maegul

maegul , 4 hours ago

I honestly think that mastodon will die on the no algorithms hill.

Plain reverse-chron just doesn’t scale beyond the “hanging with friends and neighbours” experience that mastodon was designed for.

Which is a great experience/platform, but not the social media many are after, I suspect, for better or worse. And also, I suspect, an experience that’s not so hard to get elsewhere.

Thing is that lemmy/Reddit show how helpful simple sorting and aggregated recommendation systems can be without any opacity to users. I’m still baffled that mastodon and people there haven’t embraced that ethos more.

maegul , 4 hours ago

There’s a lot of that I think with mastodon apps.

I suspect it’s devs who want to get paid at some point, which on one hand is fair but also raises interesting concerns about how open/FOSS software dev needs to work with respect to money.

Beyond that, there was some speculation I saw that the iOS dev space is just more interested in designing social media apps. No idea how true that is.

maegul , 1 day ago

assuming the name of the community can be changed that is

It’s just like with user accounts. The alias can be whatever you want but the address is static. Fortunately I’d say “house of the dragon” counts as a decent catch all for a ASOIAF community.

maegul , 2 days ago

My question is if there’s any legal mechanism to prevent this on other platforms? Pixelfed for example.

Good question!

I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse is blind to this issue as everything here is completely scrapable through either the public web or by running federated servers. On top of that, being culturally inclined toward more “serious” conversation and providing content warnings and alt-text for images, we’re probably generating relatively valuable training data.

And yet everything is public as though it’s still 2012.

There are alternatives. BlueSky for instance is basically private to members only. They recently announced that content would be made public to the web and a number of users were upset.

Group chats and Discord servers are probably similar, and from what I can tell “new” popular places for social activity online.

A major issue the fediverse has, IMO, is that it’s kinda stuck trying to fight Twitter and Facebook circa 2012, when that battle was lost and we’re on to new battle fronts now.

maegul , 1 day ago

My main point with BlueSky was that many of the users there had gotten quite comfortable with what appeared to be their closed/private space, which, despite examples like yours, was relatively true compared to the norms of Twitter and Mastodon.

The point was that many over there seemed to like it, and, if a BlueSky competitor opened up today promising all the same stuff but closed/private with the ability to opt out and make something public, many would probably jump ship or demand the same from BlueSky.

maegul , 5 days ago

Well, if they’re doing what many other places are doing, which is implementing with a focus on mastodon, then you won’t be able to. Same thing happened with the Wordpress plugin recently, AFAIK.

The issue is that mastodon does users and lemmy does groups (ie communities). From that I could tell, the wordpress plugin for ActivityPub implemented their federation as a user. This way, it’ll work more or less “naturally” on mastodon. Already you can see an issue with this IMO, as any given blog is not necessarily a single user: often a blog hosts content from multiple users, in which case federating as a group could make more sense.

My bet is that flipboard are doing the same, even though it makes even less sense for a news aggregator to not have an ActivityPub feed that is organised around a group. Of course I could be completely wrong about this. But the force to optimise for mastodon, which doesn’t do groups well at all, is very real and so I’d be willing to bet I’m right.

Either way, the point still stands that mastodon’s size is distorting what the fediverse looks like toward its idiosyncrasies. Which makes a lot of sense for those looking to plug in to the fediverse such as flipboard, but by the same token raises rather significant concerns about the quality and propriety of mastodon’s stewardship and influence over the fediverse.

Beyond all of that though is the question for lemmy and users here as to whether they’d be interested in being able to follow users more or less like a microblog? Kbin is trying something along those lines. Facebook (and friendica on the fediverse) have had a mix of user and group driven structures for a long time now.

My personal take is that lemmy’s general reddit-like design could create a rather interesting platform if it were to allow user’s to create their own personal “communities” which could be subscribed to like any other. The idea being to not lean into the microblogging idea (where the character limit here is something like 50,000 anyway, so “micro” is inapplicable) but instead to lean into the idea of a blogosphere in which people’s personal communities would become places for posting longer form content with the purpose of starting conversations.

maegul , 4 days ago

I’ve asked the devs about it before. They completely saw the potential value in it but admitted that it would be a lot of work and so isn’t a priority at the moment.

From what I’ve gathered, working with ActivityPub is a pain in the ass. Doing so with a statically/strongly typed programming language seems to only add to the pain so going with Rust may be substantially slowing them down compared to those working in Ruby and PhP (as Mastodon and kbin do). So I believe them that it would be a lot of work.

