maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 7 Posts
  • 270 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Yep. And it’s a point well made.

    To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

    Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.




  • Tech monopolies must be held to account, the outsized influence of some tech billionaires must be held in check, and competition must be allowed to thrive. We may also need to consider the protection of both consumers themselves and human-created works (including our history) as part of a conservation effort before extractive models permanently pollute our shared cultural resources.

    Honestly feels like the main and perhaps only thing to do. Sure we can all do our own individualistic things, such as what we’re doing here on the Fedi.

    But the whole AI thing reveals I think just how big of a problem this all is … big tech would rather consume and replace the whole internet with some fuzzy hype tech than empower its users in any way.






  • It’s not BlueSky making the Reddit alternative, it’s third party devs. There are a few alternative apps being built on BlueSky architecture and ATProto right now.

    And yea, it definitely could overtake and harm lemmy, if there are people here into the BlueSky approach (which likely suits Reddit-like apps, I think I’ve seen some say BlueSky has a Reddit flavour to it).

    Honestly, given the dominance Mastodon has in AP and the shitty interop it has with lemmy, migrating to ATProto wouldn’t be the most insane idea for Lemmy IMO. Relying on BlurSky’s relay wouldn’t be for everyone. But some sort of multi-relay set up seems plausible and might be cool to see.


  • The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

    So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

    For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

    Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.





  • It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.



  • Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

    The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

    EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

    Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.


  • If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.

    Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.

    To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.



  • Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.

    Yea … it’s sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social … this stuff is hard and fragile but also important … so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).

    The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good “fediverse citizen”. And some of the “cultural purity through vigilance” culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.

    A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.