Year of the Linux Desktop Fediverse!
Side note, DAE find calling them “normies” kinda icky? It’s like straight outta 4chan
The advantages most of us see in the Fediverse (lack of corporate control, low algorithm interference) are seen by most normal users as either of little importance, or actively detrimental. The Fediverse requires you engage with it to cultivate a feed that gives you what you’re interested in. But the people fleeing to Rednote want a strong algorithm that feeds them what they want, and they don’t mind influence games being played by the algorithm in exchange for this convenience.
Personally, I think there’s room in the Fediverse for an app with a “strong algorithm” provided it’s completely open ofc.
My biggest issue with algorithms isn’t the fact they exist, but that they’re proprietary black boxes so no one truly knows how it’s being manipulated
We should be able to select different fully open source algorithms from a drop down menu, and load custom ones from fediversealgorithmmenuwithdescriptions dot org, including “no algorithm”.
I assume that’s like a billion hours of work, but, goals.
“No algorithm” would load nothing at all. Everything is an “algorithm,” including listing all posts in chronological order.
Wanting “no algorithm” is like wanting food with “no chemicals” in it and not realizing that carbs, fats, proteins, etc. are “chemicals.”
Only eating noble gases.
Noble gases are chemicals too, damn it!
The only thing that isn’t “chemicals” is literally just vacuum.
Only a dehydrogen monoxide addict will say shit like that!
They have at least little tendency to participate in chemical reactions.
I would say freedom, fallacies, and magic are not chemicals.
When you sort your feed by hot vs top vs new, that’s already what you’re doing kinda.
But the platform has to have the data to support the algorithm, so you can’t just “load in” whatever algorithm you want. Besides, that sounds like a security nightmare for the platform lol
I mean, with the fediscovery project, people can make centralised applications from fediverse data (people who opt in) this makes indexing and other stuff that works better centralised possible.
If I understand correctly, that only works with data publicly available (or at least available to 3rd party instances). But there are going to be metrics that fediverse platforms simply don’t make public or even track.
for example: i dont imagine that peertube (or even loops) makes public who viewed which videos, when, for how long. and it’d be a huge privacy issue if they did. Even tracking things like who-liked-what are the kinds of things that a 3rd party probably shouldn’t be able to just check.
without these kinds of insights, it’d be hard to make a good recommendation algorithm, because you can’t really tell how an individual is interacting with content.
A client could be made on one, that tracks those things, and then suggests videos from that.
I don’t think it could.
The client doesn’t have access to all the videos, it’ll have to query the (distributed???) platform to find matching videos.
And the platform is gonna need to serve up some kind of metadata for the client to track (are hashtags enough???)
And the platform is gonna need to be keeping stats on the videos for the client to match against
And what would that query even look like? A gargantuan weighted map of hashtags? I can’t imagine hashtags alone would be enough.
Remember when Musk took over Twitter and “open sourced” the algorithm, although it was impossible to reconstruct anything from what was given, and contained clear signs of being edited and incriminating details suggesting content categorization and prioritization?
What I really want to see is Facebook’s algorithm, because it seems to just produce a neverending stream of alt-right bullshit.
Fwiw Tiktok apparently just open sourced their algorithm a week or so ago.
I wonder if loops will provide it as an option
Do you have a link? I can’t find it.
I was mistaken, it was not opensourced - there was a whitepaper on a recommendation system from tiktok’s parent company bytedance, and everyone just assumed it was the tiktok recommendation algorithm when it was published.
deleted by creator
Well, its definetely possible on activitypub. Every “app” built on the atprotocol takes data from a relay’s firehose and then indexes it and does all the algorithm stuff. There is a project (https://www.fediscovery.org/) that will let people build centralised apps with fediverse data. Although, I could just make an algorithm that looks for keywords a user may be interested in, in the posts database and show it to them, it just wouldn’t have every post to its disposal.
Hey thanks for the correction - my mistake!
