Attempting solidarity pragmatically.

I don’t believe in imaginary property.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The reality is you already know there are people to do much of that job. A local ran a BBS for a town of 15k where I lived growing up. The moderators at Reddit were never paid, but they did it.

    Point taken they whether they will do it here, but I think the descent from ubiquity to hobbyism again might do social media some good.

    I’ve been through the collapse of the last vestiges of both Usenet and independent message boards, so I’m familiar with the perils of funding, and the deceptive costs of free. But wikipedia lives, hell even headfi still lives, there is a place within any market to be carried by it’s enthusiastic.



  • So in reverse order:

    The fediverse to me will always be an expanding niche, I don’t think the network effect social growth works without cash. If your looking to measure by quality of dialogue instead of growth I think this presents the best option. There’s plenty of economic benefit beyond ad sales from good discourse.

    Instead you’re looking a million AOL install disk moments until ubiquity, if it doesn’t fall apart first.

    Instances shutting down is actually markedly like the way famine, war or anything else beyond my control as your average user would have pushed us to other reps. You can pick up and move, but how much of your stuff? Open question. Long term it should be feasible for your own instance to fire up, fetch messages and close again, so in theory you could keep all of it.

    Now hardest: scale and cost, which I’d really contend are the same problem. If you look at how such systems are introduced you find advocates for vanguard, reps, workers tribunals and nothing quite ever sticks without some lingering problems. And the reality is the web of our modern universe isn’t going to independently operate with anything.

    I don’t think anything but a charitable model gets it off the ground, the same way I don’t think the Internet is a thing without the crazy good folks running BBS boards. But it should be institutional as broadly as possible if you want long term success and trust in platform.

    I think perhaps you may be confusing nobody to assert ownership of the bits, with the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.


  • Sure! And I’m sorry in advance for the book, I’m literally around here studying this thing for this reason.

    So it might help to understand Soviet as a pre Bolshevik term more resembling ‘council’ than a unitary block like a nation.

    In the fediverse this is instances, they stand up, enroll users and give them voices. And if you graph a lot of the ethos it’s 1:1 from the ground up. For instance, you might say your posts here, once contributed are owned by everyone. You might also notice those with knowledge about the platform are maybe operating as a vanguard, you pick top or bottom (users and posts, or instances and software).

    Historically part of the problem with distributed systems of independent operating electors is how they’re vulnerable either to local tribalism, warlordism, and a need for some degree of functional central control of core ethos.

    The pile of ‘free market’ people mad at the phone company evolved into the modern Internet without a model, just chaos and genius. If the next wave is reactionary communists, we’re looking at something very different, but I’m not convinced it won’t mutate.

    if this is communism the platform: I’m genuinely curious what crowd sourced central planning offers. The people who have studied that system, and it’s problems, are the ones in who have started the project. And they started with ‘to each for each’ as it’s core principle, but it’s easy to fork any foss project.

    Part of what you learn when you start to read lefty philosophy is that they are (by volume and diversity), their own biggest critics. So there is going to be a plethora of times where we figure out of this is going to go pear shaped, and a ton of good or bad lessons that could come out of the canon.



  • The costs to push data are fairly trivial at the moment. Where peertube will struggle due to technical barriers (mostly just storage/duplication), text and images are just not that taxing.

    Let me assure you whole it sorts itself there’s no shortage of people throughout the history of new cool things who want to host and play with them. We’re probably headed to maintain those through foundations/donations.

    The cool part is just like email you shouldn’t have to be permanently synchronized, meaning you could run an instance you collect like an email client at near 0 cost to anyone.







  • I think this is just the leading edge unless folks are lining up to replace moderators in most communities.

    Systems tend to fail slowly, and then all at once.

    Most fediverse denizens have noticed how sane and measured the dialogue is, which is entirely a product of the audience who is here right now. But everyone’s got a threshold, whether Reddit loses everyone or not isn’t relevant if they couldn’t be profitable with all of us. There’s a death spiral coming, and if there’s anything left Reddit will have to functionally change.

    Easiest to think of Reddit as a party grinding on too long and starting to get rowdier, and the bouncers just quit.



  • So I didn’t make an account here for precisely this reason, I’m not really at risk of being targeted or triggered, so at the ‘edge’ of your community I can at least try to knock down some of the BS.

    I have a feeling this is where the ‘eternal vigilance’ is going to be needed.

    The trolls are gonna troll.

    Just keeping them out of your discussions may reduce the noise, but it doesn’t stop them from conglomerating on the platform. Pointing out where they come to play feels like the only way to separate the good actors from bad at an instance level so they don’t wander in.



  • Alright, more of a eli5 as I’m more folk knowledge than a scientist.

    It’s a narrower (more dense) wavelength.

    If you think of signal, any signal, how close you are to it, the total power of that signal and the quality of your receiving gear are going to be your three major factors in “speed”.

    5g gains the ability to broadcast more waves iif you’re close, at the expense of distance.

    If you’re looking to send communications further; wider (lower density) waves face less resistance. Just the same way you can seemingly get AM radio (bouncing off our atmosphere) anywhere vs FM radio (line of sight), each has a function.

    You can find rural houses like mine, or the futures trades riding from the burbs to downtown with microwave (narrower than 5g) connections. They’re pretty atmosphere resistant but require tuning to hit relays the size of about a soda can.

    I don’t think the longitudinal studies have been done on what frequencies over long periods of time produce negative results, the areas of spectrum we are working with have no real analogues in scope I’m aware of. Which is exactly why there’s room to scaremonger over it.

    Anecdotally I’ve worked a decade in an adjacent field and never heard of anyone contacting the plague.