Yes the constant meta (and Meta) discussion here is tedious, and often much worse, but what you have to realize is that this isn’t just a social network, it’s a left/progressive political project. I don’t know how many left/progressive political orgs you’ve been involved in, but let me tell you, they are kind of known for endless, agonizing talk about process, factions, outside threats, inside threats, strategy, grievances, etc. And if you have a solution for that, you just might save the world.
@misc
You may get push back on the idea that the fediverse is an “explicitly left wing” project. But I think you might be right. And it’s already “baked in” to the very structure and concept of an open protocol based network.
We are refusing to automatically aggregate our users and their data to be monetized. We just want to socialize! We aren’t exploiting that human desire to connect to generate ad revenue or data to mine— or a social graph that can be sold and exploited.
This is why there is such a mismatch when trying to fit the fediverse into the “social media company” mould. It’s like if you ran a logging company that never cut down any trees and just planted them instead— because it’s not a logging company— it’s a forest preservation club. “wow you are planting so many trees— when do you harvest?”
“well if we needed some lumber we have some trees marked, but we don’t need any now”
“This place is a failure of a lumber company”
"Voting with your feet" is a backstop not a first resort. The first resort should be democratic decision making. We should not accept instances where the users don't collectively have ultimate authority over policy and defederation decisions.
@exchgr The former. I think there should be a site where you can sign up for an account, one click upload of your archives from Twitter, Mastodon, or wherever, and it displays them with pretty styling, and searchability if you choose. And the software running all this should be open source, so you can export your archival account itself and take it to another web host at will.
@dalereardon That's not the only way to look at it though. When mastodon.social federates with Threads, that will potentially create risks for instances that federate with mastodon.social even if they block Threads -- there's a simple example here. So it's very reasonable for other instances to say "if you're doing something that may put people on our instance (or their data) at risk we're going to prioritize their safety and defederate from you."
"the purpose of The Pact is to embolden instances to commit to blocking project92/barcelona/threads. a lotta peeps were already talking bout preemptively blocking it since the march leaks, me included. and the idea popped into my head that maybe if we had like, y'know, a thingy peeps could sign to show their support for it... it might weaken that argument that it's like pointless or whatever, and might make that choice easier to make"
And it very much succeeded at that! Of course she was also clear that this wasn't why others signed the Pact, and many people pushing for defederating Threads (whether or not they signed the pact) articulated a whole range of reasons. For example in Consent and the fediverse@onepict says
"By supporting the fedipact we are signalling that we don't consent to interacting with a known abusive actor who revels in their power."
@misc it would be interesting to see some of the descriptions that framed it as coervice. Maybe they were reacting to statements that were phrased in a coercive way, which would also be interesting to see. But it wouldn't surprise me if they were projecting something into it that wasn't really there. This happens a lot -- @welshpixie's Toxic Manosphere of Fedi links out to an example where an instance admin asserting a boundary as a "bully", and @oliphant's Defederating Universeodon has an example where a different instance admin describes defederation as "abuse". So it's quite possible that people initially describing the FediPact as "coercion" were similarly mischaracterizing it, and then others just repeated that description without checking it.
@misc This seems like the sort of thing the network needs defenses against regardless. Like, I guess I can see the scenario where federating with Threads leads to a chain of events that causes brigaders to sign up for mastodon.social—but that could totally happen without federating with Threads. It doesn't even have to happen on Threads or an ActivityPub platform at all. LOTT could post on Twitter and tell people to sign up for mastodon.social.
Having worked with FB as a corporate entity (well, dealt with. Worked implies they did anything) I don't think they care about defederation as long as they have a place to send all the "inappropriate" stuff while preserving user access to it.
Of all the Twitter features intentionally omitted here, I have to hand it to them on one in particular: that you can't directly monitor someone's faves.
@misc Hell No, but it’s the worst thing when you have to tell new people not to use it bc it doesn’t even have the most basic functions like giving you an indicator that you got a reply/fav whatever.
People like to say that "AI" is different from crypto in that there are actual useful applications, and that's true. But the vast majority of people you're expecting to come up with those applications are the same people who were just trying to build products on the blockchain.
@misc The prevailing wisdom on crypto always seemed backward to me: Many people said that yes Bitcoin et al. were silly but the “real” and “serious” applications were in the underlying blockchain tech. In reality, Bitcoin is as useful as the blockchain gets (not very lol), way more practical than using a blockchain for logistics or whatever. “AI” could be similar—maybe ChatGPT is as good as it gets.
I kind of understood this, but it's getting clearer to me. The kind of people who build good thoughtful products are going to be disproportionately put off by AI and the surrounding culture, leaving the field largely to scammers and magical thinkers. And the ensuing flood of shit isn't neutral. Actual good stuff gets lost. I really think this kind of hype is bad for real innovation.
This seem fishy to anyone else? We don’t know anything about the design of this AI system. It seems like it wouldn’t have been able to come up with these strategies unless it was more or less coaxed. (Key concepts/associations planted in its training set, or basically run off an LLM that includes stories like this…) https://mastodon.social/@craignewmark/110470812091221525
If a {human roleplaying as a reinforcement trained AI,genie,Czech golem,gift-giving Magi,monkey's paw} is given a poorly thought out incentive structure, they can game their way to a max score while still being maximally uncooperative
This is a truth universally acknowledged
It's absurd to report this as "an AI drone killed its operator in simulation" when it's really a "be careful what you wish for" 500-year-old story
I have described bluesky as a "mastodon instance in denial" and I largely stand by that. If everyone on Bluesky mass migrated to a Mastodon instance there wouldn't be an issue, and I think we would all be better off. That would also be by default "opt out" for most instances here.
