maegul
@maegul@lemmy.ml
A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 week ago:
The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.
So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.
For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.
Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 week ago:
Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.
BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.
This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d
He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 1 week ago:
Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)
The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.
IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.
Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 1 week ago:
I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.
It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).
All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.
For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
- Comment on Happy 12 million! 1 month ago:
It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.
Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.
To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
Definitely interesting idea (I hadn’t really quite seen it formalised like this)! I’ve kinda had vague similar-ish thoughts along these lines too.
Any chance you’d be willing to go into any more detail, or point to specifics? I’m not familiar with what’s going on over on bestiver or programming.dev in the way of service-type things.
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
As in a new one would be necessary to do the sorts of things I’m suggesting … or the current moment requires a sort of rebranding and pivot that is best served by a new platform?
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
I don’t think this is true, maybe not at all.
Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the “migration” is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.
Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.
For me, it seemed like Gargron didn’t really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn’t a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.
So, random thoughts:
- I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse’s big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I’m not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
- More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that’s really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
- Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse’s decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
- Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn’t really matter (and “it’s just like email”) and can be ignored for the most part.
- In reality, it does matter and can’t be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
- So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
- By community building, I mean “flexible space creation” that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build “humane spaces” that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
- Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.
As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it’s always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you’re on doesn’t really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I’ve seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.
If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does … perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??
Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.
- Comment on cohost to shut down at end of 2024 2 months ago:
Yea the writing had been on the wall for a while AFAIU. I don’t know what lessons are to be gleaned from its story, but I’d bet at a basic level it’s that building new social media spaces is not easy. An old school forum is likely fine. But a whole platform with all of the expectations and features people have today, hard if not impossible.
- Comment on Any android client that can do both Lemmy and Mastodon? 2 months ago:
IMO, app developers in general are lacking imagination or ambition over ideas like this. I’ve even suggested it directly to a developer or a popular mastodon app, who was entertaining the idea of making a lemmy app … and they said they couldn’t see how it would work.
- Comment on 😳😳😳 2 months ago:
So … you seen Romulus?
- Comment on 😳😳😳 2 months ago:
That is beautiful! Thank you, made my day.
- Comment on Private voting has been added to PieFed 2 months ago:
I can see this argument, at least in general. As for community mods, I feel like it’d be generally fruitful and useful for them to be and feel empowered to create their own spaces. While I totally hear your argument about the size of the “mod” layer being too large to be trustworthy, I feel like some other mitigating mechanisms might be helpful. Maybe the idea of a “senior” mod, of which any community can only have one? Maybe “earning” seniority through being on the platform for a long time or something, not sure. But generally, I think enabling mods to moderate effectively is a generally good idea.
- Comment on Private voting has been added to PieFed 2 months ago:
Yea, which is why I think the obvious solution to the whole vote visibility question is to have private votes that are visible to admins and mods for moderation purposes. It seems like the right balance.
- Comment on Private voting has been added to PieFed 2 months ago:
If public voting data becomes a thing across the threadiverse, as some lemmy people want.
Which is why I think the appropriate balance is private votes visible to admins/mods.
- Comment on How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow 2 months ago:
I feel like some software/platform features that encourage and foster more community-based and discussion could go a long way.
Some quick thoughts:
- user-specific multi-communities
- Being able to notifications for certain events or activities (incl special notifications from a community or ongoing discussion in a thread)
- Opt-in post visibility, such as excluding a post from the All/local feeds (similar to the private communities feature coming to lemmy)
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
you just need a user on any of the services that show votes publicly.
Well if that sort of thing started happening, I think it’d be reasonable to have that person blocked, banned or defederated.
IMO, What’s possible doesn’t need to dictate what’s easy and common, especially when there are always balances and countermeasures previously involved.
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
Yea … that makes sense. Thanks!
Still … intuitively it feels like if the “threadiverse” platforms weren’t so concerned with interoperating with the likes on microblogging platforms, they could come up with a system that involved only sharing total vote numbers from their instance without any idenfifying metadata.
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
I mean, this starts to get moot if no one is aware doesn’t it. You might dismiss the design as merely artificial obscurity, but if no one is pulling up the data, then the obscurity is working. The “curtain” you cite isn’t trivial for the vast majority of users, which is what this is all about. Starting an instance and extracting the desirable data is a pretty tall hurdle where just the effort alone is prohibitive and enough to give someone a chance to calm down.
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
Hmmm … is it not really possible at all? Just riffing here … the identity of a voter isn’t necessary, just a means to ensure the uniqueness of a voter so there’s no duplication etc. So … could a hash of the voter’s ID be distributed with the vote to prevent duplication?
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
Oh, I was more talking about the technicalities of doing anything that might become desirable once votes are public, such as opting-in to having your votes hidden or having a particular post’s votes hidden or whatever else may come out in response.
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
I think the best way to think about this is in terms of “affordances” of the platform and the balance of their merits. “Affordances” just mean the actions and behaviours enabled by the platform’s features (a jargon-y but useful word I’ve seen others use in these discussions).
Broader principles like privacy are important too, but I think can easily lead to less productive and relevant discussions, in part because many of the counters or complications will come down to the actual affordances.
