Pxtl

Pxtl, 5 months ago

This is like saying “my email provider should block all emails from Gmail”.

And they can hoover your data right now. Like, you think bots aren’t spidering the site already? It’s a public website.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

“everyone who disagrees with me is a chud”

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Let’s be honest, Tesla is the new BMW, the brand associated with self-important upper-middle-class management pricks.

“BMW always stops with a jerk” has been a joke since before Tesla existed, and now Tesla has inherited the throne.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

I’m over 40 and slowing down with age, so I do 1.3 for most podcasts. I usually leave video at 1X but I’m generally doing something else at the same time like folding laundry or gaming.

Honestly, getting old sucks. Like, I used to play Lemmings a lot and hum the theme song to myself constantly. But I hadn’t played the game in 20 years. I heard the song recently, and the tempo sounded twice as fast as I remembered, so much that I fired up emulators and whatnot to confirm… yes, that’s really how fast the song is.

The song didn’t get faster, I got slower.

Pxtl, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

That’s an awful lot of words to say “yes, that’s me”.

Get some help.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

1. Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
2. Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
3. It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

How many users did Jabber/XMPP have in 2004?

recommending everyone I knew to switch to it

I think we’ve isolated the problem. Everyone is aware of the risk this time. nobody is going to abandon their Fediverse accounts for Threads.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

I, for one, support the right of every instance to federate with whoever they choose to federate with.

So do I.

I just think their decisions might be dumb.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Exactly. Any analysis of “embrace extend extinguish” WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?

Pxtl, 5 months ago

See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Doesn’t it require a whole mess of Docker instances and some kind of orchestrator to host? Or is it easier to stand up on a single server now? I haven’t looked into it in a year or so.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/33a8b983-4758-46a1-90f5-f173bbe6e9ee.png

Pxtl, 5 months ago

ITT:

“Nobody understands fedipact, Jabber, activitypub, Ruby, embrace/extend/extinguish, mastodon, lemmy, Java, federation, Kubernetes, XMPP, Docker, architecture, carburetors, Ikebana, midwifery, Filipino stickfighting, Zoroastrianism, hegelian philosophy, or XML but me, and therefore you’re all morons with nothing to contribute to this conversation”.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

a lot of folks here naively think Meta will for some reason handle things more ethically.

Yeah it’s way easier to win arguments when you make up your opponent’s position in your mind

Nobody thinks Meta will be ethical.

We just think federation will be good for the Fediverse regardless.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

As much as I prefer the market-based bottom-up solutions provided by carbon tax, the advantage of green infrastructure is that it’s sticky.

The conservatives can destroy the carbon tax with the stroke of a pen. They won’t destroy the wind generators and the charging stations that have already been fully implemented.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

The problem is that the correct way to do this that lets the economy itself find the most efficient and effective way to eliminate emissions? That’s carbon pricing. No need for the government to pick winners and losers, just make everybody pay for the emissions and then businesses and individuals will invest in green solutions because nobody likes wasting money.

And despite that being the economics-oriented market-based, scientific, conservative solution, the “Conservatives” freaking hate it.

And they can destroy it with the stroke of a pen.

So the Liberals need to find solutions that are sticky. Things that can’t be destroyed with a pen. Things like charging infrastructure, and insulation, and green power. Things made of concrete and wires.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.

Pxtl, 5 months ago

The highlight on new comments is ugly as sin. Do not want.