Recovering skooma addict.
Okay I watched the few seconds of video at the end of a three-hour long video apparently about Facebook where he mentions “federated social media using open decentralized technologies such as activitypub” as it is known. The ratio of time and effort he’s inclined to devote to each topic speaks for itself. My understanding of what he says: “Sounds complicated. I’m not touching it until all my friends are already there.”
I’m not saying you’re a nazi, but if you think the main problem with social media is that everyone calls you a nazi you should consider the possibility that you might be.
Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.
It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.
It’s still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn’t block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.
They’re complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?
As I’ve only just recently written here, blog comments are not social media, and I think such things should remain separate.
So it’s definitely not social media but it is the social web? I don’t see any comments section at all over there. Some of these “indieweb” guys are pretty weird.
Not many rocks don’t have some oxygen atoms in them, so I chose to include all the astronomical “metals” in my estimate. Interesting to see how little difference it makes.
Most of the sun is hydrogen and helium, which is not the kind of stuff that rocks are made of. Wikipedia says that 0.0122 of it is heavier elements, which might more often be found in rocks, so if we imagine it’d be possible to make one big rock out of all that somehow, its mass would be 1.2% that of the sun = 2.4 * 10^28 kg, or 4000 times more than Earth.
Comic strip: Makes fun of American neo-nazis.
Nuanced opinion: Some of my friends look kind of like that guy. Are you calling me a nazi? Okay then, let’s go, time for a civil war.
Typical call to the AI safety hotline:
Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…
It is a fair position in the sense that it’s technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should’ve had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.
If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now “it’s an ongoing process” as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.
If you were a threads user, you’d be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.
It does not require compromising your free software ideals
By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I’ve come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I’m not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn’t expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.
I don’t think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you’ve chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.
It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it’s too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.
Hi vegans! I’m not really inclined to go anywhere near c/vegan while you’re working all this stuff out so while you’re here let me just take this opportunity to say I admire your diet and stuff. Glad you’re around, hope it goes well.
… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.
I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.
I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.
That’s the argument. Do they, though? I sure didn’t when I first signed up.