I’ve peaked at that issue a couple of times, but I never worked out what the issue/feature got stuck on. Naively I would have thought it a relatively workable feature to add.

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better … we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

It went down without any indications as to why AFAIU, as in no admin piped up anywhere about what was going on. So either something awful happened, or they just weren’t up for running an instance anymore and didn’t want to bother with the hassle of explaining that to others.

I claim no expertise here … so take this with plenty of salt. I also don’t know how much of this is specific to the protocol itself or is just the way bluesky have decided to build things.

I see two interesting and nice things here:

• Users and their follows or social graph are portable across the protocol
• The architecture (again, not sure how much of this is a protocol thing) has different levels of centrality or decentralisation for different parts of the system. So you don’t have to pick an instance just to create an account but can instead pick moderation policies and feeds when you want to. The issue is that underlying everything is a big giant server that’s collecting data and spitting it all out as a firehose. There’s only one right now (BlueSky’s) but the code is open and they say that others can start one too (however onerous that would be). The upside is that all the things downstream from the giant server can rely on it and instead make apps, feeds, execute moderation etc … which could be a nicer experience for both devs and users.

In the end, my impression of it is that they’re building more of a framework and ecosystem for others to build social media within. ActivityPub by comparison is much more of a playground of ideas and tools that people can make and host whatever they want with it. So more truly decentralised but also, IMO, puts more weight on the developers and the users to make the ecosystem happen and work well. For instance, we could have more portable user accounts on the fediverse, but we don’t (yet), because that’d have to be built and then implemented by all the platforms.

Once I see another Big Giant Central server running in some sort of sustainable or functioning way, then I personally think it’ll have a lot of promise. Before then, however, a number of developers might get interested in developing in that ecosystem because of how it might allow them to make the thing they’re interested in and not worry about other things.

As for how ATProto and ActivityPub can and should relate to each other in the future … they’re the only two decently sized projects really having a good shot at this decentralised thing (though there a few web3.0 things out there AFAIU, eg farcaster) … and I think they’re better off being “friends” rather than “enemies” for that reason.

If my impression of their differences is accurate, they’ll have different strengths going forward. IMO, ActivityPub will be more of smaller community thing. If all of the neuroscientists want to create a network of forums and blogs, that they’re in control of, around the world that all talk to each other but without being connected to all of the other social media, then the fediverse and its platforms will be the ecosystem to use. If neuroscientists want to talk to the rest of the world but still have ownship and control over their data and maybe their platform or feed or moderation, then AT-Proto will be the place to go. Bridges between the two would complement the flexibility here.

Yea I have. It’s more twitter-like in its vibe. But people seem happy there.

I’m not really a twitter person … so it’s not really my jam. But the AT Proto as an idea interests me and I’m interested to see what happens on it. Big question for is still whether a second (or third etc) relay will every be run.

Well said.

I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).

And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.

Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.

It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.

With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …

… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.

Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.

Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.

I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.

Either 19.1 or rc.1 fixes the bug from what I saw.

But the question then becomes when the last post was made to apocalyptic art. From my quick glance it was 4 days ago on the lemmy.ml mirror, which seems behind the most recent posts on the actual community. Lemmy.ml is on the newest version.

So my guess is that there’s some general federation issue, possibly on the feddit.de end, which is causing some things to get dropped.

If that’s not the issue, then there could be a similar bug that hasn’t yet been noticed.

Interesting. Could be related to the outbound federation bug 0.19.0 had.

The devs are aware and discussing it here (thanks, it seems, to your post!): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288

Are the devs aware or have you reported it somewhere? It’s a rather important bug and worth testing to be sure.

I can confirm that similar things have happened to me recently as a user in lemmy.ml. Don’t know if was a symptom of the beta testing or not though, or whether things are fine now.

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

As someone who is against use aggregate scores and pleased to see it removed I can understand the desire to make it available to admins/moderators to assist in their actions.

I think making the numbers available only for admins/mods would make sense, though I also feel it starts to get to be an arbitrary divide.

I also have to wonder if an admin/mod couldn’t simply use the view of the user’s posts/comments we all have access to along with the various sorts available. Want to know if a user posts generally well received stuff … look at their posts and sort by “Top all time”. Want to know if they’re regularly posting stuff that is poorly received, sort by “Controversial” (which is new) or just “New”. I’d suspect that in the end integrating this sort of lookup into the moderation tooling so that it’s easier/quicker to do would be more worthwhile than persisting with user aggregates.

one thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to set custom categories for Lemmy communities that I subscribe to/order them

Yep. Lemmy doesn’t provide any community management tooling, which is a shame, because a little can go a long way. Some clients provide some help, but generally it seems to be a lacking feature set.

I’m not really on discord (occasionally have gone on there) … but generally the whole fedi, IMO should probably be taking notes from them because they’ve obviously done a few things right which also seem to be exactly the things the fedi definitely doesn’t understand.

On the small subscription fee for the fedi, I think it would work best for specific instances. Here, decentralisation is a strength (again), as the small instance/community approach is well suited as the alternative to the large-with-a-small-subscription model and should provide a diversity of options for different kinds of people.

As for Twitter, right now a bunch of takes are floating around about how dumb the fee is (at least on masto, which has a huge bias against twitter) … while some will definitely leave I do wonder whether it actually makes sense for a lot people. How many principally lurk and would prefer their feed were “better” and are willing to be on a platform that requires the subscription for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if down the line we here takes from people who don’t pay but stay on Twitter because they like the feed better.

Honestly don’t think it’s an insane idea. Not sure how effective $1 would be against bots, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea makes sense: basic and low friction to deter a large amount of spam. Maybe it’s $5 a year or whatever.

Of course there’s an equity issue for those who can’t afford this, especially if it goes mainstream and every online thing requires similar and we get Netflix -> Cable all over again.

But here on the Fedi I can see the idea working if applied to some instances that have set up the governance (eg co-op) and services (committed moderators) for it to make sense.

I think it would be cool if being an admin and moderator could genuinely be a side hustle or more without sucking away at someone’s passion.