favors the prepared: #bluesky grew a lot as of late because of a smoother UX and catering in particular to US users fleeing X/Tweeter.

Tough job but failure not an option 🙏😍😬🖖

@ned @tfardet

not sure how to cast this into a positive trait rather than "we don't want that" but the imho absolutely most hideous aspect of adtech social is what @aral calls "people farming". This is done by algorithms of course, but is catalysed by "influencers". These people explicitly embrace the manipulation paradigm for monetary gain (and they are by now a entire and well trained army).

The challenge is that many people are inately drawn to be "followers" in real life...

@silverpill Individuals have limited bandwidth so I don't see that happening, but bots acting on their behalf could get close to that.

A more realistic working hypothesis for a "mass scaling" scenario would be if every existing web server (cities, universities, companies, whatever) is part of the server-to-server network. User "follows" would be a parameter to model.

Is there a good reference of #activitypub scaling with more users/clients, servers, content exchange, network topology etc. What happens when everything and everywhere is connected?

Looking for a more or less rigorous *model* to compare and contrast with e.g., how #atproto and #p2p protocols scale (at least in theory) and put some mathematical meat behind the recent "message passing" vs "shared heap" discussions.

Have been looking for this with little success so time to #askfedi #askfediverse

@ErikJonker there is the #freeourfeeds initiative that will replicate an atproto relay. Subject to technical / economic factors it wil put to rest the (reasonable) fears about bluesky.

My gut feeling is that because of different architectures, the two protocols will give rise to different online exchanges. Bluesky type cathedrals vs #activitypub type community houses.

And much depends on the client software we use - which is a bit stagnant. We could have a common interface to all these.

@Gargron we need to create a world where people thrive and live full lives at peace with each other and nature wherever they are. Its not utopic, its a necessity for our survival.

And the #fediverse you are helping in its baby steps is an integral part of that journey. You are already an inspiration for many.

@petergleick

The towers of falsehood and abuse are built one layer at a time.

Before "Artificial Intelligence" there was Machine "Learning" of which Large Language Models are just an instance.

Nobody ever questioned if fitting a non-linear model to data actually "learns" anything.

Its exactly what linear regression does. Nobody worries about straight lines running through data and interpolating or extrapolating new points becoming sentient.

We truly live in an age of artificial stupidity.

@dansup @pixelfed @loops Its a challenging task. Normal people using social media have been addicted and the adtech platforms have found all our weaknesses by running large scale social experiments. How easy is it to get people off junk food and into healthy food?

The only advantage of the fediverse is decentralization. Maybe this could be used to better support localized communities. People like their own places, villages, cities. But you'd need the nerds running servers 😉