SorteKanin @ SorteKanin @feddit.dk

Posts

15

Comments

1,655

Joined

2 yr. ago

almost no defederation

I don't think this is really a good thing. Most people don't want to bother curating their feed and if they get lots of bad stuff from instances that ought to be defederated, then they will leave.

I don't understand the benefits.

users don’t have to scratch their head on if I am the same person or not across these platforms

They already don't need to worry about that. Presumably if you could log in with your Lemmy user on Mastodon, your user domain would still refer to your Lemmy instance, just as it does currently. That's besides the fact that I have no idea how this mechanism of logging into different sites would even work.

theoretically, someone following my feed can get updates on what I do on multiple platforms

They can already do that with the current mechanism. It's only a problem with Lemmy not supporting various other forms of social media concepts that prevents you from writing, say, a toot (microblog).

It sounds like what you want is just a more generic ActivityPub instance that supports more forms of social constructs.

Aside from all that, there's what other people have mentioned. Grouping users on instances has all kinds of moderation benefits.

I don't think a nomadic identity is the same as an instance-less identity. I could definitely see users migrating from one instance to another but that's very different from a user not being associated with any particular instance at any given time, which is what I think the OP is suggesting.

the ability to take over/migrate them from other instances, so that if an instance goes down, people can still keep their identity

I can definitely see user migration from one ActivityPub server to another being a possibility, but I really don't see how that can happen if one of the servers is down. That's too late then. If you could migrate a user from a server that is down, what prevents you from migrating a user from a server that is still up and doesn't want to do the migration? You could just pretend that it is down and do the migration anyway? I have no idea how that would work.

What do you mean by "federates identities with"? I mean users are already federated, you can see my profile on your own instance. What is the mechanism you're talking about?

What's the difference between a boost and a favourite?

forget what’s real, I want to write a story with humans interacting with aliens that’s consistent with what we see now.

You just have to make it a bit sci fi. Like say it's the year 2400 or whatever and Earth achieves radio contact with another civilization. Maybe they're 100 light years away so you'd jump 200 years every time a message is sent and returned. Not sure how you'd tell that story but that's the most realistic thing I can think of.

Are you really saying that "aliens have not been to Earth" and "aliens have been to Earth" are equal when it comes to speculation? You would need a lot of evidence to prove the latter and there's a lot of theory to support the former.

our current theories are probably downright primitive to any advanced life form and there’s undoubtedly blind spots in modern day science

"All due respect", this is pure speculation. We may very well be at a close approximation of physics and have a reasonably accurate understanding of the limitations. Or we may not be. But there is not really much of a reason to think that what we know now about the limitations of the universe (like the speed of light) should somehow be upended by new discoveries or theories.

"Something" is much more likely to be aircraft from Earth or atmospheric illusions or hundreds of other possibilities and the probability of it being actual aliens is basically 0%.

Why won’t the US gov tell us or show us everything they have?

Isn't it also funny that all these UFO sightings almost exclusively happen in the US, the country seemingly obsessed with UFOs? And other countries basically don't see them at all?

Also isn't it weird that despite giving literally everyone and their kid a smartphone with high resolution cameras, we still haven't gotten any convincing footage of any alien UFOs? You'd think if there were aliens, someone would've filmed them by now (hint: there are no aliens on earth to film).

Doesn’t that make you at least a little curious?

Yes, it is easy to fall into this "I want to believe" trap. Of course it makes us curious. But that should not blind you from what is real.

Using "server" instead of "instance" is misleading. An instance could use many servers behind the scenes. It may be more appropriate to simply call it a "domain" instead, cause that's kinda all it is. But instance is also well-understood.

If you really wanted to unify the terminology, you would call communities and magazines "groups", as this is what they are called in ActivityPub. It is a group of all the people following the community.

But I don't think terminology unification is a goal in itself. Different clients and implementations can use different terminology and that's a good thing. There's no need to force anyone to use a certain term. There's no need to nail down language like that - it is a fluid, evolving thing after all.

imagining someone traveling using wormholes or other technologies humans have no clue about

Our current physical theories suggest that there is no "shortcut" to travelling between the stars and it will likely not become any easier with future technology. There is no way around light speed and conservation of momentum.

I don't doubt that alien civilizations would want to visit if they knew we existed - we certainly would want to visit another civilization if we knew it existed. But the problem is that it's just not physically feasible. The most likely scenario is that we achieve some kind of radio communication with another civilization.

Honestly even centuries is like... a crazy timescale for space travel. There's so many things that can go wrong and there's nothing saving you in space. Generation ships is a cool idea but it is that - just an idea, at this point.

No amount of technology will let you go faster than light. There's no reason to believe that technology will just keep expanding and allow us to somehow travel easily to other star systems. Actually our current understanding of physics seems to suggest that we might never be able to do that.

Just because we want it to happen doesn't mean it will or that we should think it will. Hope is not equal to truth, unfortunately.

I touched on this a bit here. But basically I think the fermi paradox essentially just tells us that life, multicellular life and intelligent life are much rarer than we think they are.

I don't know if nuclear engines would change too much when it comes to space travel between the stars. I mean let's say you could reach even 1% of the speed of light (which is already bonkers honestly). That's still quite slow all things considered. Just to cover, say 1% of the Milky Way's diameter (100.000 light years) would be a distance of 1000 light years. With 1% light speed, that would take you 100.000 years. That's simply not viable.

More of a conjecture that fell out of some math, but can’t exist in the real world.

To be fair, you could have said the same thing about black holes at some point. But even if wormholes exist, they may not be "constructable" or anything of that sort. It may just as easily be a hole from nowhere to nowhere and you can't change it or move it, it's just there.

I know that feel. I also want to believe. Contact is one of my favourite movies. You should watch it, it's very good. But it's fiction.

We can't let our hopes blind us from the truth. I also wish warp drives would be real and I wish I would win the lottery tomorrow. But neither of those things are true.

There’s advanced aliens out there. They know about us.

1. There might be advanced aliens out there, but very likely not within the distance our signals have travelled so far.
2. They almost certainly don't know about us, because again, our signals have probably not even reached them.

If you ask me, Fermi's paradox is much more likely to overestimate how likely advanced life is. It may be that multicellular life is just extraordinarily rare and that Earth is essentially unique in this aspect, or maybe it has only happened in a few other places. Even then, intelligent life could be another extremely rare occurrence.

Personally I’m a developer, so I care a lot about integrating parts of my development stack. A lot of those things don’t “just work” on Windows, or even Mac, so I’m happy to stick with Linux instead.

I'm also a developer, but I'm also a user, depending on what I'm doing. And this is a very poor excuse for Linux having bad UX.

Linux shouldn't only be for developers, it should be for everyone.

Wormholes is a purely theoretical idea, we have not observed any. There are no scientifically viable FTL drives that fit our current theories. Something like an Alcubierre drive would require exotic matter with negative mass, which we also have no idea if is even possible. It probably isn't possible.

Because if not, I’d say we can’t that for certain.

This is Russell's teapot. You can't say "we can't rule it out, so maybe it's true!". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Aliens visiting earth is a super duper extraordinary claim. You need extremely convincing evidence to go against the pure common sense that the distances are so vast that visiting other star systems (let alone the solar system) is near impossible.