This is silly. The web is not in decline and Google is not at fault. Most of the web is garbage, and Google helps us find the information buried in a sea of ads and repetitively copied/reworded content. We are moving to a world where putting up a plagiarized page with tons of ads will not be profitable. The sooner that day arrives, the better.
and you know why all the copying/rewording or why all recipes include three paragraphs about how the author first discovered the dish during their trip to Toscania in 1997? because they’re trying to game Google’s requirements and get included in their search results.
Some parts of the Mastodon community are hostile towards VC Funding, AI, and cryptocurrency, particularly because of their entanglement with enshittification and hype cycles. These people are worried that this relationship will lead Mastodon down an unhealthy path that prioritizes the wrong things. It’s a totally understandable concern, but it’s important to remember the mission and purpose of Mastodon’s US entity: to manage and raise donations in the United States. This is not an executive department making decisions for the Mastodon project, and they aren’t shareholders expecting to make some kind of financial returns. A healthy board requires a diverse set of opinions and experiences that educate the real decision-makers so they can get multiple perspectives on problems they need to solve. It seems like this board’s variety of backgrounds has been set up to do exactly that.
…This really doesn’t soothe my concerns at all! Actually, up until right now, I hadn’t even been paying enough attention to have concerns. So… if anything, this article has inspired concerns I didn’t already have.
It’s like if the server at a restaurant came up to you and said “now I know what you’re thinking… we did in fact recently hire some cannibals. But they only work in the business office, not the kitchen!”
Yeah I had no idea. Now I have one and I’m immediately considering moving to a different fedi microblog platform. I’ve already lost quite a bit of trust for Rochko due to his extreme eagerness to federate with Meta.
*Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself. *
I had actually read this article the day it came out, but I didn’t think too much of that paragraph until a couple days later at a dinner full of folks working on decentralization. Someone brought up that quote, though paraphrased it slightly differently, claiming Casey was saying that Google was actively putting* the web into managed decline*.
Whether or not that’s very different (and maybe it’s not), both should spark people to realize that this is a problem.
Our bots have sucked up everyone’s sites, so screw your web we got it all at the Evil Store.
I think you should talk about accessibility here, and everywhere else you visit on the fediverse. Especially here though. Accessibility isn’t just an ethical impetus to make community spaces accessible to everyone not just ~90% of people.
I am not dyslexic but I use the Open Dyslexic font all the time because it is easy to read when my brain’s word processing neurons are totally fried from a stressful day.
I am not color blind but I love color blind options in games for the UI since it often simplifies the AI’s color scheme down to a point that makes me feel more relaxed.
I am not deaf, but I love closed captions as they let me watch things at any volume, and allow me to process what people are saying better.
I am not a wheelchair user, but I can’t count the amount of times wheelchair ramps have been useful and helpful in my life (especially when moving big bulky things on wheels).
I am not someone who typically gets powerfully triggered by things that evoke a past trauma, but I find content warnings have massively improved my mental health when using social media because they bring agency into the microblogging/twitter form, an agency I never thought about not having, where I don’t get ambushed by real world, depressing news that I want to learn about but need to check in with myself before processing (especially if I went onto mastodon for cute cat pics, not to catch up on the latest shitty thing).
I am not queer, but every single fucking piece of accessibility accommodation that queer people and their allies have fought for has meaningfully made my life better. You know what drops the bottom out of toxic masculinity violently forcing men into super unhealthy and emotionally stunted existences? A bunch of queer and proud people drilling holes into the foundations of binary gender and blowing it the fuck up so toxic men are too busy panicking about trans people to keep building the widely accepted definition of masculinity towards even more toxic places.
I am ADHD and the world shits on actually accommodating me everyday, to the point that loved ones hurt me constantly even when they are trying to do the right thing because that hatred of ADHD people goes so deep down into the US protestant work ethic hellscape… that it is like a really bad trip that people don’t seem to be able to escape even if they wanted to.
I know what it is like to not be accommodated at a very deep level. It is violence.
I also know what it is like to be in a community that prioritizes accommodating the “edge cases” of humans (I mean that in a kind way), i.e. making sure the people most sensitive to overstimulation have a space they can retreat to and chill for a bit, or making sure the person in the wheelchair can access the building, or making sure that images have image descriptions for blind people. It is missing the point to lament “oh but these people are outliers from the dataset of humans, we shouldn’t waste too much time accommodating them”. Accommodation is HOW we innovate and evolve the Fediverse, and the barometer for how well we are doing can be almost directly translated into how well the Fediverse accommodates those with disabilities and specific needs (and also how suffocatingly white a space we make the Fediverse by tone policing black and brown people from life experience’s we don’t know shit about).
It is funny how people will readily agree that the challenges NASA has faced and overcome with putting a measly handful of spaceships and humans into space has had many indirect, but nonetheless MAJOR benefits to our society in the development of technologies that went on to be useful for entirely different contexts. The challenges of making the Fediverse (or any community space) accessible are no different except though they are far more diverse and far more vital.
At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter.
@fossilesque This is really neat! I really like being able to be on a completely different instance and commenting/favoriting from other federated instances.
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