CynAq

<insert yo mama joke here>

I’d say it’s exactly as productive as saying “It’s no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It’ll be fiiiiiine”.

We should watch everything very carefully.

Read this. You’ll understand the issue a little better.

The problem here isn’t talking to Meta or Meta making a federated platform.

Nobody can prevent Meta from doing that anyway.

The problem is the need to push against the insistence of Meta to keep these meetings off the record. It’s against the entire philosophy of something like not only fediverse but FOSS in general.

If Meta wants good faith, they have to show it first.

Notice that in the email, Kev gives his guidance as to the matter. Do whatever the fuck you want as long as you put people first and make a product for the purpose of serving them.

This should be the attitude everyone should have first.

We will accept you as long as you’re bringing value to us, not the other way round, got that Meta?

As long as any dev is taking this approach, Meta included, I’m supporting them. If someone is secretive about their intentions about a public service which is not a for profit endeavor inherently, I’ll have a hard pass too.

What I don’t understand with the “wait and see” people is the presupposition that it means to federate day 1 and see if they fuck things up to decide if defederation is needed. Their reasoning often includes “two clicks” as if the amount of effort defederation takes was the concern people had.

“Let’s wait and see how they behave first, and then decide if we can federate safely” is just as much a “wait and see” stance, and it should take two clicks as well.

Why do we have to get exposed first and react later when we can observe first and then decide if we want it or not?

I think (and hope) so too. Some pro leniency stances from mastodon bigwigs got me a little worried, that’s all.

They will drown us out even if they don’t want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.

Preach it.

I recently started studying social psychology, and sadly the main takeaway from my initial venture into the field is a confirmation of how unaware and automated the average person is.

Middle managers, marketers and the average customer are all caught up in a perpetual feedback loop, constantly enabling each other’s addictions. It doesn’t help that these demographics overlap as managers and marketers are customers of other marketers and managers, turning the feedback loop into a vicious cycle.

We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.

We also need a way to decouple everyone’s personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.

Storage ain’t cheap and it definitely ain’t infinite.

This is a way harder problem than “the internet” being a bit more mindful can solve easily.

Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.

We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.

We also need a way to decouple everyone’s personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.

Storage ain’t cheap and it definitely ain’t infinite.

This is a way harder problem than “the internet” being a bit more mindful can solve easily.

Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.

Really? What kind of lake are they now? Oh, meteor lake.

Remind me when they are at “toxic waste lake” or “out of lakes, sorry”

Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.

“Fediverse” seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.

Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That’s still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.

It would be good to have a list of subs going private. It might incentivize other subs to join in protest.