Notices by     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 (n8@mastodon.social)

@evan Lemme preface this by saying that I don't ask out of disagreement, but out of interest in historical context: how much do you think we know about the US-based "Big Tech" companies that no longer exist, like Yahoo, and whether or not agreeing to cooperate with federal law-enforcers orgs affected their survival rate?

Personally, I might use the term "bubble" rather than "echo chamber," because so much of Mastodon's design focuses on giving server administrators tools to block things they don't want to see, and "bubble" emphasizes the barrier-forming aspect.

"Echo chamber" IMO put more emphasis on the "other people will tell me I'm correct and we'll all convince ourselves there are no significant divergent viewpoints" and I don't really think that's true. It's certainly not dominant.

Hashtag nuance.

RE: https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116352522288234148

Huh; I didn't realize it was possible to *not know* that Mastodon is and has always been an echo chamber.

That having been said, the underlying goal of things like ActivityPub are still genuinely interesting and incredibly worthwhile, specifically because they are a lot more powerful than Mastodon itself is. If AP was just the Mastodon source code, that would be meh.

So, more power to the smart people like Evan who see a lot more ambitious things out there — and do the work to bring them within reach.

But Mastodon itself is a group of people, and it is what it is. It's not some other group.

For context: to me, the value of participating in Mastodon as a social network is that there are a lot of people here who discuss (intelligently and with a sense of humor) subjects that I'm interested in , like FOSS and type design.

But that's also true of many other online services, like web-based discussion forums, which are also very bubble-ish. I use those, too.

But the notion that Mastodon itself was not going to operate in that same manner, frankly, fully evaporated super quickly.

@evan I'M OFFENDED THAT ATLANTIS IS OMITTED

Considering the audience of this network, I suppose I need to explicitly point out that the preceding post was _sarcasm_, and that I'm seeing just as much of the content here as I would on literally any other platform.

That's the point. The point is that they're not different in reality, You can tell yourself they are, but you're wrong, and giant sudden news stories reveal that to everybody, so you should stop telling the general public that The Fediverse is a flowering, sunny, green utopia.

Does anybody know what web sites I could go to to find some sloppy hot takes about current events? Because Mastodon and the entire concept of the fediverse is magically impervious to those on principle, I'm going through a lot of withdrawal today. It's like a desert out here!

@evan Like I keep trying to point out to people, literally anyone can slap the name "Nobel" onto something, prizes included, and it's as valid as the competition — just plaster on a couple of prepositional phrases 'n' such if you're antsy:

https://mastodon.social/@n8/115367999530548751

The ball might really be in your court on this one. I'll chip in a couple of bucks for, like, 3d-printing the medal or whatnot

@evan ..."often called the Nobel Prize In Everybody Likes You and Being Cool"

@mattl That won't be easy; my stuff is all in storage. Maybe you can find a boxed set of the whole season on eBay or Netflix -- I think I remember December 31 that year also had a lot going on.

@mattl NBC Nightly News, May 20, 1999.

@mattl, you are the dot in dotcom.

Confound it I just had a great idea for a Mastodon bot, and I have so many other things I have to be doing..

Okay, back to seething with absolute outrage.

I momentarily do not absolutely hate JavaScript.

(apropos of nothing happening on the internet today; I've been hunkered down trying to complete a demo for a couple of days. Just logging this fact for the sake of the long arc of human history which, as is widely known, trends away from JavaScript.)

(...and I appended that particular link because it does a good job of explaining in plain terms that "operating income" is not some esoteric, meaningless statistic cherry-picked for the purpose of making this point. Selling & shipping socks has a margin of < 2%; selling CPU time and disk quotas, > 30%.)

I'm getting tired of software developers berating normal people for buying everyday household items on Amazon, considering that 3/4 of its operating income comes from the cloud computing services it sells to software developers.

(read it here when you feel all haughty, nerds: https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/10/amazon-e-commerce-company-74-profit-this-instead/ )

So far, I have not seen an actual lawyer give an analysis of the newly-announced #Firefox #TOS thing and, to be frank, the hottakes that I have seen boosted by all yall here have not met my standard for "this person is doing a careful assessment".

Instead, there is a whole lot of "this undoubtedly verifies what I always secretly expected" or "everything in these sorts of statements in a trojan horse intended to cause harm."

So, please: If/when you do see some analysis by a lawyer, boost that.

Does anybody create their own custom, possibly local-only XDG (or not, I guess) URL-scheme handlers?

I know it's doable; I just never hear about it.

The Calendar app thing has reminded me that I meant to do that for a handful of #selfhosted applications.