The biggest affordance is obvious: more polarisation & abusive/antagonistic behaviour
From what I’ve read so far, I think everyone shares a pretty clear understanding of what public votes will lead to … a more heated and polarising dynamic, with potential abuse vectors opening up, and less honesty and openness in voting. And I think most share a distaste for that scenario. Either way, I do, and I’d encourage others to think about how it’s likely result of public votes and with the internet being the internet, is unlikely to be pleasant or fruitful.
Specific people having access doesn’t decide the matter
While others have access to vote data, namely admins of instances, mods (for their communities) and members of platforms that make votes public like k/mbin, I don’t think this is decisive.
It’s about the behaviours that are being enabled and the balance of behaviours and how they interact to form community dynamics, with the fediverse itself being an important factor. An admin or mod having access to votes is part of making their job easier, which is a good thing. It’s power and responsibility. And the moment they violate the bounds of their role by “doxing” someone’s voting data, that’d obviously be a bad thing, but with countermeasures we can take. We can leave their instance or community and our instance can defederate from them … their account can be blocked and possibly banned by admins. On balance, this seems stable and fair enough to me.
In the case of other platforms, like k/mbin, that’s definitely more tricky. But again, defederation is always a possibility here if it becomes problematic enough (however dramatic that could end up). This is just the nature of the fediverse, that platforms will differ on things like this. Again, if people start abusing that information from other platforms and instances, blocking, banning are options, as is the nuclear option of defederation with any such instances (which is a core balancing feature of the fediverse).
As it presently stands, k/mbin are a minority of users on the threadiverse and so whatever their platform choices are don’t really affect the rest of the threadiverse.
In the end, you can only make the best platform that you can. That k/mbin do something we don’t want to do isn’t a good reason for following suite. If anything, it’s a good reason to stick with what we prefer and continue to make the argument with them on their choices.
Privacy and transparency are relevant but not decisive
I agree it’s an issue that it seems votes are private when they aren’t. Again, I come back to the balance of affordances, and I think they’re better as they are than with public votes. However misleading the privacy situation is, it can be handled by being more transparent with users by providing warnings etc.
Ultimately, the privacy problem on the fediverse is not going away any time soon … it’s the nature of decentralisation, and this should maybe be made more clear to more people! But making a better platform is a real problem in front of us right now and I think it’s better to focus on that than how the general issue of privacy or consistency with privacy is best served.
Other platforms aren’t that relevant
I think I saw someone mentioning in the GitHub dicussion that other platforms expose vote data. While true, many of those would be microblogging platforms (mastodon, twitter, bluesky etc), where, again, the balance of affordances becomes relevant. A “vote” there, normally called a “like” is a personal action between user accounts that are likely to follow each other with such being the core mechanic of the platform. On aggregators like lemmy/reddit, the core mechanic is making popular posts so that your content gets to the top of the feed (roughly anyway). While there’s a lot of overlap, there’s more angst here around what gets voted on and what doesn’t and less inter-personal accountability and bonding. Posts and discussions are more public affairs and less conversations between people.
Technical can of worms
I wonder if making votes public would create the need or desire for enabling more post-specific options for users, such as making a post that can’t be voted on or that doesn’t provide public voting data?
What about the children!!
In the end, my bet would be that at the scale that lemmy is at, it won’t make too much of a difference if votes were made public. I think some would definitely encounter more unpleasantness and some would definitely find voting a more stressful affair, but we’re cosy enough that we’ll cope. Going forward though, public voting for an aggregator feels dangerous and hard to undo. Yes, it could be technically removed, but if a culture is established that is accustomed to it and become desensitised to the negatives, they’ll probably want to hold on to it.
- Comment on Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads 3 months ago:
So … can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they’re doing bad things and are the reason why we can’t have nice things?
Hmmm … a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company … how could that possibly go wrong!!!
- Comment on Thoughts Around KBin's Current Status and the Importance of Community Migration Features 3 months ago:
Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.
Yes. Even more, any administration (and frankly community mod team too) needs to have backups in place from the start. Or at least very early.
It’s not hard. Find someone willing to be a co-admin or mod. If you can’t do that … then you’re not actually in a position to be an admin (or even a mod).
- Comment on NSW government ends WFH as workers are ordered back into the office 3 months ago:
Cunts.
- Comment on Pixelfed groups are finally here! 3 months ago:
Yea … more group things is good news.
- Comment on Pixelfed groups are finally here! 3 months ago:
If you’re wondering about lemmy compatibility: mastodon.social/@pixelfed/112902986123309202
Lemmy and piefed compatibility will be there it seems.
If you’ve got other questions, dansup, lead dev, is pretty outgoing and probably happy to talk.
- Comment on Im counting the days for a Piefed app so i can switch over and be able to forget about ml drama and weirdness 3 months ago:
You’re in denial or you’ve gotten good at ignoring it.
Maybe. I’m plugged into my fair share of Fedi drama around the fediverse I’d say.
A big difference I suspect is between those who scroll All and those who rely on subscribing.
Otherwise, I don’t think this is a lemmy thing, it’s a fediverse thing. Even BlueSky. A sad trait amongst people has been exposed by alternative social … people are meaner to open source voluntary devs than big corp extractive owners.