It’s gonna happen in the AT protocol I’m sure.
Recommendation engines aren’t the biggest issue. People will figure out how to fins what they want, and be generally happy with that, if looking is easy enough.
The big issue is that “join the fediverse” is a really, really shitty and incomplete recommendation. It’s like “join the blogosphere!”
And “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy” is bad, too. It’s like asking them to “join Joomla”.
You need to point people to the specific website they should join, and that website has to already have what they’re looking for. People aren’t interested in building something.
They just want to consume.
You know, if this rednote thing really takes off, I don’t think I can believe the whole “fediverse is too complicated” thing anymore. People are moving to an app that isn’t even fully in English. That’s WAY more complicated than picking a random instance out of a list (or more likely, just going to the one big one). I’m getting to where I think the vast majority of people just click on what’s advertised no matter how stupid it is, and without ads (not people spreading things by word of mouth, I mean actual “ooh, shiny” ads) mainstream uptake of the fediverse will never happen. Good luck outspending the big corps on that.
Might be for the best anyway. The type of people who respond to ads probably aren’t particularly fun to engage with.
They chose the app specifically because its chinese, they still have every other tiktok clone, like clapper (lol), snapchat spotlight, youtube shorts and instagram reels.
Whatever the reason, navigating that is still more complicated than navigating Lemmy or Mastodon
I agree, but thats why they chose it.
It’s mire simple because they have actual designers that design the app to users to use, so it’s not that much difficult to navigate, with all the icons and familiar patterns.
Yeah, it’s amazing the things you can do with UX when your platform takes in enough money that you can support a UI/UX team.
don’t ask where that money came from or why kthx(some oss projects outright decline help from actual designers by the way)
Don’t get too high and mighty, you’re doom scrolling like everyone else.
I mean, I’ve got definite FOMO, but I generally don’t feel the need to continuously search for new content. If the comms in my feed are quiet, that’s nearly a good thing.
Funny enough, that’s also the reason that democracy is always in the brink of collapse.
It would be nice if the Fediverse (or some apps like Sync) had a strong algorithm that you can choose to activate if you like, once you install the app.
And could pick from different algorithms, one big barrier to entry for new users is the UX just sucks compared to platforms they’re used to.
Eg. Default lemmy Web UI is TERRIBLE
I kind of like the algorithm idea that Neptune (a potential Tiktok replacement) plans on having.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2dbYBKj/
It plans on giving users different sliders, such as:
Following
Friends
Trending
Categories
etc.
https://www.tiktok.com/@theneptuneapp?_t=ZT-8tE7t6KDR5m&_r=1
Or maybe something like Fedialgo?
Or maybe perhaps something like Bluesky’s Algorithmic Custom Feeds, but adapted for Fediverse Social Media?:
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/tutorials/custom-feeds
I actually enjoy not having a strong algorithm here. This way I can spend as little as possible on my only social media app that I use.
I mean, a software could easily do it they just don’t.
A lot of people are going to rednote as a show of protest:
- these people have had their data mined since they were babies, they’ve been taught by the market since birth that their data isn’t something they should value
- then they’re told that it’s bad that these other people can access their data, with no explanation as to why it’s any different
- while at the same time being told that it’s totally fine for the folks who are already mining your data to sell it to the people who shouldn’t have your data
So they’re basically saying “you’re lying, and your explanation contradicts your previous behavior, so I’m gonna do the exact opposite of what you want”
Again because they don’t actually care about their dataUnfortunately, Fediverse apps still have a lot of UX issues compared to their mainstream alternatives. Those will need to be smoothed over for mainstream adoption to take root.
They’re attractive to the tech inclined who are comfortable working around what, to them, is minor clunkiness. Mainstream users have shorter attention spans and are more likely to move on when there’s friction.
Far as the meme is concerned, the only Fediverse equivalent is Loops which is still in closed beta.
UX issues
Easiest way to sum up Facebook
Not with their onboarding.
