Notices by Eli Pariser (elipariser@mastodon.social)

This new piece in @niemanlab is a great showcase of our work and what we’re trying to do at @wearenew_public

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/07/could-social-media-support-healthy-online-conversations-new_public-is-working-on-it/

20k attendees and growing fast since yesterday, Pete Buttegieg to speak—let’s go!

Fascinating and disturbing finding on how AI co-writing can influence opinion from Maurice Jakesh thesis research (h/t @natematias ). Jakesh had people write short essays using an AI tool like Google Autocomplete on whether social media was good or bad. When the tool pre-generated language supportive of social media (top bar), people were more likely to write essays with that opinion and vice versa (bottom bar).

@evan @vanderwal Thanks for taking the time to spell this out -- makes a lot of sense and I like the philosophical premise.

@shoq This is great, but I'm more talking about some of the technical/structural scalability problems... e.g. if every post interaction has to be pushed to every server, how does that hold up in a world where there are tens of thousands of servers and posts with tens of thousands of interactions?

@evan @vanderwal Yeah. Definitely thinking about the latter. The question I was thinking about is... if the cost to host a server goes up dramatically/exponentially as the network scales, what does that mean for decentralization?

@evan @vanderwal To be honest I haven't been deep in the debate and thinking (as I know you have). But the discussion in this piece definitely got me thinking. https://softwaremill.com/the-architecture-of-mastodon/

Ok continuing up the fediverse learning curve… what’s the best read on the debate around scalability questions for ActivityPub and federated systems?

Thread on Twitter alternatives and democracy:

As the fragmentation of social spaces continues, let’s think about two axises: How similar the people in a space are, and how well-managed or well-governed the space is. Make a 2x2 and it looks like this:

Hello Mastodonners! The org I co-run, New_ Public, is organizing a learning session for folks new to Mastodon and the fediverse this coming Tuesday at 12pm ET. We'll be joined by the brilliant @cfiesler @wilf and @jeffjarvis -- and you are welcome too.

Noobs (like me) who want to learn and long-timers are all welcome. Sign up here, and boost if you're willing to help find other interested folks. https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvc--uqzIrGd3viRbTltC0dXmDkaidAJc-?_x_zm_rtaid=we6EIiy7SVC4ko6U7Unicw.1668089335856.e548e65efba05ec79cde9656bf3f20a1&_x_zm_rhtaid=249