As for kbin, I’m not sure how they got user based federation going but IME I’ve always found it to be a bit weird and concluded that it is mostly sucking up microblog content to fill up the magazines (which is a cool idea in itself). I’ve spoken to the kbin dev about it and they it is working properly if you know which page to go to but it still didn’t seem quite right to me. So though I could be wrong I’m not sure kbin has proper microblogging or user based federation just yet.

With friendica, well that’s a product of Mike Macgirvin who is basically the fediverse’s old unsung hero that appears to be making better things but without any interest in pushing their popularity … point being that it’s no surprise that friendica (or Hubzilla or Streams, his other works) has something the rest of the fediverse should.

A lemmy fork has been spoken about for a while but I’ve not seen anyone willing and able take the idea seriously. Not sure it would change the core devs approach though, they seem pretty happy doing what they want to do.

The thing with forks, or at least unfriendly/hard forks, is that they probably damage the fediverse more than help it. By my estimate the first line on the fediverse’s tombstone will be “failed to cooperate well”. I suspect there’s way too much of a “hacker … I’ll do it my own way with blackjack and hookers” culture and less of a “lets build together” culture, where the former tickles personal needs and gripes and itches while the latter requires making compromises for the greater good. IE: If someone is capable of developing user based federation on top of lemmy then they should probably think about how they can pull that into the mainline code base before starting their own prideful fork. Just my two cents.

maegul , 5 days ago

Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.

But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.

That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.

Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.

maegul , 5 days ago

Interesting thing about the Misskey story is that there’s a decent amount of activity around forking it for western users.

See firefish or calckey as recent attempts with sharkey and iceshrimp being even more recent.

I hope one these gets off of the ground. Talk is that the recent Misskey update (v13) properly fixed some performance improvements which the new forks are hoping to leverage.

maegul , 6 days ago

Except how is ROI estimated? I can imagine it being done both intelligently and stupidly and so I’m curious how well it is actually done.

Part of what I’m sceptical about is that it seems like a practice driven either by a lot of FOMO and vague thinking or a system where it only makes sense to run ads because everyone else is.

maegul , 4 days ago

How well are sales and ad spend correlated and how well are spurious correlations accounted for?

maegul , 7 days ago

Well wasn’t that kinda how chess masters would play computers back in the 80s and 90s … purposely playing in a particular way they wouldn’t normally against a human but that created awkward play the computers found difficult and which forced them to make a mistake?

Point being that that didn’t last too long after Kasparov’s loss.

maegul , 8 days ago

It’s also a common finding from those comparing replies to the same posts on Twitter and mastodon: fewer but better replies on mastodon.

maegul , 8 days ago

You make a good point.

Mastodon by comparison has attracted a number of people basically campaigning for its adoption with webpages and sign up drives.

I’m not clear on the details but I’ve picked up that some of that energy comes from people who see Twitter as politically important and so view Mastodon advocacy as a political act worthy of funding.

Reddit I imagine doesn’t attract that kind of interest.

But still, as you say, adoption could be better with some more community organisation.

Generally, the lack of synergy with mastodon is a continuous source of disappointment for me in how segregated the Fedi actually is and how insular masto actually is.

maegul , 9 days ago

That’s a hell of a “non-profit” to “mother of for-profit monopolists” transition. Obviously it had started years ago and this past few weeks was just the calamitous release of pent-up tension. But still, Microsoft of all companies.

maegul , 8 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

Yea I wasn’t trying to channel any particular Microsoft hate. You could probably sub any of the big tech companies in. Either way it’s a massive for-profit to the point of pushing the lines of monopolism.

maegul , 13 days ago

Oh man this looks like it has a NSFW and bloody ending.

maegul , 15 days ago

Yep. With respect to network effects, culture bifurcates and can do so quickly. Good eggs bring in good eggs, bad (and dangerously, mediocre) bring in bad.

maegul , 15 days ago

There’s clearly a good amount fog around this. But something that is clearly true is that at least some OpenAI people have behaved poorly. Altman, the board, some employees, the mainstream of the employees or maybe all of them in some way or another.

What we know about the employees was the petition which had ~90% sign it. Many were quick to point out the weird peer pressure that was likely around that petition. Amongst all that, some employees being alarmed about the new AI to the board or other higher ups is perfectly plausible. Either they were also unhappy with the poorly managed Altman sacking, never signed the petition or did so while really not wanting Altman back that much.

maegul , 15 days ago

As an end goal, with something like UBI and rescaled salaries etc … yes, this obviously true.