(Also, familiarity is a kind of UX lubricant, all on its own)
Except Voyager app (or webapp) that shits ready for the masses
Feels 100% like the Apollo app for redit, plus blocked features of Apollo are free in voyager
Agreed, the Voyager app for lemmy is the GOAT.
I don’t know, though. I’m someone who gave up on Linux Mint because I just couldn’t get it to work properly. I wouldn’t say I’m tech inclined. I used a button phone until 2022. I only got a smartphone because my sim stopped working with my Nokia. The only issue I had with Lemmy was the sign up (it was during the reddit exodus so the sign ups weren’t going through, but I’m glad cos I nearly joined ml).
Mastodon was easy as heck to join. I got a friend to sign up, no issues, and he has no idea what the fediverse even is.
Fediverse fanboys when they realise that their obscure and socially complex software isn’t know by many people specially outside of the tech bubble, and that it’s not the same experiences that they will get with known platforms:
The obscurity and social complexity is the whole reason I’m here haha. My hope is that even if/when fedi apps become the standard, we’ll still have ways to curate ourselves into small corners as that’s just way nicer.
That’s why I subscribe not to topics, but to interests. It doesn’t solve the problem but it puts me with more interesting content and like-minded people, hopefully. Then again I don’t want to be in a bias bubble…
known platforms
I seriously doubt that people ‘knew’ about some random app that isn’t even translated all the way.
You should try this new messenger app.
Have you seen what acquiring lots of mainstream users does to a platform?
It allows it to have a large range of content covering a variety of interests?
Gotta second this. Especially if the growth is sudden. It’s very difficult to integrate newer users into the existing culture.
There are merits to being a smaller community.
That’s what I love about the fediverse. Sure, the huge instances will struggle to maintain their identity, but new instances can be spun up for approx $15/mo USD. Pass the hat around to 100 people and you can easily cover that.
Also instances do not have to please everyone, and they don’t have to push ads, or worry about being a friendly corp playground, so they can just tell people who don’t fit the vibe to fuck right off.
You’re expecting Zoomers and Gen Alpha irreversibly addicted to short-form video content, which has resulted in an attention span that doesn’t extend past 30 seconds, to READ?
My kids use a plethora of short-form video apps, and they also read novels, in addition to hobbies like cooking, knitting, crocheting, mechanical work, etc.
Maybe it’s just your kids.
Thanks for encouraging your kids to have diverse interests and hobbies instead of letting a glowing screen raise them. I don’t have children but if I did I would hope to achieve the same for them.
There are plenty of kids who aren’t interested at all in the activities yours are.
Maybe your kids are the exception.
You know what, I shouldn’t comment before I eat breakfast. You’re fine, I hope you have a very nice day.
Ok boomer
Your comment is another proof that Lemmy/Fediverse is lacking young people
More or less is proving my point no?
No, it just shows a lack of understanding and is very unwelcoming.
Best thing that happened recently. Wonderful wonderful chaos, when the best plans of authoritarian politicians go awry. And I mean both Chinese and American politicians.
I don’t see how this is authoritarian, Bytedance’s bad intentions are clear. They could make money from selling the app, keep making money from it in a stock sale but yet they’d rather have 0 dollars than relinquish control of their brainrot engine. It’s clear that the CCP values it more as a cultural weapon than as a product.
Why sell it, when they can just give trump a paycheck under the table to keep it going?
I swear on the graves of my ancestors, they script this shit to keep everyone guessing at what the real explanation is. Everyone finds a way to fit it into their own understanding of how the world works. Same thing with the ceasefire agreement. Democrats understand it one way, Republicans understand it another way, outsiders understand it a third (or fourth or fifth), more skeptical way.
Nobody would want to take a shitty deal, and since your comment was posted it’s back online in the US. You sound like you don’t understand how business works and are twisting facts to fit your understanding of the situation.
