Microblog Posts

People are acting like the fediverse will someday blow up. These days, if you want any sort of recognition, you need centralized social media. An example is comedians. Social media changed that whole profession.

If the Internet were a high school, decentralized social media certainly wouldn't be the cool kids. They wouldn't even be as cool as the band kids. They would be behind the DND/anime kid table watching over wishing they could be there.

I'll check it out. Url?

Maybe we need to start webrings again

Oh no. He's not literally perfect!

You didn't get invited to WhiteHouse.com via Yahoo chat when you were 12?

The centralized stuff is riddled with US politics too. Wish we could make some fediverse stuff that is free of Americans and their political discussions.

Tbh, the federated stuff also isn’t fully decentralized. It still has quite a few of the pitfalls of a centralized system, even if it’s setup on a distributed technology.

The wrong thing is distributed.

If an instance grows to some massive size (for whatever reason), it will just be the new Reddit, the new Twitter. If that instance gets purchased, the exact same issues await as on Reddit or Twitter.

It's the back-end that should be decentralised while the front-end (all the user-generated content) should be uniformly distributed with backups across the entire fediverse. That way, if an instance goes down, the content and user accounts don't go down with it.

We've come full circle. Paying for things used to be normal. People used to pay to host their own personal websites. In a world where it was normal to pay for things, it was also normal to pay someone to host your personal website.

There were BBS systems, IRC servers, etc. that used to be paid for by somebody, but the users didn't need to pay. Some geek just had enough cash to spare and liked hosting an IRC server, so she did. Or a school was knowingly (or unknowingly) hosting services that were used by a lot of non-students. The school admins didn't know, the computer admins liked using the services so they didn't mind keeping them running. In the early days, long before the dot-com boom ads were rare. That meant it stayed OK with the schools and stuff. Nobody tried to run an ad-supported IRC server, AFAIK. It just wasn't a thing.

Then "Free (with ads)" became an option, and people started migrating to "Free (with ads)" because, why wouldn't you? The earliest ads weren't all that obnoxious, and once they started getting obnoxious it was easy for the tech-savvy to just block those ads. Now we've started to see the error of our ways. So yeah, please host your own stuff, or if you're using something hosted by someone else, help out however you can.

Perhaps it would’ve been more accurate to say no mysterious, dark-pattern algorithms. The Fediverse has documented, simple algorithms that aren’t trying to manipulate the viewer.

I mean, that's a little pedantic. Those are simple sorts by post attribute, not individualized preference targets. And you explicitly choose your own sort, it isn't assigned secretly and dynamically.

It's the difference between getting junk mail in your mailbox and going through the card catalogue at the library.

When they say "no algorithms", they mean "no personally tailored bubble for your interests, all done to keep you engaged and enraged, while scrolling past ad impressions"

Obviously there's an algorithm, even if it's just sorting by times voted on in the last hour. It's actually detailed here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

What would you rather call them? I feel like you might as well be saying that cruise control is unnecessary jargon and is confusing to new drivers… Okay but would calling it acceleration latch be any less confusing for new drivers?

The defining characteristic of a new user is that they are unfamiliar with the system. You are never going to be able to reason around those who don’t want to learn something new.

100%. I've been finding a ton of weird internet forums out there that are an odd mix of people. Fortunately, none of them are loaded with asshole 13 year olds, so it's already objectively better than reddit.

Where might I find these mystical places?

I'm worried that if we become dependent on ads, then we also become beholden to the advertisers. I don't want to have to have to use neutered words like "unalive." Give companies an inch, and they'll take a mile. I'd rather avoid the risk of ads controlling my internet completely.

But it seems we're on the same page about decentralization. There could be ad-sponsored instances for you and user-sponsored instances for me, and we can all get what we prefer. We all win when there are more choices available.

I don't mind if my cable subscription has one or two ads, they need to cover all the fees for their TV licences

I don't mind if YouTube has one or two ads, delivering videos over the internet is costly

Give an inch, and they'll take a mile.

Adverts have been the bane of the internet experience since adverts arrived on the internet.

We must be like Edna from The Incredibles, learn from past mistakes, and take a hard stance against them.

No ads!