rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

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2 yr. ago

Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments

What do you think that Automattic, Flipboard and Ghost are doing? Do you think they are paying people to develop integrations with AP because they are really nice people and have zero intentions of profiting from their investments?

Look, I better leave this conversation. I should have learned by now that there is no point in arguing with ideologues.

would be a very poor substitute most likely

• phanpy is already doing it for Mastodon, and there are plenty of people satisfied with it.
• You have no idea how far one can go by getting a generic training model and fine-tuning on the device
• we don't need to have something a perfect replacement. We just need "good enough".
• even if it is not perfect, it is better than the nothing that reactionary "no algorithm in the Fediverse!" crowd is bringing to the table.

That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.

Says who? You and the gatekeepers who'd rather have everyone stuck in the past, just to preserve some technical/ideological purity?

Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part.

There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.

they certainly don’t want to pay for it either.

It doesn't have to be a "donation/public funding" vs "ads/surveillance capitalism" dichotomy. I bet we can find alternative models of governance and funding, provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.

There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch.

Again, this is just a lazy cop-out and a perfect display of the hubris here that is so off-putting.

You make it sound that the people using Instagram or TikTok are there because they like the Surveillance Capitalism, or getting bombard by ads, or they are all sucking up to Zuckerberg. Have you ever considered that maybe people are still there because they actually like some of the features they use in the products and they can't find it here?

"Millions of people", let's round it up to 10 million, ok?

Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.

Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let's be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.

This is cockroach levels of usage.

Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn't mean that it ever was relevant.

Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed

With this continued "anti-capitalist" stance there will never be anything to be destroyed. Without real investment and resources, this will be forever nothing more than a castle made of sand.

I disagree about "the primary service" of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just "send" emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.

I also disagree about the idea of "managed opposition". "Managed opposition" is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.

Finally, I have serious doubts that this "prefigurative infrastructure building" is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it's just too afraid to say it out loud.

Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won't be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don't see someone as "toxic" just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.

these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies

Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?

pose absolutely no threat to them

Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I'd be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.

I'd rather work towards a world where Facebook has "only" 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and "community" alone.

A "cockroach business" is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.

There’s a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit

• There were fewer than 200 subreddits being mirrored. This is far from "all of reddit".
• Some of them were also mirroring comments, but the large majority was post-only.
• I was implementing a bunch of filters to bring the noise down.
• The bots from alien.top were posting only to instances that I also own.
• No content was being pushed out. If the content from alien.top was ending up on your instance, it was because your users were interested in the content.
• Even after I disabled most of the bots (I think that now it's only mirroring stuff to sfw.community), the ban on the instance persisted.

With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated

We also have a good example of an instance that is dead. There is no point in giving that as an example, if no one can actually use it.

Wait, not only are you misinterpreting what I said (I used alien.top as a case of for "admins will want to defederate because of resource abuse even when their own users find it useful" and less about "admins will ban any bot-only instance") but your interpretation directly contradicts your first point.

Yeah, you can add the "reasonable output" qualifier all you want. This would be a subjective point. I for one think that a fleet of 98 bots posting each once a day is not even worth of consideration, but clearly some disagree and are willing to treat the guy as "toxic".

examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology.

Citation needed?

I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.

your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream.

I'm sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.

In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn't kill all the other website builders companies out there.

And I am not arguing "everyone will defederate from instances running bots".

My argument is that admins see any "unwanted" activity and try to squash it on the grounds of "abusing the resources set up for the community", instead of realizing that the it was the community's interest in the service provided by the bots that was causing the excessive activity in the first place.

We do like to get stuck in a loop, no?

The point is that we are expecting newcomers to get a crash course on how Mastodon does content discovery and the dynamics of federation just to set up a completely harmless fleet of bots.

Then, when OP has the absolutely natural reaction of saying "look, this seems completely broken, I don't care about these things you are asking and therefore I will just go play somewhere else", we attack the messenger and his character instead of listening to the criticism and seeing where we could've done better.

There were plenty of instances that had botsin.space on automatic blocklist. On par with instances that block bird.makeup or any other Twitter mirrors.

Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

I once had this conversation with some other "indie entrepreneur" who was arguing something along the lines of "I don't care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures." When I asked "Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?" and his response was "no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive"

He wasn't too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.

All of this to say: there is no consolation in being "right" in my death bed. I am not interested in something that "takes time" if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.

commercial companies (...) end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

It's is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It's a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.

The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this "culture" of people expecting services for free.

This leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is.

You don't need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I'm saying that for years already.

But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it's entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as "cool" and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.

For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because "they are using a microblog to send notifications". It's this culture that is pathetic. It's this culture that pushes "normies" away, and if we don't change this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make Fedi a nice, fun, appealing place.

You can’t put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market’s funding issues.

This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don't go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here. No, sir. This is a soup kitchen where everyone pretends to be homeless in order to fit in.

if all you want is to recreate the corporate social media 1:1 then indeed Bluesky is the better place to be.

What a lame, lazy and self-righteous cop-out!

I am not talking about "recreating corporate social media". I am saying that the culture here is completely broken. It is dominated by this loud reactionary group of people who think of themselves of oh-so-welcoming and oh-so-progressive, but that takes any newcomer and shoves them away at the slight deviation of the current norms. And now that someone has come and writes an honest critique, your defense mechanism is to call them toxic?

Infrastructure does not magically appear, and the Fediverse does not have deep VC funded pockets to just make it so.

If only we managed to be just a little bit more appealing to the masses, so that we could have an actual ecosystem with a healthy economy then we wouldn't need to depend on VC pockets and we would be able to serve everyone. All we need is to find a way to attract some of those who looked our way and we can then show how we can have a fun place without depending on Big Tech, right?

But no, apparently the "right thing to do" is to create division over the most ridiculous things (bots posting every 14 minutes! To an instance of 12k users! Blasphemy!) and further pigeonholing us into the "The Fediverse is only for weirdos and social pariahs" territory.

I am not expecting you to have a full "are we the baddies?" realization, but hol-li-eey shit when I find myself in arguments like these I lose another slice of hope on the Fediverse as a healthy universal alternative to the web. For all the talk about building the Fediverse to fight Big Tech, we sure spend a lot of energy attacking the wrong targets.

Yeah, instead if closed down because it couldn't support itself. What an amazing alternative you are proposing...

a remote instance (...) would not show up on the local feed, and (...) subscribed to would show up on the federated timeline.

Not only the distinction between local/federated timeline is completely irrelevant for most people, the whole concept of "timelines" only exist because the system does not provide an efficient global discovery mechanism.

And just by trying to explain this, we've lost like 90% of the potential user base.

And to make it worse, you think that people need to think about all of this when onboarding?

the system working as intended and defending itself against abuse.

No, this is way for individual nodes to protect themselves, but the idea of protection here only counts for the admins.

If people want to subscribe to bot spam they can start their own instance

No, they will just go back to the social media platforms that gives them what they want without getting judged by it.

or register directly on alien.top.

Why would they register on alien.top, when the largest "organic instances" defederated from it and effectively removed any chance of making it attractive for real people that were looking for a "soft" migration?