Notices by Mark Kraft (krafttea@mastodon.social)

@mekkaokereke "BlueSky users skew younger than Mastodon. Again, in large part because Black Americans are young, and white Americans are old."

In part, although the Hispanic/Latino population is about 50% larger now, growing faster, and about 2.1 years younger than the median age of Black Americans.

(This is why I tend to encourage MUCH more concentration upon helping minority groups to register themselves, based on the influence of people such as Steve Phillips.)
https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@KraftTea/112889701096866096

@mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke It seems to me that people need to not just be recommended to, say, an author they like, but also to people they can legitimately befriend and interact with, who are followers / active commenters.

New users can't expect to generate a lot of friends, comments, etc. from professional content creators.

Generating a limited deck of varying but relevant people might be more useful for all concerned than a pure top-40 list.

@mekkaokereke If we REALLY want to encourage growth & diversity, we should realize we're inheriting some bad demographics here at Mastodon. Platforming aging developers and niche influencers is valuable, yes... but in a limited way.

We SHOULD be focusing on younger demographics.

Which is another reason why we should be careful of a solution that leans ageist, without showcasing diversity and youth, when they're a LOT of our future going forward.

We lost the short game. Let's win the long one.

@mekkaokereke I can understand your desire for people to be able to find those who are well-known, but you should at least realize that emphasis comes at a price.

The #transgender community on #mastodon, in particular, is very strong. They fled here because of hate. Starter packs could easily ghetto-ize their presence here. What I'm thinking of is more like the formatting I experienced in public radio. We'd play stars, but also three other tiers.
More tiers, more protection of diversity.

@mekkaokereke I can only speak of what a disaster for #lgbtqia people a commercially-biased, top-40esque formatting has been for us. I'm sure there are endless parallels in other communities.

i.e. When it comes to journalism, Andrew Sullivan has, until quite recently, ruled the roost when it came to #lgbtqia figures, for nearly twenty years, in a kind of right-wing putsch. As the media feted and tripped over themselves to platform him, he eviscerated our community.
https://www.metafilter.com/86228/US-Military-Cuts-And-A-Step-Towards-Equality#2802554

@mekkaokereke I'm all for something like starter packs, but the devil is in the details. There appears to be serious server issues that starter packs could potentially exacerbate, if not addressed first.

https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@KraftTea/113519877780405274

@eosfpodcast @futurebird @danilo Exactly.

And if Bluesky really is what it claims to be, they will roll out full, universal, bidirectional support for #federation in a few months. In which case, I would have no NEED to join Bluesky, at all. If not, they were misleading their customers and weren't even the most basic level of trustworthy to begin with.

As for the user interface preferences some have for Bluesky, well... there is no one UI for Mastodon. I use elk.zone.
Looks like Twitter to me!

All those Russian losses.
And yet, we're not hearing about Ukrainian troops shattering, or being overrun, or basically doing much worse than retreating in an organized fashion.

Makes you think...

@jwz @SomaFMrusty I don't see why it would have to mean recentralization, as much as having some admins who would be willing to be spokes / regional hubs to a certain range of other sites.

Every large global social media site is essentially decentralized, in technologically meaningful ways that generally boost performance.

My comment re: Memcached was merely that yours was the kind of problem it solved. But if it can be solved efficiently in ways that don't drive users crazy, I'm all for it.

@jwz @SomaFMrusty I was actually implying that the work shouldn't have to be done on your end, but rather that there might be opportunities for things to be fetched only a few times, and distributed within clusters.

It wouldn't make sense to do it the other way. But the general idea of what it does stands.

@jwz @SomaFMrusty ... and that's why LJ made Memcached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached

In fact, even now you can order goods from Amazon inside of Russia, to be shipped to you via numerous online companies that operate as intermediaries for shipments. Specialized tools, drones, etc.

It would be a relatively easy thing for Amazon to restrict shipments to these intermediary companies, or to have their lawyers pressure them to stop shipping their goods to Russia, but... that's not good for business, and would require actually complying in good faith with the intent of the sanctions.

Call it what you will, but crony capitalism seems to be one of the constants you can depend upon in life, no matter where you live.

Like death, taxes, and the registered sex offender living down the block from you.

It comes along with the system, fully installed, along with all those bits of paper that people like so much.

David D. sums up why the US isn't as vital to Ukraine's arms needs as many would like to think.

"Socialism and capitalism can't exist together..."

(Except, of course, when they do. Which, up to now, has traditionally been the case.)

You can argue that it's not a PURE system, but that's an ideological, not historical, argument.

Saying oil & water don't mix doesn't mean they can't be made to mix.

Laws have been passed REPEATEDLY, requiring 2/3rds authorization, i.e., for overturning many bad public policies. In retrospect, it's a shame we lack similar laws for tax cuts for the rich.

This is an argument that embraces ideology, while avoiding actual history, which is a dance between evolution & revolution.

US democracy, i.e., leaned heavily on the Magna Carta, parliament, etc. The American Revolution leaned on colonials not having the same rights they had in Britain.

New systems tend to develop in fertile soil, such as the freedom of workers to organize, form unions, etc. If some rights & freedoms aren't widely accepted first, they're difficult to add after the fact. (USSR)

@Radical_EgoCom @kkarhan "If you want one, you must get rid of the other."

Most historical systems have not been either/or. Most are hybrid. You can argue that hybrid systems are not pure __________, but that's an ideological, not real-world, debate.

If you care to cite exceptions to this, feel free to do so.

@Radical_EgoCom @kkarhan It is literally how most major systemic change has happened, going from monarchy to parliamentary to republic to representative democracy.

Even in cases where there were revolutions, it usually happened in environments where the rights of the people generally helped to lead to a systemic change. So the idea that systems don't change in ways that veer towards the next major shift is simply not historically tenable, regardless of ideological beliefs.

@kkarhan Even the early communists before the USSR were pretty clear that communism would and should naturally be an evolution within democracy.

The way forward isn't to topple the least horrible state. It's to create things of worth within it that are superior, provide bounty and freedom for the people, don't fall prey to capitalism or unfair distribution / a tragedy of the commons, and are designed to scale and grow, until it wins by simply being superior to what existed previously.

IOW...
If you wanted to enforce a fascist NewSpeak, like #orwell's 1984,
#ai would be the ultimate tool to do that.

Used in #education, AI reinforces intellectual conformity, ableism, cultural bias, lack of expression, and, ultimately, lack of the meaning and power of words.

Doubleplusungood.