Phileosopher

joined 1 year ago
 

I only partly live under a rock, so I've now heard that the Facebooks is making Threads, and it'll talk to Mastodon.

Any idea how to keep them from taking over? Apparently, you're a weirdo these days if you use Firefox, Brave/Qwant, and trust FLOSS > proprietary.

[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right wing? Money is a pretty nonpartisan matter.

Most of the right-wingers have already fled off to Gab, MeWe, or Mastodon.

Yeah, you get the idea. Things can be always true, but also where we see them wrong. The Sheep in the Field thought experiment shows it clearly.

This will be funny how bad it'll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.

Then come the AI bots who comment...

[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 45 points 1 year ago

This plays out like things I've seen in real life:

  1. Get a community/club/church/workplace going with a good set of leaders.
  2. The system becomes unwieldy through bureaucracy, excessive rules, whatever.
  3. Leadership can't change it, so they storm off in a huff after nobody listens to them.
  4. Power-mongering Assistant to the Regional Manager takes their shot to run the show.
  5. Everything becomes awful.
[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago (10 children)

In all fairness, that's how Twitter did things from what I can understand.

Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.

I'm sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?

 

I love the weird one-off internet: those tiny little fan projects made by someone with a true passion and something in their mind that's probably hard to pronounce.

Any fun corners of the internet out there still beyond social media? Or do you build anything yourself?

[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's the emergence of a new community. When things get big, people feel less individually responsible, and that's how trouble starts.

[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That really depends on which philosophy you subscribe to.

The TL;DR is that existential and post-modern philosophy say it's varying degrees of relative, while everything anyone said before ~1800 was saying that facts were immutable.

One fact I can glean is that the data itself may be real (e.g., the wavelengths of light that hit your eyeballs) but the perception is a composite illusion of our mind (e.g., the fact that you just saw a kitty).

[–] Phileosopher@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're forgetting the future stages:

  • holy crap! im autistic
  • hey everyone, im autistic
  • okay, i guess it just explains everything
  • nobody seems to care that much
  • alright, i'll go find a good-paying tech/accounting/science job now
  • proud to be ASD, if anyone cares

You'll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it's about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

  • It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
  • Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
  • Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you're embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.