I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.
Good to hear.
They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.
This Tech Won’t Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.
Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps “whatever Mastodon is doing”. That’s problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.
I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That’s fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.
The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. T
I think that’s taking it too far and jumping to conclusions. I cannot think of a single instance of an instance admin inflating their numbers with bot accounts or in any other artificial way, and I’ve been on fedi before it was called fedi.
This is almost certainly external bad actors taking advantage of captcha-less open signups.
Mastodon grew, but only took a tiny slice of Twitter
Growth is not the only, nor even main, metric to measure success of fedi. Fedi is not a VC-funded startup that needs to grow exponentially to remain viable (consider how that worked for Twitter and Reddit…).
Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by. That takes more time, than hooking people on endorphin/noradrenalin high and slick interfaces.
half of Mastodon are bots or people who crosspost to both.
This is false. I follow a couple of thousand people and have an interesting, diverse, funny, and informative timeline. Very few accounts I follow crosspost.
There is no recommendation algorithm so your timeline is what you make of it. It takes a bit more time to curate, but you end up with your own thing that suits you — if you put in the tiny bit of effort required.
Maybe talk to @feditips@mstdn.social? I think they might be interested. They run a site that seems like a good home for a compatibility matrix: https://fedi.tips/
If a cafe wants to enforce a “no phones” rule, they can do so relatively effectively. If a website wants to enforce a “no robots” rule (especially if they also want to not require any login to view the content on the site) they can ultimately only pretend to be able to do that effectively.
But you’re again conflating the issue of consent and enforcement. There are things we are able to do but we know to ask first before we do them. The fact that something is possible doesn’t mean that it’s allowed. The fact that something is not easy to enforce against does not make it okay to do it anyway.
What about public parks? Is it okay to walk around you while you’re having a conversation and record you, and then post that conversation on-line? Is it okay to use directional microphones to record you in such a setting? Doesn’t the whole recording-in-the-park thing from the Conversation give you the creeps?
Are you saying that the fact that something is difficult to enforce against makes it okay to do, even if the person you do this to does not want it done?
You technically can, and if you get caught the cafe can (and should, imo) kick you out for doing so.
Right, so we agree here. But you did not respond to the second question: are cafés public or private spaces?
I’m a big proponent of enforcing privacy in online and offline spaces with technology, policy, and social norms. I’m also opposed to magical thinking. Telling people that they can semi-publish, to have some of the benefits of publishing without some of the consequences, is misleading to the point of being dishonest.
Nobody is saying that. Nowhere in the thread I linked is that being said. Nowhere in my comments did I say that. It’s not about telling people they can or cannot “semi-publish”, it’s about telling people creating systems and products that they need to ask these people for permission to do certain things.
Or in other words: it’s not about telling café patrons they can or can’t have perfectly private conversations in the café, it’s about telling anyone who might want to potentially record conversations in that café “you have to ask and receive permission for this first”. That’s a pretty crucial difference.
I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith. In fact, reading your comment again, I am pretty sure you are arguing in bad faith. And I have better things to do than engaging with that.
If anyone wants to engage in an honest conversation, those who follow me on fedi or have seen my comments around here know I’m totally game for that. But “and yet you engage in society! curious!”-level discussion is not worth anyone’s time, frankly. 🙂
I am one of those technology educators, and today I would still warn people that “Internet does not forget”, and that they need to be careful what they put out there.
That doesn’t mean we should not demand explanation from people who make it so, and that we should not demand them to ask for consent and respect our refusal to give it. I really appreciate how fedi culturally puts this front-and-center. I hope it continues to do so, and that this way of thinking spreads farther!
I agree that consent should not be a controversial topic. Regardless of how much it inconveniences techbros trying to “disrupt” yet another area of human endeavor.
I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like “compromised” is a very bad idea.