rglullis
This is the type of argument that makes you less credible, because even if I take what you are saying at face value it shows how all your logic is biased. If "failure to deal with safety" was such a big impediment for mass adoption, how have come the Big Tech alternative still attract billions of users?
From previous interactions with the author, I am convinced he is not really interested in the growth of the fediverse and is more than willing to sacrifice anything if it keeps it small and on the fringes. As much as I try to steelman his arguments, I can not find a good reasoning. At best, it is just a reactionary attempt to keep the fediverse exclusive to some minority. At worst, it becomes a way to submit everyone into a ESG-compliance racket. "Nice instance you have over there, it would be a shame if it was marked as the home of nazis..."
The proposal would allow one community to follow another
Who determines when a community should follow another? The admin? The user?
If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented,
My point is that it a lot easier to implement something that solves the problem that you are describing than asking for a whole change in the implementation of the server.
The nodes are the servers not the clients. (...) The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (...) is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.
It's a trade-off between speed to deliver the base case vs the lack of flexibility to deliver a more flexible version of it. And the more that we push to the server, the slower it will be to be able to extend it. Case in point: People have been complaining about the lack of algoritmic timelines on Mastodon. The Mastodon developers will find all sorts of excuses to not have to implement it... "Algorithms are bad for people", "People are just too used with how things in Big Tech", "we rather working on moderation and safety"... etc. All of those are bad rationalizations for them to avoid doing work they don't want to do. Which is fine, the devs are not forced to develop anything. The interesting things is that this problem was solved a lot faster by flipping it around and pushing to the client. And it works so well that that people now can even choose what type of algorithm they want to run.
Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says.
Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client.
Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior. There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?
One is not inherently better than the other.
When it comes to decentralized technologies and systems, it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the leaf nodes as much as possible. The less things are mandated on the server, the easier it is to build a robust system. Pushing as much functionality as possible to the client is such a good way to follow Postel's Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.
This kind of worship at the altar of efficiency is a big part of why we are losing our third places in society.
This is a brilliant and eloquent observation. My only concern is that younger people (and more specifically younger people from North America, the dominant demographic here and on reddit) never even had a third-place to begin with, so they wouldn't know what they are missing.
Why couldn't this be solved at the client level? Whenever you go to a thread, the client could check the submission URL and inline comments from matching posts from other subscribed communities.
Reddit already does that with their "related diacussions" tab. It would be a lot more elegant, requires no extensions in the spec, no changes in the server side and easily prototyped/tested.
But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities.
Why? That's a pretty big assumption to think a significant share of people will default to create a new community, when the most likely scenario is that they will browse around their own instance to find out what is already here.
Even in the most extreme cases, we have 4-5 "repeated" communities and they all eventually consolidated into one.
It’s about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase
Great, so let's talk about how we can increase the overall userbase instead of worrying about whether we can optimize the system for the small number of people that happen to be here already. There is no point in designing that tries to help, e.g, 5 people that like Yu-Gi-oh!, when in reality the most likely thing to happen is that they will just leave it here and go to /r/yugioh which has 500 thousand subscribers.
If that is true, then why hasn't OP responded well to the other more tactful responses?
Always, but how is this related to the discussion at hand?
Do you think that if my responses were more tactful, OP would change his mind or at least give some thought about their own (passive-)aggressiveness on the post?
The cheaper and easier it gets to produce and distribute content online, the more I am convinced that we will need to start requiring people to put something of actual value at stake to let them join a social network. The sad thing is that, aside from simply charging money for access, there is nothing that I see that could be used but not abused by governments or corporations.