Notices by Open Risk (openrisk@mastodon.social)

@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 😉

@HauntedOwlbear @nilesh

To me its all still quite confusing. Activitypub seems quite a bit less prescriptive, a lot of important details are "left to implementation". The Mastodon server network is one such fully developed architecture but quite different designs are compliant, e.g., single account "instances" like gotosocial. Somebody even suggested that the entire activitypub pattern could be implemented over the atproto protocol etc.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" (Goodhart’s Law, alternatively: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes")

Inevitably #xkcd asks whether there is a metric to identify vulnerable metrics 🙂

#openriskmanual

https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Goodhart%E2%80%99s_Law

https://xkcd.com/2899/

@Gargron There are similarities in people's lemming behavior but also important substance differences that are good for the #opensource community to keep in mind.

Blockchain architectures typically target problems that could be solved with slightly less decentralized / automated designs if people really wanted to.

In contrast, "AI" is a class of useful algorithms (LLM) cleverly packaged to be seen as something magical. But they already solve something fairly practical, its not 100% hype.