I'm definitely seeing the benefits of belonging to a smaller Lemmy instance today.
ruffsl @ ruffsl @programming.dev Posts 77Comments 98Joined 2 yr. ago
ruffsl @ ruffsl @programming.dev
Posts
77
Comments
98
Joined
2 yr. ago
Seems like votes are public, thus auditable for instance of origin, vote manipulation and brigading:
- YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
Although, support for more capable polling features would still be preferable.
We can defederate at any point
Could we re-federate at any point as well? Perhaps after ActivityPup establishes some form of protocol ossification, like email or sms, curbing the potential for it to be effectively owned by a majority platform? Would that take too long, and thus dissuade corporate adoption?
If we held off on supporting Facebook first, and federated with smaller governmental agencies, news outlets, academic institutions, encouraging them to host their own ActivityPup servers instead of solely relying on Twitter or Facebook for public communication, just as they already do for website and email domains, could that help speed up the ossification process?
By essentially giving FOSS platforms and protocols a longer runway before federating with Facebook, it could give ActivityPup greater time to cement more diverse stakeholders, calming the Fediverse's historic fears of repeated "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" antics, particularly when dealing with the largest FANG conglomerates on earth.
Yeah, I actually think lemmy could benefit from improved scraping and indexing. For example, it'd really help if more search engines could natively understand Lemmy's federated nature, e.g:
- Deduplicate links by prioritising results for instances hosting the community that a post was originally submitted to.
- Include and denote cross posts by recognizing order of submission timestamp and prioritizing popularity via vote ratios, comment counts, and lurker click-through traffic.
- Do the same deduplication and prioritization across instances, but for comments as well.
Another use case besides search engines would be for internet archive projects, helping to preserve historic internet content even in the face of lemmy instances falling offline and disappearing. For example, much knowledge was lost to us due to the Twitter APIoplicips and Reddit Blackout: E.g:
Most of the above will only ever be possible due to improved scraping or even federation APIs.
Related discussions and relevant news:
- Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
- Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook
- Lemmy.World Admins: "Watching Like A hawk, with our fingers on the block button"
- Does Lemm.ee plan to de-federate from instagram threads?
Related articles and opinion pieces:
- https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
- counter argument
- https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/
- rebuttals to counter
- https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- historic precedent and prevailing trends with open protocols
- https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
- argument for local communities and against universal social networks
Hope the SREs can get back to a quite workday soon.
Looks like you linked to the !devops@programming.dev post directly. You can also use the cross-post button on the original post, just next to the star/save icon. That'll reuse the original URL that the original post used, then also auto populate the body with a link directly to the original post, along with quoted markdown of the original body text.
The nice thing about using the same URL for cross-posts is that Limmy-UI will also include hints below the title of posts with names of the communities cross posted to, allowing readers to discover even more cross-posted locations to jump into other threads, even from other instances.
Not sure if the Lemmy community has established a consistent etiquette for linking, as I think currently the URLs have to string match exactly for cross-posts to be highlighted. URL parameters and shorteners can throw a wrench into that feature. Would be nice to support aliasing across common variants, such as YouTube share and time parames.
Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:
... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...
Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.
I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- etc
But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.
Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it’s a risk we have to take.
If we had to white board a decision matrix on Facebook federation, what would be the number of risk's and rewards for either approach? How would you weight or quantify them? Just trying to approach this from a little more of an analytical angle, given most of us are developers anyway.
Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
I'd be interested to hear how Facebook would seek to alleviate those concern, regardless of weather such concerns are realisticly founded or not, as social networks inherently deal with humans and public opinions.
- What kind of technical solution from Facebook do you think would best help appease concerned users in the Fediverse?
- Could there be a technical solution to resolve the social dilemma of (real or appearance of) power imbalance between Facebook and the rest of the Fediverse?
I'm trying to think of how Facebook could gracefully relinquish control over its platform while guaranteeing Facebook could not later subvert those concessions. Would that ever be in Facebook's best interests? I guess improved user trust and positive PR could help abate the calls for regulation and monopoly busting.
There are skeptic rumours that Facebook is hoping to leverage the Fediverse as a relief valve for regulatory pressure due to EU's DMA:
- Theory: the only reason Meta cares about the fediverse / ActivityPub is so that threads isn’t labeled a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act”
- https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
Looks like they posted the video process timelapse of that artwork here:
I'll have to checkout their webcomic Pepper&Carrot. Thanks for the reference!
This also ties well into @canpolat@programming.dev 's recent post yesterday, about validating or verifying emails. Check this timestamp and yesterday's post:
Just need to put a JIT compiled language logo inside the blue car and caption it as "Containerise once, ship anywhere".
Image Transcription: Meme
A photo of an opened semi-trailer unloading a cargo van, with the cargo van rear door open revealing an even smaller blue smart car inside, with each vehicle captioned as "macOS", "Linux VM" and "Docker" respectively in decreasing font size. Onlookers in the foreground of the photo gawk as a worker opens each vehicle door, revealing a scene like that of russian dolls.
I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! 
Out in the wild? Perhaps quite a few. For example, for teleoperated robotic thoracic surgeries, I imagine medical grade HID should mandate safety certified hardware that doesn't rely on electrically noisy mechanical potentiometers, subject to Dead zone drift, or non-deterministic dead man behavior under failure modes. Although I'm certain there's various reasons not to use hall effect sensing devices even within the same facility as MRI machines.
Textual transcription of meme: (two panels)
First panel: laughing group of people gathered around a phone, captioned:
"The Internet laughing at the Titan submersible using a Logitech controller"
Second panel: the Awkward Look Monkey Puppet meme, captioned:
"The robotics community"
Related: [META] We should help transcribe our memes for RBlind!
I suspect this comment was posted to spell out the meme for those unfamiliar, but I wanted to thank you for transcribing it into text for those that also may be blind or visually impaired. With the loss of r/TranscribersOfReddit , I salute your contribution! Please keep at it!
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/23/23771396/reddit-subreddit-community-transcribers-accessibility
Yep, I've seen reporting of Navy's using them for controlling periscopes on submarines (now that most are drive by wire), or Air forces using them for piloting drones, as well as for teleoperated robotic thoracic surgeries.
The widespread user familiarity and benefits in transferable hand coordination skills with common gaming based HID economics is hard to refute. Although, I'm guessing the market for safety certified joysticks will uptick.
You know how folks inherit tools, workshops, or auto projects from parents and family? Stuff like wood working equipment, sewing machines, or whatever tools of the trade. It's got me wondering, what's it like for children that inherit their parents' codebase, computers, keyboards. Surely with the growth of the tech sector and job market, compared to half a century prior, this could be a growing re-occurrence.
E.g. like the entire premise of this YouTube channel titled "Inheritance Machining": https://youtu.be/hearLttbrLo
For example, my grandfather worked for IBM, and my family recalls growing up surrounded by punch cards around the house. Of course that form of programming only lasted so long, so the next generation was unlikely to reuse the same tools of the trade, but as tech stacks have matured and interfaces standardized, what are the chances are that folk's children will use the same Linux kernel modules, custom mechanical keyboards or desktop chassis that their parents used today?
I came across this community, which it reminded me of your choice of avatar, and figured you'd be interested: