If large companies and influential people move to Mastodon […] and no ads.
large companies and influential people are in the commercial platforms because of the ads. There is literally no reason for them to move in a place without ads.
while I would say I belong to the dark-theme cult, there are some applications/websites that I cannot get used to them in dark mode. Like github or slack for example in which everything else than they light theme looks strange in my eyes.
I agree. The mass influx of users from reddit have brought here people who are not familiar with the core principles behind such projects. They literally see it as a free social media that could potentially be in the place of lets say facebook. They don’t understand that the mainstream social media are what they are today because of decisions that have been taken based only on their profit. And this is something that we don’t want to copy here
meta (threads) will not support fediverse already. They said they will do in some later version. So for the completely practical part, you don’t need to do anything right now.
it depends what you consider as consequence. For me, setting up a clear boundary between what is now known as fediverse and whatever it is this that meta will create is not consequence but choice.
in this case we don’t talk about users who want to block users of another instance. The problem is not the users of meta. The problem is meta itself and all the problems it will bring to the federated network. Whoever cannot see that their intentions are not to promote federated networks but to exploit and extinguish them, is just naive.
Am I just misunderstanding this?
yes
I think it would be possible to keep a central database containing only the information which username has already been registered within the Fediverse - a bit like domain registrars. When a new user joins, the operators of an instance could look up whether the desired username is already occupied on another instance. This would certainly mean losing some autonomy, since the instances would no longer have sovereignty over available usernames. But I think it would be beneficial overall if usernames were only assigned once within the Fediverse.
I don’t think this is realistic at all. It breaks the current philosophy of the fediverse where each instance can be both autonomous and federated. What would happen if for example an instance wanted to federate after they already had a couple accounts. Would they need to delete these users because the username exists? This is the reason that the second part (after the “@”) exists.
Also look at the email. Ofcourse it is possible to have the same name with users in other email services. It would be very weird not to be allowed to get the yourname@yourfavoriteservice.com because the yourname@anotherservice.com already exists.
What you are suggesting introduces and requires a central authority that would be responsible for that, but this again, breaks the philosophy of the fediverse itself.
meta is not here to promote open networks. They will do more harm than good. If you want to learn more about how google achieved it with the XMPP you can read the story here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html written by one of the core developers.
this seems so messed up. I like kbin, don’t get me wrong, but I consider this to be a bug, not a feature. When you have upvotes and downvotes one next to the other, you (a user) expect these 2 to do the exactly opposite action. Not one of them just add something in your favourites while the other starts negating another user’s karma.
you missed the point that the open source devs were in a constant race to adapt to all the google-“innovations” and actually troubleshoot on them which ends up demotivating
first of all I’d like to say that i’m very concerned about my online privacy. However what you ask is, with all due respect, delusional.
The only way to prevent this is by moving in closed gate environment where you know the participants. It is impossible to stop all the scrappers or the AIs by posting #nobots. This game is already over and you just consume your mental energy fighting a lost war.
The moment you are posting something online publicly it will be scrapped by unlimited companies. Consider it a fact. Even if lets say the biggest of companies due to public relations reasons, respect such tag, there are unlimited other smaller companies/entities/whatever that will give no fuck at all. If they scrap it, then they can even sell it to the larger companies and your data is again there. It is unpreventable. It is like going in from of other people and telling them “don’t look, look away”. Ok so what, they have already looked and they look again when you turn away.
because by collecting votes and favorites one can create a full spectrum profile of a user. However, if I decide to write a couple of sentences publicly I already know that it will be scrapped by unlimited companies and I agree that we have to just accept that it will be happening.
so you think that 2 governments would had started spending millions if 5 migrants had somehow been trapped in the seabed of the Mediterranean?
if you live in europe, the Mediterranean sea is you know, right next to you. And way much closer than the distance of the titanic to the shore in America, which is about 1000 nautical miles.
sure. It has nothing to do with the fact that in one of cases they are 5 billionaires while in the other one they are 750 poor migrants. No, totally not.
True. But in due time you’ll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the “go to” community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We’re still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their “own thing”. Maybe that’s fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).
while technically you’re correct, what I see as different that I think needs improvement, is the discoverability. It is needed to somehow when I search for e.g. technology to also see the various federated “technology” communities. If I have to manually search for an instance, find the correct handle, then go search for this handle in my own instance and only after that to be able to subscribe, it adds a difficulty on the level that I may never manage to know about the existence of some other communities (magazines). Apart from that, I agree it is totally fine to just let them organically grow and it will sort itself out on which one I may want to participate more.
thanks for reminding us!
i think there is a way to move your account from one instance to another, but even if there is a way, it wouldn’t cover the case that an instance is already offline. Yes, generally speaking it is nice and correct approach to “choose a smaller instance”, but when you don’t know who runs it behind, it is actually other problems that come up, as you already know first hand.
I don’t think that accessibility in AI somehow correlates with the intelligence of the subjects using it. It can actually work in the completely opposite way where people blindly trust it or people get used to using it in a degree that they’re unable to do anything without the help from the technology. Like people who are unable to navigate 2 blocks from their house if they don’t use google maps navigation even though they do the same route every day.