The catch is that there’d be a transition period, with uncertainties and states of incomplete capacity either from the AI or the implementation of the rearrangements of salaries etc.

In that phase, there will be opportunities for people or companies to acquire power and wealth over this new future. Who will make and sell the AIs? Who will decide what gets automated and how and with what supervision. That’s where the danger lies. It’s a whole new field of power to grab.

maegul , 16 days ago

Being a layperson in this, I’d imagine part of the promise is that once you’ve got reliable arithmetic, you can get logic and maths in there too and so get the LLM to actually do more computer-y stuff but with the whole LLM/ChatGPT wrapped around it as the interface.

That would mean more functionality, perhaps a lot more of it works and scales, but also, perhaps more control and predictability and logical constraints. I can see how the development would get some excited. It seems like a categorical improvement.

maegul , 17 days ago

Useful and overrated aren’t mutually exclusive.

maegul , 19 days ago

Welcome to lemmy!

And great article!

Discovery can sometimes be a touchy topic around here, as it prompts some arguably toxic negativity, but I thought it was important to try to outline, as you did, what the whole JJ reboot thing was about and how it has been problematic for Trek, Discovery being ground zero. Thanks!

maegul , 19 days ago

the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared

I’m with you. The problem is that this promise is mostly empty, at least at the moment.

ActivityPub, from what I’ve gleaned, is too vague and open ended and under-developed in terms of software for this to be true. The result is that each platform is implementing a sub-set of the protocol and often adding their own custom twists/additions to it. Which means that just because two platforms use ActivityPub does not mean at all that those two platforms can communicate in anyway. And, even if they can communicate, there’s no guarantee at all that this will be usable.

The interaction between lemmy and mastodon is illustrative. Technically they can communicate, and at times this can work well. But the two platforms are hardly mutually enriching each other because the interactions between them are fairly limited in number. And that’s because they don’t talk to each other well. Some of that is because they’ve implemented different parts of the protocol. Some of it is also their differences in design and UI/UX that just add too much friction to consuming and meaningfully interacting with content from the other platform.

What’s more, this problem is fairly predictable and has been criticised as a false promise in the past. At the moment, I’d say it’s fair to say that ActivityPub has not been proven as a way to enable communication between substantially different platforms. That might change over time, though I suspect the load on developers to make that happen will remain high without some major foundational work.

But right now, unless there’s something I don’t know/understand, I don’t see the extra-platform capabilities of ActivityPub playin any role in the success of the fediverse in competition with BlueSky, at least as far as Mastodon is concerned which, as a platform, is relatively happy just doing its own thing.

maegul , 19 days ago

I was going to say the same but don’t know enough about BlueSky’s ATProtocol to be sure about the possibilities.

In principle, you’d hope they’ve added enough flexibility on there for different platform types. If they have, next year could get interesting as they open up federation. There seems to be a bit of buzz and interest around BlueSky, and if they garner the interest of enough developers who feel like they can make new things on the platform/protocol, then new things could happen and, if they attract a sizeable Twitter migration, go kinda mainstream pretty quickly.

maegul , 19 days ago

It seems BlueSky have explicit plans for their protocol to extend to all types of platforms: atproto.com/blog/building-on-atproto#what-to-expe…

Which means they’re coming for the fediverse, and may just succeed.

maegul , 19 days ago

Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here.

Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.

Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.

That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.

The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).

maegul , 19 days ago

What do you mean kbin doesn’t really support microblogging?

I could be wrong about this … but as I understand, you can’t see a feed of microblogs/posts from people that you follow. Instead everything is viewed through magazines, which pickup microblogs but combine them with the ordinary threadiverse content posted to those magazines. Following people and viewing their personal posts is, I’d say, the essence of microblogging.

Not a criticism of kbin at all BTW … easily the youngest platform on the fediverse but doing quite well it seems with already a fork that’s doing well too (mbin).

maegul , 18 days ago

Thanks Ernest!! Hope you’re going well and kbin development isn’t too much of a burden!!

I’ve seen that view before, and just checked it now again. It still feels like there’s more in the feed than should be. I’m probably missing some of the boosts etc that you cite, but it feels to me like some posts are coming in without it being clear why they’re there. My guess has always been that my subscriptions are playing a role somehow.

Anyway, hope the new changes go well!! And thanks for the response!

maegul , 25 days ago

The incentive might become more apparent as time goes on.

• long term up-time commitments
• stability guarantees
• dedicated Moderation services
• dedicated help service
• performance guarantees
• additional features or parallel services beyond ordinary masto (eg search, blogging, feed sorting/algorithms, or even fusion of additional platforms like lemmy)
• active sponsorship of developers contributing back to masto
• subscription is part of a dedicated app too (see, eg, Mammoth)

maegul , 25 days ago

In its own small way, the story exemplifies just how much of a fracturing is happening right now outside of the ordinary corporation siloed ideas around social media. People are moving around and relatively freely.

maegul , 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

I’d say it’s a big maybe on the protocol side of things.

In general it’s an affirmation of the power of open source software to grow and change things, which we’ve seen before. Mastodon was lying there ready as a more or less plug and play platform. That’s powerful in a moment looking for alternative platforms.

Mastodon’s success IMO isn’t necessarily a success for or an indication of success for ActivityHub. At most, I’d say, it attracts more attention to the idea of open platforms and decentralised social web infrastructure. But the specific protocol being used, AP, isn’t really a big part of the picture, and might just be the weakest aspect of the current fediverse story.

To illustrate, pebble chose not to federate their original platform because the task was too hard. Ask developers and they’ll tell how true this is. So it seems false to say that the protocol on its own is making open and decentralised social media happen. The heavy lifting is coming from the software devs making platform software.

maegul , 25 days ago

Interesting. I feel like long term stability, up time and performance would be valuable to many users. In many ways I’d say just going on to mastodon.social is a bit of a cop out as it heavily dilutes the decentralised structure that is arguably the point of all of this. Multiple paid instances would be healthier. And there, as a user on a relatively peripheral instance but one that is paid-for, longevity and stability become increasingly valuable.

Otherwise, instance providers putting the work into trying to provide a relatively “complete” fediverse palette of tools while making it as easy as possible for the users could also be interesting.

maegul , 24 days ago

Yea I’d say it isn’t a problem for anyone until it is. All of the notable examples of a server going down that I’ve seen were a surprise to its users. On top of that, I’d expect many have fairly hefty expectations of their server’s longevity. Like 10-15 years, more or less as long as they’ve been using Twitter etc.

maegul , 25 days ago

The admin (same as firefish.social) is distracted by school and work and appears to be absent from maintenance work. In the short to medium term, I wouldn’t bet on any reliability.

It does seem that they’re still committing to the code base relatively recently, so the project is probably not dead.

maegul , 26 days ago

For some reason this is making me wish Jobs were still around.

I’d hope he’d have some subtle burns about this product … maybe about how we’re visual animals and you can’t just throw out decades of progress on screen tech and call that innovation. Maybe something about how we’ve got one voice but 10 fingers and two eyes.

maegul , 28 days ago

The whole instances thing is flawed. It’s mostly a copy of the walled garden system of corporate big social, including the capacity to install shitty power hungry leaders and the lack of user-centric freedom and control. Hopefully we get a more hybridised system down the line.

maegul , 26 days ago

that wasn’t the explicit intention by the authors of AP

Ohhh, didn’t know this. Do you have any links or insights on this?

maegul , 29 days ago

Well from what I’ve gathered it’s tough work for DIY people too.

maegul , 29 days ago

The growing options to just fork is an interesting and good point. Quite a few languages and stacks are now represented in some project somewhere.

That being said, we’re probably fast approaching the point where some form of generic modular software for the lower level stuff would provide a productivity boost to the ecosystem. My understanding is that there’s some work starting on that front for testing and maybe a sort of reference implementation.

maegul , 29 days ago

No, just the work of building the federation part of a platform.

Look at both mastodon and Lemmy, both have a huge blind spot for a major part of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon doesn’t manage groups well and Lemmy doesn’t manage users well, as content creating actors that is. This is obviously by design to a large extent, but the difficulty of expanding the bounds of a platform to include more of the spec seems to clearly be part of the problem.

maegul , 29 days ago

Part of what problem?

That platforms struggle to interact with each other more than the promise of the fediverse implies.

Segregated platforms is a hang over from competitive big social. It’s all just text messages in the end as webpages are all just HTML. Part of the promise of the fediverse is to break down these capitalistic walls. If it’s too hard to engineer though, then the promise may need some rethinking.