I agree. Although the method of resolution could vary widely, depending on the party in power, if the US masses keep jumping from foreign platform to foreign platform.
You mean they signed up for an app that actually works and generates a feed for you vs one that doesn’t do either of those things?
No, I think they mean “Well, fuck. The thing I liked is being taken away, and here’s where everyone else is going, so I should do that, too.”
That’s just my interpretation, though.
Sadly, yes
exactly
I think that it was less: let’s find alternatives, than it was fuck you government TikTok isn’t Chinese enough. It was a direct answer to the government telling us which social media apps we were allowed to use. Also, 100% avoidable if they’d passed data protection instead. It really felt like the government enforcing private interests on its citizens.
Americans typically don’t like the government telling us what to do. It’s all fine if Facebook buys all the competition, but it’s another thing when the government makes the competition illegal because they won’t sell to zuck or musk.
Honestly, Redbook was sort of neat. I doubt it has much staying power as it was really just a protest, but it was sort of a historical feeling moment.
Red note just added a feature that lets you translate any comment to English (or presumably the local language of your phone number) . Online reviews and Airbnb have done this for a long time. It’s a simple yet amazing feature, one that will really remove barriers to appreciating different cultures. I would love to have it here so that everyone can speak their native tongue and others could appreciate it. I always want to know what the French and German communities are up to (those are the most common other languages I see).
Browser plugins can do that.
Great point
What is the one on the left anyway?
Fedivserse logo, thats lemmy, mastodon, sharkey, mbin and all the other decentralised social medias.
While I like the logo, I also realize that the logo also evokes blind hatred from people. Unfortunately, you only have to mention the color scheme, which for many is like a declaration of war. Sick world
It’s just colors, if colors evoke blind hatred in someone, I likely wouldn’t want them around me anyways. It looks to me like an interlinked web of different nodes. Which seems to be a pretty accurate representation of the hosting and federations.
Well, blind, stupid hatred from e.g. anti-woke, MAGA or the growing right-wingers all over the West. Just need to have as many colors as a rainbow and there is the connection to LGBTQA+ with said blind hatred. Now of course you can say you don’t want these people around you. But unfortunately there are more of them and they are taking over the leadership of the countries in the West.
Is the sky woke? There’s a rainbow in it.
Sometimes
I like rainbows. I don’t know what all woke is because it feels like it’s everything republicans/MAGA/right-wing/anti-democratic/etc. use to defame something and direct hate towards it anyway. But as I said, it’s just a feeling… I don’t know what it’s really about.
it feels like it’s everything republicans/MAGA/right-wing/anti-democratic/etc. use to defame something and direct hate towards it anyway.
That’s exactly what it is.
power users/businesses: “you can’t go VIRAL on mastodon”
Regular Users: “yOu HaVe To PiCk A sErVeR???”
Perfect meme to describe what’s happening. Yes, fedi has some UX issues and is not very beginner friendly.
But also, people have gotten so used to being spoonfed content from an algorithm that tells them what they want to see that they can’t handle the prospect of “build your own algorithm”
Corpo-curated-content is a hard drug and most people don’t realize that they have an addiction.
Tiktok exposes me to all kinds of viewpoints I’d never have even thought to search for.
Lemmy is a circle jerk by comparison.When you say “build your own algorithm” what you really mean is “decide who is allowed in my echo chamber, and what is the sort order of the content from those people”. You can do that on Tiktok too, it’s called the “following” feed, smh.
But elitist Lemmy neckbeards are never willing to hear that they’re not actually special
You deserve an award for telling the truth
I’d love to see the list of communities followed by each of the people who downvoted me. I have some pretty strong suspicions about what they’d look like.
You should be like me. I’ve just disabled the “vote” counter, and it feels amazing! Screw those people, they’re probably neckbeards or something, anyway.
Yep that’s addiction it’s hard to recover.
I don’t think you can localize to a language. You localize to a region, you translate to a language. Localization goes beyond mere translation, they are different concepts.
