Not a solution. Defeats the point of decentralisation, putting most (like 90%+) users in one instance. Big instance is sold to Venture Capital Firm because a bunch of amateur moderators call moderate the whole of twitter… and just like that enshitification shall commence.
Perhaps… But how exactly?
Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?
BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.
a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.
the focus should be on figuring out how to explain it to people in a sensible way.
And that is the thing I have been struggling with and if the major instances looked visually distinct it would make it easier to not confuse them. But yeah, the fediverse has a marketing problem. We need to get people with marketing skills involved.
What do I think? I think it’s normal to have wallpapers that aren’t related to the kernel of you OS and I’m struggling to make sense of how people setting their wallpaper to something they like could possibly be a problem.
For example, I don’t use Gmail and I run my own personal Mastodon instance using masto.host, this doesn’t stop me communicating with people on Gmail or major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social.
I mentioned Gmail because, when a single instances holds something like 95% of the users, that gives them a lot of power. If Gmail decided to de-federate from you… you are kinda screwed. That’s my concern. Although, as you said, that is still better than a fully centralized platform.
Sorry for the long, poorly organized response. I just had a bunch of thoughts on this that I wanted to get of my head
The thing I have noticed is that the fediverse does not have an elevator pitch. It is really hard to explain things in simple terms.
Usually, when just simply trying to make an account, people expect to simply go to a website, create account and done, you are in.
While in the fediverse it is like:
And the user is like:
And them they get lectured for 10+ minutes over some tech concepts that look alien to them.
And now they will have to receive another 10+ minute long lecture on the flaws of the centralized social media.
20+ minutes worth of lecture, just so they can use a social media platform. If they hear they whole lecture, and understand it, they will probably give the fediverse a try, but if they don’t because they got overwhelmed with information from your lectures they won’t even try.
And all of this and I still haven’t explained a single feature of the platform itself.
We need to come up with an elevator pitch that gives people some clue of what federation is.
I know what some might be thinking: “Why do they need to know what federation is?” Well yes, I could just say, go to [big Mastodon instance here] and create an account. Cool, they are using Mastodon.
But inevitably, this will happen: Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”. And now they come to me for tech support (because I was the one who introduced them to mastodon), and I end up having to explain federation anyways.
Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.
Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:
No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.
Now that I’m writing this I’m realizing that this seems to be an UI problem: The instances look to similar to be immediately recognizable as distinct and that’s confusing. Therefore we should work towards ensuring that instance, or at least the big ones, have a distinct appearance, their own “brand”, so they can be seen as distinct so that the example scenario I showed earlier doesn’t happen.
Or maybe I’m over-complicating things… Maybe it’s as easy as: “It kinda works like email. On email, you can go to a number of different sites, like gmail and outlook and send mail to anyone. Mastodon is also like that, there are many websites, each one with their own rules and mod teams. You can join any of them and see post from people from the other sites.”
But even this explanation has a problem: It does not explain de-federation. If they end up trying to follow someone who is on an instance their main instance as de-federated, they won’t be able to find them and they won’t know why. Most are not familiar with email de-federation as most only ever need to interact with the big instances which all federate with each other.
I guess my problem is that, by simplifying things so that non-tech people can understand, they will end up running into the intricacies of federation and not know what to do.
Also, if people don’t understand federation, we will end up with a Gmail situation: Everybody is on the same one instance. Understanding the need for this separation of Mastodon into different instances can be hard. If we simply tell people to go to the big instance, that’s what they will do. And then we end up with Gmail.
Federation and separation into smaller communities is a good thing, but it can hard to explain how and why.
I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.
The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.
perhaps the federated nature of Mastodon could be its greatest strength as well.
I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.
The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.
One of the reasons why I like Mastodon is precisely because I want to interact with more of a niche community on a federated platform.
I agree. Mastodon being niche isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
basically immediately sold out to crypto people.
Wait what? I know very little about BlueSky and even less about the people behind it, so I didn’t know that. Could you send me a link to more info?
A pattern which seems to repeat itself many times: An accusation proves to be, in reality, a confession.
Philosophy is fine and all but we can’t forget that from a practical standpoint, all this philosophizing is useless. We can’t live our day to day lives operating under the belief that the material world doesn’t exist and using The Problem Of Knowledge as a way to dismiss empirical evidence by stating that we can’t be sure if the material world even exist is impractical and useless. Remember: Philosophy is completely useless. The only value you will find in it is the development of critical thinking skills.
Just imagine if a murdered caught red handed could get away scoot free by just saying “Hey, you can prove the material world exist, therefore you can prove the victim ever existed!”
It’s the problem of knowledge all over again. Something which philosophers have been debating for centuries. But I highly doubt you have studied any of it.
That whole thing of “facts are just opinions” is nothing more than the devaluing of empirical evidence and turning observable facts into a matter of opinion, turning any and all political discussion into a shouting match where nothing ever comes of it because “it’s just my opinion”. This propaganda tactic is called “The Fire hose of Falsehood”.
I could go on and on about the nature of knowledge and the evolution of science, but I highly doubt you would care as you do not seem to know even the most basic things about The Problem of Knowledge and choose to go the self-contradictory skeptic route of “Knowledge doesn’t exist”.
Edit: I would just like to add that just because our sense are 100% reliable that doesn’t mean that everything is false.
This kinda stuff should be opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Just think of how many people don’t even know this is happening, or that there even is an opt-out.
Modern day Russia ≠ USSR.
Modern day Russia is Capitalist. That isn’t the counter argument you think it is.
I think this post is just pointing out that the people of the USSR weren’t under a constant threat of starvation like many believe.
Reminder that neutrality and compromise isn’t always a good thing.
I don’t think you understand exactly how theses machines work. The machine does not “learn”, it does not extract meaning from the tokens it receives. Here is one way to look at it
Suppose you have a sequence of symbols: ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ And then were given a fragment of a sequence and asked to guess what you be the most likely symbol to follow it: ¹§ Think you could do it? I’m sure you would have no trouble solving this example. But could you make a machine that could reliably accomplish this task, regardless of the sequence of symbols and regardless of the fragment given? Let’s imagine you did manage to create such a marvellous machine.
If given a large sequence of symbols spanning multiple books of length would you say this pattern recognition machine is able to create anything original? No… Because it is simply trying to copy it’s original sequence as closely as possible.
Another question: Would this machine ever derive meaning from this symbols? No… How could it?
But what if I told you that these symbols weren’t just symbols: Unbeknownst to the machine each one of this symbols actually represents a word. Behold: ChatGPT.
This is basically the general idea behind generative AI as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m wrong. This is obviously oversimplified.
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.
I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.