@seachanger In general I want people to define their allegiances around meaningful human communities not artificial boundaries. That’s what appealed to me about Snarfed’s “moderate people, not code” essay. We need better ways to define those meaningful communities within and across protocols, and that necessarily involves reducing the relevance of those less important boundaries. Not sure this is the best way to do that, but I appreciate the impulse.
@seachanger Absolutely. The way I’ve structured it in my mind is, we haven’t really figured out the ideal way to do that yet, so the best thing we can do is hold open the space where it’s possible to experiment, and make that space more conducive to such experiments. My intuition is that small-b bridging the communities of Mastodon and Bluesky is helpful to that endeavor.
Volunteering to adopt new users who are lost or confused. Meaning I’ll recommend people to follow, and answer questions. I’ll delete this when I’ve reached my capacity, but feel free to boost or copy paste to your own accounts.
@misc Hi. I’m currently using mastodon on the chrome browser on my iPhone. I’d like recommendations for an iPhone app. Also looking for breaking news accounts to follow. Thanks.
@misc I'm new to mastodon and this form of social media in general. I've followed a few people, but I really want to find people who are posting really engaging content. Also breaking news. If you have a recommendation for an android app, that would be cool, too.
@exchgr Yeah, that’s basically the idea, I didn’t even get to that part though because I didn’t screw the cap on tight enough. Also wasn’t used to this inverted technique everyone is saying is the way.
Hey, in the early days of Twitter we had "tweetups" where enthusiasts with nothing else in common but their geography would just ... meet up somewhere. (I actually have been reunited here with several old friends I met in those days)
Covid complicates it somewhat but I think it might be just about time to try something like that for Mastodon. We have enough people - but not quite too many - for it to make sense. I'd be down to try!
Collecting anecdotes, data, and anecdata on people and orgs who’ve left Twitter and found higher engagement from ostensibly fewer followers. This is in preparation for a renewed pitch to the org I’m in, to begin the process of x-trication. Boosts appreciated!
After a year on Mastodon, I have nearly as many followers as I had on Twitter after 12 years. None of my posts ever got a thousand retweets on Twitter, and that has happened here.
Ongoing problem with this platform is that it's so polite that, with rare exceptions, you can't vent about a big account's bad takes without standing out as an antisocial jerkwad. So you just have to seethe internally, denied the reassurance that other people are seeing this shit. *yes I've complained about this before, and yes it's also (and probably primarily) a good thing
@misc Ahem, it's very much a boy's club here in many ways, and very much a tech guy assumed to be master-of-the-universe type thing. This very much replicates the worst kinds of sexism in the business world (not to mention the ridiculous, pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism type philosophy that business-think is rooted in that makes everything hierarchical and transactional). This is business male alpha/beta type behaviour (though the alpha/beta thing has no grounding in science either, as always business philosophy/economics/capitalist thinking continues to be astrology for men who think they're hyper-rational). That kind of passive aggression has a very business world middle management vibe to it (women can embody it too, obviously, since it's about being socialized to function in corporate and social hierarchies in ways that avoid punishment for being direct or challenging the hierarchy).
Yes there are women and queer people who participate, speak up (or among ourselves) and who are (often quietly) building and talking about things. And there are some privileged men here who are actively listening, learning and supporting other voices (in inclusive non-condescending ways) but it's really hard to avoid just how old White and male this space can be and how that plays out socially and in power dynamics (we saw that recently with how people from minority communities voicing concerns about Threads were treated as if they were hysterical by privileged men who have decided they're the power brokers and deciders for the fediverse, an absurd proposition in and of itself and they make it very clear how uncomfortable they are in non-hierarchical contexts....it can be difficult to step back from power and unelected "leadership" when one simply assumes they should be in that position and "earned" it somehow!). We really do need to talk about power dynamics when we talk about racism, sexism/femmephobia, ableism and bigotry because bigotry is ALL about power and you can't talk about decentralizing power without, well, talking about power, how it's shared, who has it and who doesn't, how it can be distributed more equally, systemic ways power works, the cultural aspects, how capitalism needs and creates hierarchical systems built on oppressing certain people via class, gender, ethnicity/skin colour, etc. Just like you can't get rid of racism or sexism with tokenism, tokenism is just the hierarchy protecting itself buy making a cosmetic change but no systemic change.
@LALegault I've just very actively worked to make my experience here less White cishet male like I do with all social media (so it better reflects my real world social circles, which do include quite a few people who work in tech). But I'm old enough to have always been fighting against gender stereotypes and the patriarchy and I used to play in punk rock bands so I'm very used to being aggressively female and vocal in often very male spaces 😂 As well as navigating power in more covert ways too, obviously. But, yeah, I'm a pushy broad and I have sharp elbows I strategically deploy if I need to make room for myself or someone else who isn't being heard. I'm also pretty dedicated to the idea of the fediverse's potential and see it as something we need to build and shape through participation, which is one reason I have loud opinions about it (also because I see the fediverse as a potential social lab for real democracy and egalitarianism).
@wx1g It feels hotter to me, but that’s probably mostly because the air conditioning is broken in my car. Also the wildfire smoke, and like you said the humidity, makes the outdoors just feel inhospitable in general. Yuck.
@misc I don't need to visit Steam Works, just step out of my very air-conditioned apartment. It feels like a summer I spent on Virginia's eastern shore.