Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net

Posts

8

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2,232

Joined

2 yr. ago

Because evil is loud and self-important, and people doing good have learned to be mycelial, underground, quietly building the new world in the shell of the old.

https://youtu.be/aHZpVSyP7vc

Some of them will actively advocate for user-unfriendliness to keep out the noobs which... I mean the number of psy-ops in the community has to be non-zero.

It's just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we're talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that's like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.

My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don't do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn't.

Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.

Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?

This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.

If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I'll listen to you, but like... wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That's literally what causes enshittification.

Oh, I didn't realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I'm right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.

That's a great resource, I'm going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it's meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I've seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.

Plus, holy web 1.0, that's a motherfucking website.

Right, my point is that they have the ingredients to meaningfully decentralise control, but until they do they are not meaningfully bettee than twitter, and it's just a branding exercise.

Maybe they'll fix that, maybe they won't but until they do I think the fediverse's resilience proves that platforms will keep turning over until a viable federated system arises, whether that's bluesky, mastodon or something else.

I can't even see where you disagree with this. You're just throwing out details withoit reference to how this affects my point.

It doesn't matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is "distributed" if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it's not the feature I was talking about.

The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.

That's a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it's not doing it in an open manner because the software isn't open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it's not meaningfully decentralised, but it's still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company's bad business decisions.

That's what I was referring to.

And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.

By "technically better" I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.

I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It's a matter of making that growth count.

If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.

If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.

Hard to say which way it will go. I don't hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.

Yes, exactly this. Like something might be technically better but unless it's doing its main job of actually connecting people it's not going to work.

I wish more FOSS nerds understood this.

That's very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.

It's building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.

All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.

In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It's doing orders of magnitude less work.

I think if he really wants that plan to shake out he needs to transition ownership while he's alive. Just dumping it on them with no discussion, no cultural adjustment and no preparation time will cause a lot of problems.

They're not just browsers, they're accessing the posts via an API and presenting it in a bespoke manner with purpose-built controls.

That's good because it's faster and lower-data than a webpage, and it's easier and faster to use on mobile.

Not every app is just a web browser, that's a particular kind of lazy app created by the app hype bubble like 20 years ago.

I think the rise of hate speech on centralised platforms relies very heavily on their centralised moderation and curation via algorithms.

They have all known for a long time that their algorithms promote hate speech, but they know that curbing that behaviour negatively affects their revenue, so they don't do it. They chase the fast buck, and they appease advertisers who have a naturally conservative bent, and that means rage bait and conventional values.

That's quite apart from when platform owners explicitly support that hate speech and actively suppress left leaning voices.

I think what we have on decentralised systems where we curate/moderate for ourselves works well because most of that open hate speech is siloed, which I think is the best thing you can do with it.

No worries lol.

I was more referring to the fact that they were very ready to say how they'd kill for it but the price was the thing stopping them. The maths is pretty easy but I think 3 people didn't get the joke.

In future you can just say that rather than talking in circles and making no sense. Goodbye.

Your point is that the issues don't affect the core experience, and I've explained how that's wrong, and you've ignored it.

You're also now blatantly mischaracterising what I've said.

If you want me to keep talking to you, I need you to tell me that you are actually curious to understand what I have to say.

Yes, you ignored the worst parts of it in favour of things you could dismiss for yourself, and then you ignored me pointing that out. I'm not going to keep explaining this to you any further.

Thanks! Looks like on the talk page there's doubt about whether it even has a touchscreen, which is a little discouraging. I guess I can just try, but It's good to know a resource like this exists.