Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)

Anybody who is a freelance developer/engineer. How do you find work? Where do you go to find opportunities? If I had an opportunity and I needed to find someone, how would I find you?

Remember when I said Bluesky was part of the fediverse and everybody got real mad about it? They're pretty close to enabling fully independent self-hosting.
https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c

ChatGPT is still wildly unprofitable. They're losing money at an exponential rate. Last estimate I read is that they have something like 10 million paying users. This says they have 300 million active users. We should expect to start seeing aggressive attempts to monetize the vast majority of non-paying users. I don't think making them pay directly is viable. Maybe ChatGPT will start returning ads as part of it's answers? 😂
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24313097/chatgpt-300-million-weekly-users

Right. It was hard to talk about this with people before Musk. Twitter wasn't perfect by any means and people complained a lot. But some of us were trying to get people to understand what bad actually looks like. A lot of y'all took for granted how hard it is to keep the worst garbage out. And Twitter had been working on it for 15 years. Musk is reversing all of the filters that held back the tide.
https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113478119292642828

If Mastodon ever achieves the level of growth that it wants to achieve, it's gonna happen here as well. And folks will again underestimate the level of works it takes for things to stay relatively tame.

That part.
https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/113476742302233151

A lot of the political class assume that conservative voters were looking for permission not to vote for Trump. And we just had to find the right way to make them feel comfortable with that. But that was just never really the case.

It's not about Trump himself. The reality is that the right wing is actually convinced that *we* are just as big an existential a threat to their way of life. They feel the same way we do. They're not voting for Trump. They are voting against us.

The word fascism is actually hard to wrap your head around. And in true fashion, people tend to flatten and intellectualize it. Fascism isn't useful without context. It's just a tool. It's about control. The right wing seeks to control the growing culture changes that threaten to destroy their patriarchal and white supremacist hierarchies of powers. They are terrified of us. And fascism promises to help them with that.

If the Democratic party was able to accept that core truth, I think they would have a very different strategy for winning elections. I think their platform and policies would adjust accordingly. Folks like @mekkaokereke have been talking about this in detail for a long time. What if you just accepted that you don't have any influence with white conservatives, and instead you leaned into your actual base and sought to grow it from the inside? What if you just win by having more people than them?

I agree with this for the most part. Over institutions need to be overhauled. The "checks and balances" are just fundamentally broken. Maybe they always have been.

But this also gave me another thought about political theories of change. I wonder if part of the problem is that Democrats actually want a "unity". But they won't accept that the other side doesn't actually want that at all. Regardless of whatever lip service they give.
https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/113438348289320137

One way to think of a political platform that seeks "unity" is this.

Try to give every constituency *something* they want. That plus *their desire to unify* will convince them to come into the coalition even if it's not perfect.

This definition explains why Democratic platforms always find ways to give concessions to right wingers. It also explains why it'll never work with the current incarnation of the right wing. They literally have no desire for unity. They want dominance.

Whiteness is a hell of a drug.

@brianleroux People might say "everybody's doing it". But that's the judgmental version. The reality is that people want to be where other people are. That *is* part of their interests. So it might more sense to think of it as people making tradeoffs.

We can still be judgmental if we believe it's not the right tradeoff. I'm just saying that the network is only as valuable as the people who show up.

I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.

In the past I wanted it this way. Because I believe getting notified created bad incentives.

"Is this person talking to me or about me?"

"Is this a dunk? I don't know, but I better assume it is."

Anyway, right now I'm thinking about the tradeoff. I think I'm missing a lot of discourse because I don't get notified of people commenting on my posts.

I agree with this 100%. But I would also add some other dynamics into the mix. It's not only about people being discouraged. I believe people need help to get started. Those who understand the protocols enough to help often choose not to help because they don't agree with the direction you're headed.
cc: @hrefna
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/113401096538251330

Something I've been saying for a while now. If you know how to program and are willing to dig in, you don't need permission to create the online world that you want. But that's not sufficient. Very few people have both the skills and fortitude to do something meaningful on their own. I would go further and say that's not even what we want.

Creating the world we want is always a social problem. Because we need to find like-minded people to join us.

@jenniferplusplus sorry. I don't mean to invoke a generalized "human nature" argument. I'm talking about the demonstrated culture of open source. I do think that we see people create and maintain hierarchies more often than not. Even when they swear that's not what they want. But it's bad enough without being overstated.

I don't think I've ever regretting setting up push-button deploys on a new project. It always feels like overkill. But once you get it set up, there are huge benefits in your ability to iterate quickly.

I've definitely gotten too far down the road and regretted that I didn't make it easier to deploy early on.

I'm thinking critically about these lessons as I get into helping people start new projects. Some things you don't need. But this one still holds up.

@Gargron @poswald @kissane @fediversereport feel free to explain the actual reason this is such a persistent problem. I don't mind being corrected. But please don’t let that be the only reason you pop in.

@kissane @fediversereport I always thought of this as the fundamental technical problem to solve for distributed social networks. And we're just... not solving it. People are talking about everything else besides this. And it's so weird to me.