Not to tech bros, they were to hungover from their sketchy frat bro ragers full of men hoping to get lucky and commit sexual assault to pay attention in that one humanities class they took freshman year.
Language studies are an obsolete profession to them, the future they have built is bullshit all the way down, there is nothing left to study other than the language of utter incompetency and proud willful ignorance steeped in chauvinism which they eminate like a 2005 vintage Abercrombie & Fitch mall store eminated vapors of shitty cologne.
It’s a bit akward to respond to that, since I did a Master’s in CompSci, lol. At least I can distance myself from that massive burn a little by saying that I was the akward virgin type and didn’t like the machine learning courses I had to take.
Language studies seem fascinating to me, I always found the stuff my sister was doing in her studies pretty interesting. A friend of hers was even trying to become an interpreter, that sounds so difficult.
For what it is worth I am not trying to dunk on being awkward, introverted or neurodivergent in a way that makes it hard to be confident in “normal” social situations (i.e. a normal defined by people with a brain entirely unlike yours). I don’t mean that kind of computer geek.
The thing is, there are plenty of hot people who would think you are hot for being exactly that precise kind of nerd, or artist, or just different person with a different brain it’s just that interesting and different people are usually shy because of how people treat them for being interesting and different and so it is hard to actually find that other hot cool weirdo and get into a conversation with them. Once you do, you are off to the races into some weird kind of sexy nerdy wonderous relationship and all this incel nonsense collapses in one moment of looking into their eyes.
The losers I am talking about never get to that point because they are never nice enough to a woman long enough to have them gaze into their eyes like that and a whole lot of them went into computers or business…
The people I am attacking are too narrow minded to understand that the reason nobody they are attracted to wants to talk to them is the way they treat the people they are attracted to in moment to moment social interactions and also in political ideology and values.
Computers are cool as fuck, computer people are great, we just need more cool people to dilute and displace the toxicity of this kind of ingrown toxic male masculinity that permeates a lot of video game and computer circles. It isn’t just bad for women, it actually erodes the capacity of the men in these circles to critically think, in otherwords this shit is brainworms.
TL;DR Make Computing Great Again a.k.a. bring it back to it’s roots a.k.a. make it queer, feminine and militantly focused on fighting oppression and totalitarian ideologies again
Not that I disagree with the sentiment but in most software systems localization does not just mean translation either. Localization as a practice includes date, time, and number formats, preferred units of measure, language and dialect, and sometimes a few other things. I’m not saying localization or translation are done well, or that the Big Tech companies give any shits about it at all, but its not as though computer professionals are all entirely ignorant of these distinctions.
I mean I take your point but again you are just describing the technical details of localization. The little fiddly bits that can be automated and neatly dealt with by a computer or person with an accountant’s mindset for making sure little things plug neatly and cleanly into other little things. Any concept of “localization” that does not include careful consideration of the vast territory of nuance that surrounds the much easier technical details seems useless to me in the context of solving any actual real world problem.
When it comes to the actual hard parts about localization I am fairly certain almost every computer professional I have ever met or talked to does not understand them. The more successful a computer person is in their career the more they tend to think everything in the world functions like computers and thus they don’t need to try to understand alternate systems or phenomena that don’t adhere to their narrow tool belt of critical thinking strategies that can’t handle even a homeopathic amount of ambiguity or subjective nuance.
These types of people spend all day thinking in programs and then go home and play factorio and they think they are the smartest people in the entire universe, and they are idiots. Very very skilled idiots.
Very very skilled idiots.
On that–and as a highly skilled idiot myself–we fully agree!
The adage “social problems don’t have purely technological solutions” is something I’ve known for years yet must continuously remind myself of and reintegrate it for new issues.
It’s a shame the old vision of computer specialists integrated into empowered teams building bespoke solutions never really came to pass. Not enough profit in that model, when mass market slop is so lucrative.
