Notices by volkris@qoto.org

@Hyolobrika I’d be interested in learning about those proposals.

My concern is that it’s like trying to bolt wings onto a car to make it fly instead of starting from scratch with an airplane fuselage: I think the platform is fundamentally not adapted for it, so I’m skeptical that those additions would work in an elegant way.

But I’m interested!

@wjmaggos

@wjmaggos

It’s a really important point that different people use social media differently and expect different things out of social media.

The reason I think this point is so important is because too often users will think the system works one way and expect it to work that way when in reality it’s working a different way.

That applies here. You bring up the idea that most of what we do on social media is targeted toward the public, and platforms like Twitter and Mastodon seem very focused on that mode, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

However, a user that expects more privacy and less targeting toward the public might find themself surprised if their content is much more public than they were expecting.

So that’s why I grind that ax pretty regularly.

@Hyolobrika

@wjmaggos Well the other half of the ax that I grind is that I wish Fediverse developers had much more of a focus on end users, on letting end empowering end users to shape their experiences the way they want so that different people can use the same platform in different ways.

We do see some of that with, for example, picture posting sites existing alongside the microblogging sites. Different interfaces just have to figure out how to handle different types of content coming across.

But taking it a step farther, this is why I emphasize ActivityPub being not so much decentralized as centralized around instances. That is a constraint that prevents this platform from being as flexible to different users.

And I think ATProtocol seems more decentralized and more flexible so that more users can have different sorts of experiences all on the same network.

In a way it’s like how web traffic and email all coexist on the internet. If you decentralize more control you can have more different approaches to the experience.

@Hyolobrika

@wjmaggos what about ATProtocol prevents decentralization?

From what I’ve read it promotes it better than the protocols here.

@wjmaggos

Well for what it’s worth, my opinion, just an opinion, is that the platform was held back by engineering decisions that came out of a web server world, where everything was focused on servers instead of users.

If you look at the technologies underneath ActivityPub, it looks like developers grabbed a bunch of off-the-shelf web technologies and cobbled them together. Lots of http and webfinger and web certificates, etc.

They could have started more from scratch, but this is the direction they went, and for better or worse, it’s going to be a server oriented platform because it was built on server oriented technologies.

I think it was a case of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail 🙂

@Hyolobrika

@gray because they’re irrationally obsessed with hating it.

@silverpill if you read through the ActivityPub standard, the protocol is designed to scale with number of instances, and it is a scaling factor larger than simply linear.

You say AP is very easy on resources, but that flies in the face of so many instance operators experiencing meltdowns and surprise hosting costs when the resources exploded far higher than they expected.

Which makes sense because, again, the protocol is designed in a way that involves exponential increases.

@lps @errhead @Revertron @kzimmermann

@errhead I’m referring to the design of ActivityPub at the core of Fediverse.

If you’re talking about something else that’s fine, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

@lps @Revertron @kzimmermann

@lps the problem is that smaller instances and more of them consume exponentially more resources, making the whole system exponentially more expensive to operate.

That’s just how the protocol was designed, unfortunately.

People complain about Bitcoin being resource-intensive, but Fediverse faces a similar problem.

@Revertron @kzimmermann

@aral no, that’s not what a war crime is

@exception exactly.

We might get a TON of engagement within our echo chambers. The amount of head-nodding might give a perception that we’re doing a lot of good.

But just engaging with people whose minds are already on the same page does nothing to progress anything.

@aral

@lain

I’ve heard people make that framing over the years, and I really don’t know where they come up with it.

The value of the scientific method is exactly that theories are maybe, leading to testing via hypothesis.

When I hear people saying theory is certain, they really get the whole point of #science backwards. If the theory was certain there would be nothing worth testing.

Just for completeness, the way I’d frame science is:
A model describes what you see
A theory guesses at how the model works
An experiment stresses the theory, trying to break it
A hypothesis is the stress point where the theory may break

@Meemoo

When you use that many hashtags it makes it hard for people to tailor their feeds using them.