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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  • It’ll get more support with some time. For now it’s a nice browser to keep separate for not polluting what you doing mind putting out in public. I’ve had a lot more smooth experiences with PWAs I load through the ddg browser.

    Actually one area I think it’s got an immediate edge on firefox while the wild wild fediverse sorts out is just how many fewer attack vectors it’s presenting with the pared back features.


  • Important to note there are options.

    I’ve been relatively pleased with the duckduckgo mobile browser. There are a reasonable amount of chromium forks that aim for privacy oriented browsing as well, although I don’t have a specific one to endorse.

    I guess in defense of Mozilla: it isn’t really playing a different game in the browser space, they’re just trying to mitigate some of the toxicity of ad revenue as a foundation. They’re still a non profit hiring from the same pool as the tech industry money printing machine.

    There’s still a limited pool of support they have to pull from, and I like it better with them around so the big 3 don’t have a total monopoly on browser architecture.

    That said it’s maybe the best example the model is flawed at the jump.


  • It’s a very interesting thought, but it will always struggle to account for variables you can’t see.

    It’s always going to be designed top down to approximate your own development as human from the ground up. I don’t douby AI as a feasible possibility, but I don’t think we’re headed for digital clones. They’re always going to have some amount of the creators ghost or assumptions in the machine.



  • I mean I didn’t graduate with a lit degree and spent my career in IT so I guess you can take a cross disciplinary endorsement. I was just a nerd.

    His writing and timing are impeccable if you see it live, which is kind of lost on the page.

    I found the histories worth reading because he’s editorializing history in his time. You have to remember his audience was us plebs, so we get the gossip instead of the record. You know too many times in history the hot gossip got covered by… literally Shakespeare?

    The fact that he’s to the English language what the Beatles are to rock music feels eternally relevant too.


  • It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

    However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

    It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.








  • Understandable, and yet if nobody contributes upvotes out of the same concern you end up with nothing standing out in your feed to come comment on. Kind of circular.

    On the other hand having an upvote actually attached to your (and I actually mean your handle here) name would likely give it credibility in a weird sense. There’s much less incentive to blindly upvote if it essentially shows what you saw like a slug trail, but if you’re selectively giving oxygen to the best of what you see then that trail is valuable to others who value you. It’s a functional change from competing to push things for their own sake.

    Im old! I come from an era where there was no such thing as OPSEC as soon as you interact with another party you cant personally name. For every consumer that was the phone company, or literally right out the door. If you transmit (login credentials, personal info, search queries) the expectation is somewhere, someone or something is logging it. Not even maliciously all the time either, sometimes I got to some of this out of boredom. The corporate Internet just kind of acts like a middle man, because that same problem never went away, just siloed into companies.

    Until we get to a future like Transmetropolitan where the expectation is your online presence has some dirty laundry (and hopefully leave out the other stuff), all the bits/bytes, not just upvotes, you transmit should have a limited expectation of privacy. This is just the best/latest reminder because every hack is the same problem, only the company has incentive to keep it quiet so it doesn’t hit their bottom line.


  • This is super interesting to me.

    I think you’re right in that the user base has the same expectations despite a huge change in the model. But it’s going to be the same on any server, your circle of trust now has to include your instance owner everywhere on the fediverse.

    In general there’s no expectation you can delete every email you ever sent either, just your local copies. Most of what you see here is similar with some new attached protocols (votes, markdown etc)

    I’m sure we’ll see some evolution, but the entire infrastructure is a call back to when a single service wasn’t directly linked to a single business, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

    In other words I’m not sure the concession isn’t the price you pay to not have reddit/twitter in charge. Because any other architecture that had the convenience of having a single point to delete from is also going to be a single point of failure.







  • 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.