- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I’m glad someone’s into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There’s no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That’s why it was written and that’s what it does. End of story.
So refreshing to see someone call out Bluesky for what it is.
It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.
The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.
What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it’s disappointing in lots of ways too.
Added: the article is mostly about Mastodon which is more pleasant than Twitter because it lets you listen to just your own selected coterie, also not entirely good.
For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.
Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.
For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO. Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.
I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.
In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.
I haven’t noticed much difference between instances either, though I haven’t been on many. I moved from lemmy.world to lemmy.ml because .ml has a bit less censorship (e.g. .ml lets me subscribe to !covid@hexbear.net). They are otherwise about the same, as far as I can tell.
I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.
This is mostly getting into normative vs descriptive philosophy. If it’s scrutable that a site/instance is demoting everything non-aligned with a worldview; then on the Fediverse it’s users’ choice to leave (and part of ‘community values’).
In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.
To some degree, yes. New Reddit is particularly bad about this, it actively buries unpopular replies (but it goes further, and doesn’t just use upvotes) — Software like Lemmy is better, you can easily set Sort by New or sort by Top as the default. There’s also no ‘Karma’ system that propagates across the site.
Sycophancy is a human trait, so it’ll always emerge in social systems; but normatively, our systems should not cater to these negative traits (e.g. Twitter).
There are some Lemmy instances without downvoting, but none without upvoting. That affects what gets posted. Also it doesn’t matter much what an individual instance does, since a lively community has users from lots of instances contributing. That’s the point of federation, I thought.
Yeah, I mean that’s true of any social space though, if you say something agreeable (definitionally) you’re going to get agreement. If you view upvoting as consensus building (i.e “I like this” / “I agree”) it’s just a more concise representation of a reply saying as much.
But that is scrutable.
What becomes a problem is content getting surfaced/buried on non-scrutable metrics (typically engagement) — ragebait isn’t anything new, online or in societies. But when algorithms target content that gets engagement, ragebait is naturally surfaced in higher proportions. Often time such platforms completely bury content or make it impossible to find something not explicitly surfaced (YouTube search for example is widely known to be terrible here, FB rabidly buries comments on posts).
WRT communities, there definitely are instances and communities with very different rules, values and expected behaviors. Federation allows communities to pick and choose what other communities they think they’ll get along with. This includes banning individual remote users if they don’t follow local rules, or defederating entirely if other instances have drastically different values.
The federation model as described does well by my metrics. I can pick an instance that shares my values, participate in communities (in the Lemmy technical sense) that share them as well — and largely avoid or choose not to engage with people from communities (in the instance sense) that I don’t share values with. This is extending “freedom of association” to online spaces in a way that large platforms largely cannot and willingly do not enable.
This article is confirming the extreme merit of Citizen Controlled Media, which has only become more and more important as an essential form of prefiguration as time goes on, since these alternative citizen controlled sources become virtually the only way to communicate truth to others that is otherwise censored in state or corporate controlled media.
Yup.
Though I thought of it as the Internet from 2010. No ads. No algo. All chronological. Once you figure out where the slow mode setting is and turn it off, Mastodon is the fucking best. I even pay a voluntary sub every month to help my instance host itself.
And it requires just enough setup (5-10 minutes tops) that the vast majority of the Internet is too lazy to use it, which keeps the quality high.
Slow mode?
Yeah, when you’re on the global feed, posts fly by at a dizzying rate. Turning on slow mode makes it so that they stop auto-scrolling and only scroll when you click that you want to see more posts.
It’s incredible how much ActivityPub sabotages itself. This author speaks on the deliberately dysfunctional aspects of Mastodon as being a result of “open source software having to suck” when in fact the devs here chose to make it suck because they decided it was better, like removing quote tweets etc. Misskey variants do all this stuff perfectly fine, far more features than Twitter actually, although the base version is incredibly buggy and inhabited by pedophiles. There is no reason why Lemmy and its forks can’t connect to these sites either. People are just incredibly confused on here and do not see their own potential.
Big fan of Movim by the way.
There is no reason why Lemmy and its forks can’t connect to these sites either. People are just incredibly confused on here and do not see their own potential.
The internet doesn’t run on potential. It runs on actual fucking features.
The fact that I don’t see a mix of Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, and other mediums on my front page just makes me angry at the lost potential of what this protocol is supposed to be about.
From what I understand, Piefed instances will have better support for Mastodon posts, and I believe it supports subscribing to Peertube channels already
(something that Lemmy still doesn’t support…)Edit: It does support Peertube!You can subscribe to Peertube channels from Lemmy since a very long time. Recently there has been a problem with federation on the Peertube side, but that will be fixed soon.
Ah, my bad. Thanks for letting me know! Edited my other comment to reflect that.
Related to Movim; it just received Discord-like spaces a couple days ago! So it’s now a pretty effective decentralized Discord that can do group audio/video calls, screen share, and even has blogging built in.
Highly recommend anyone thinking about ditching Discord to give it a shot. It doesn’t even require an email to use, just a username and password :)
Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn’t a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.
It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn’t stop me.
I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.
So, a few things. One, I appreciate the authors evolution on this, but I also think for anyone who lived through the US’s campaigns in the war on terror, on resistance movements like BLM, Dakota pipeline, Occupy, Me Too, on and on…
The American (and often global) experience is a eventual experience of realizing you are being lied to and finding a way to the truth. For me it was being enlisted and finding Democracy Now! because it was a show I could download on an mp3 players and put on mini-disks when I was preparing for underways.
The same sentiment that the author is appreciating is one that some people in the 90’s got when they first had access to the internet. That kids in the 2000’s felt when they found alternative media (DN!, others, many coming from the WTO protests of the 90’s), that kids in the mid-2000’s felt when they found social media, when kids in the 2010’s found the second wave of social media, when kids in the 2020’s found the fediverse, and on and on.
At least we have hot chips now while we’re being lied to. Society has come so far
I’d never considered how bang-on this viewpoint is…
A lot of hot takes. Definitely don’t agree with calling every youtuber and twitch streamer a narcissist. If you just go on the front page, sure. But there are thousands of normal people on there making great content. They just don’t appeal to the algorithm as much so you haven’t heard of them. But they’re out there
I miss the mid-2000s YouTube when there was no monetization incentive. People just made videos and posted them because they believed others would enjoy them. That was it.
Good times.
It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.
