rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

Posts

39

Comments

1,814

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sorry, it wasn't clear to me. Are you saying that your first association of the name Communick is with "Communism"?

You are the first that makes this association, at least that I know of.

Communick is rooted on "Communication", "nickname" and "unique": because the original idea was that people that sign up to the service get an unique username across all instances...

I really don't get this "if you don't block XYZ, it means you are in favor of them".

My instance does not block any of the big tankies, and yet it has not been a problem.

Well, I've always said that Communick is not meant to be an instance focused on any particular group, so perhaps it could count as "normie" for her?

i hate IP laws, but it is what it is

It is what it is because we are too afraid to challenge them.

which made you demand that everyone else change their usage patterns to filter out the spam you created.

I really don't get this argument. Browsing by "all" is akin to drinking from the firehose, people are not using the affordances that the software provided from the very beginning and then the problem is with those who are bringing content to the network?

Next you are going to tell me that the reason we should keep Lemmy small is to not break people's workflows.

the existing lemmy codebase was probably not performant enough for what you were planning anyway

Au contraire!. One of the reasons that I was creating so many different instances was precisely to avoid concentration of communities in a single instance. In Lemmy's currrent design, the communities are the chatty agents. Every comment and post becomes a message broadcast by the community. The reason that LW has become problematic in the overall network is less about the amount the user it has and more because of its communities.

But it creates a chilling effect

I just disagree, here. In fact, it feels like the opposite is the problem here. I feel like the Fediverse is so concerned about being a place for minorities and outcasts that it only accepts fringe opinions.

Mastodon is a really crappy name.

May as well be, but completely irrelevant. There are a dozen other projects providing microblogging and a Twitter-like experience. All of them failing to appeal to a more "normie" crowd.

Sorry, I reject the premise. The cartoon does not make sense in a decentralized/distributed system.

Lemmy/Mastodon/"The Fediverse" are not isolated places, but an ecosystem that can sustain many different niches.

A Lemmy community is a place. A topic-focused instance is a place. The minority here shouldn't be worried about any tyranny from the majority because they can always have their boundaries established and they can choose how permeable they are.

I missed another F, for Fun.

(Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

That was me. ;)

And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.

The one thing that I didn't get to execute properly was that I should've completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.

A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology...

1. This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
2. It's not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.

A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen

This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like "Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized". Yeah, it is true. It's not "really" decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say "so what?" and continue to use it.

I'm tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.

Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.

We are getting off-topic, but to me it seems clear that they are trying to become to the Python world what npm became to Javascript?

There is a non-negligible amount of companies making money out of services based on email, even though they don't own email as a standard.

Also, remember when VCs were giving money to every "Uber for X" pitch deck some years ago? If ActivityPub ever manages to cement itself as ubiquitous standard, you can bet that we'll see investors going after anyone saying "LinkedIn, but on ActivityPub", "Tinder, but on ActivityPub", "Etsy, but on ActivityPub", "Patreon, but on ActivityPub", "Yelp, but on ActivityPub", "Github, but on ActivityPub"...

No. It's quite easy to paint venture capitalists as these cartoonish evil entities that are plotting together against anything that might come to disrupt the status quo, but the reality is that the is no single entity out there coordinating their work. "Venture capitalists" are just a disparate number of people, all of them acting in their own self-interest, and if any of them sees the opportunity for themselves to make money on something, they will do it.

Venture Capital already knows about the Fediverse. The problem is that VCs are actually terrible at taking risks and they will only invest on things once "the market" started paying attention to it.

It’s much lower friction to say: “Hey, add me on XYZ social media app”.

only because of network effects. People are used to ask you to add them on FB or IG because literally a third of the world have an account there. Now go around asking them to add you on friendica or movim, they will probably just give you a blank stare.

The problem is less about the chart and the fact that you are taking a jump from a very short interval and trying to pass it off as something completely unprecedented.

Getting called a liar and having people try to minimize a significant trend

"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is not about calling you a liar, but how people can selectively use different data points to present information that supports their thesis or confirms their biases. I wasn't calling you a liar, I am just disagreeing with you about this being "significant".

If this growth rate holds for the next two weeks, then I'll gladly change my tune and start talking about a trend. But so emphatically making projections out of one or two data points is a fool's errand.

Sorry, I think we were talking past each other.

When you were talking about "Matrix is not a good" , I was understanding that you meant that the protocol was not suitable for it. Now I see that your issue is not with matrix itself, but with its most popular clients, because none of them (unlike Futo circles) provide any sort of unified view of the different rooms.

I understand how it could be interesting to have this type of unified view if you really care about emulating "the Facebook experience", and perhaps it wouldn't be that difficult to implement that. In practice though, I think that you'd come up with the following conclusions:

• even if Futo Circles was still around, you'd still have a major challenge in convincing the people to create an account on a Matrix server.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, most people are not interested in getting all their social connections sorted in all these different buckets.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, you'd quickly realize that most people prefer the UX of separate group chats. There simply aren't that many "circles" for most users. You'd have a circle for your close friends, another for work/school colleagues, another for some common activity like gym/chess/book club, maybe a bigger circle for your neighborhood, etc... so it doesn't really provide a lot of helping when filtering things out in a timeline. The whole thing with "Circles" is interesting (and one of the most interesting features of Google+) but one of the reasons that Google+ failed was because and the UX of "browsing through the list of groups with new messages" is good enough for most people.

Reach out to @mczachurski@mastodon.social, the developer.

Ok, I don't know how else to explain. What you are asking ("A public timeline that anyone can follow, except end-to-end encrypted") is physically impossible.

Like, really impossible. See if you spot the issue:

they won’t see each other’s stuff, just mine and whoever else they add

The wide audience I’m talking about is all the people I add

How would keep a single timeline where the messages you sent are only visible to your friends, but not visible to your friends' friends?

The answer is: you don't. You can not do that. You need to have a separate room for the contacts that you want to make your pictures available. Your contacts need each to have their own room for the contacts that they need to have available.

I’m essentially proposing a mass e2ee encryption messaging service, with a UI that amalgamates it into a single feed

To view the feed, yes you can consolidate all posts into one single view. But when you post something, you will need to define which rooms will see the content, and the message will be duplicated across the different rooms. You can bet that Futo does not gets rid of this abstraction.

it’s “public” only to people you’ve added

Which means that you have a protected room!

You mentioned you are not a programmer, so maybe you are missing one key information: it only makes sense to talk about "end-to-end encryption" when the sender knows the recipient a priori. You can not simply broadcast a message to any unspecified "wide-audience" and have it "end-to-end encrypted".

It’s not a group abstraction, at least for the user, since you’re not asking everyone to join the same group,

Yes, you are. If you want the messages to be e2ee encrypted and which can not be spied by the server owner, you are in effect asking people "come join me on this room where we will have a shared secret to exchange messages privately".

I understand that you are thinking in terms of an unified view, but this is an UX matter. If you want only a selection of people to be able to decrypt your message, you will have to add them to a group that you will have to manage it, and Matrix/XMPP already provide these mechanisms.

And I'm saying that your "end-to-end encryption" and "public timeline" requirements are conflicting. If you want e2ee, you will have to manage the rooms yourself. You can bet that even if you tried the Futo Circles client, you would still have to manage "who-can-access-what", which implies that the room/group abstraction is still there.