Notices by Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop), page 2

Update: I find myself agreeing with Starchild (and the Chronicle?) a surprising amount. Send help and wine.

@ntnsndr @jalcine I admit I can’t read more about the online right (too depressing) but that second one sounds fascinating, thanks for the rec.

@jalcine it’s really great! But also probably sort of weird to read now? The core argument is roughly “it is hard to make lasting change based on the very weak ties made on social media”.

Unfortunately current reality tells us something more like “it is hard for (numerous, poor) people to make (positive) change”.

Small groups of people who are already rich, powerful, and thickly connected seem to be doing destruction via group chat and social perfectly well. 😬

@jalcine and to be clear, I don’t think that invalidates the book; her experience and focus are on things like bottom-up revolution, and I think nothing since she wrote it has disproved her thesis *for that use case*.

But for small, connected groups of the wealthy, SVB, Trump-pilling, and probably more we don’t even know about yet suggest her argument was somewhat incomplete.

@evan nor’easter, Portland to Boston (after #monktoberfest )

Good morning! Currently choosing between looking out the window of a train and writing an essay pondering my identity and mortality, AMA

@glyph @grimalkina and unidirectional, basically

@glyph @grimalkina it’d certainly be an interesting project! Of course first you need to settle on a typology and that’s been, uh, controversial

@kingrat presumably the Mayor is visting?

@burritojustice @rollovereasy me, in 2008 before I moved here: why do they wear so many hoodies in SF

me in 2024: (checks weather) ah, it’s a day for my 63 degree hoodie, not my 65 degree hoodie

Fascinating question from @bluegreenandfree . I don't think of bookwyrm instances as social, per se, but I guess maybe they can be?
https://mastodon.energy/@bluegreenandfree/113182750592632551

@evan that I have to think about it! a lot!

[The cheap answer is that every human language is a protocol for inter-human communication, and there are thousands of those…]

@evan greattttt question.

how is this real https://isp.netscape.com/news/

Has anyone here ever downloaded their facebook data? Is it structured enough to make it possible to extract who you've interacted with?

[I haven't been on in almost eight years but my account still exists.]

@brooke @evan I'm mostly agreed philosophically, but from a product-management perspective, but you can't simultaneously build a twitter-style tool and be defacto DM-first. They're just completely different UIs, user expectations, ways of finding your friends, etc. So if Masto wants to build Signal or Discord on top of activitypub, that's fine! But that's an entirely different product than what they're currently building. And sadly there is no sign they understand any of that.

@evan an account that by default has no content visible to search engines or casual browsers is not discoverable in any meaningful sense. That’s 100% the opposite direction from bsky, which is innovating on how to surface content to newbies w/ starter packs, lists, & filters.

Maybe private is a good direction! Maybe 🐘 should make a clean break from being a twitter clone. But that’s the implication: “private by default”, when you’re not already market-dominant, is not a *social* network anymore.

@evan interesting thought experiment as to how to reinvent discovery in that situation. Because it’s dire now and would become even worse, but maybe that forces some creativity around what “social network” even means in the Masto context. Is it less Twitter, more Signal? More webrings2.0?

I want to read short alt-histories where the net took a different, more human, less horrific path than uh, whatever this is from @josephcox.

Not sure what the branching-off point is: maybe Mozilla figures out micropayments early, and that encourages a non-ad-based web? Or Finland does UBI and so Linus builds an open-web empire there? Early Wikimedia Foundation buys Automattic, Reddit, and other human-driven “national parks of the web”?

https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/113153566983052094

While talking to someone about how underinvestment in (open source) infrastructure can lead to (software) security compromises, I saw the flag on my bike start to wave. Due to SF’s underinvestment in (sign post) infrastructure, my (bike’s) security was being compromised! Thankfully got it in time.