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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I mean, keeping them local is easy - if anything much easier. I like the idea of summoning them, maybe a mod summoning and banishing them to have them watch a community

    And bots shouldn’t be acting like humans, they should be doing things only they could or should do. Like haiku bot, n-word bot, things like tallying votes for AITA, or even tracking nominations and building best of communities

    They were misused on Reddit, but we can do more with them here. Probably starting a goodbot that messages admins so they can stay ahead of the inevitable bot explosion





  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”


  • By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

    Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

    They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

    Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

    Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

    Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

    And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

    They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

    We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible


  • Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

    Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

    Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

    Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals


  • Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

    They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

    Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

    Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it

    And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

    They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society

    It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…


  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot


  • I’m totally on board with this. Most of this stuff is random culture crap I could take or leave, but common use of /s is practically an excuse not to make an effort to understand the other person’s POV.

    Being a charitable reader and trying to understand the other person is everything.

    Sure, without it there will be misunderstandings… But coming back and clarifying “I thought that was obviously sarcastic” is the kind of little nudge that makes both people reread what they wrote, and introspection keeps a community healthy.

    It’s embarrassing when you misunderstand someone or if you didn’t get your basic position across - and frankly it should be.

    And if people get nasty the second they see a bad take, that’s a symptom of being in an echo chamber (or at least a very polarized community)



  • I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

    But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media


  • I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up

    I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow

    What we don’t need is karma done badly, and there’s a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it


  • Running a server isn’t that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it’s in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

    That’s well within casual donation amounts.

    But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs



  • It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

    Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

    At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

    Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter



  • That’s funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I’m still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).

    Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn’t have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while… It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.

    But then wsl came out and it just didn’t seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven’t felt the need to switch… It’s sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it’d run better on Linux


  • I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

    We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

    Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

    But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

    And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

    And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

    This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital


  • Hahahaha…he didn’t start Tesla or spaceX

    He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as “co-founders” and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

    There’s speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

    Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I’d still be singing his praises… Except he hasn’t.

    He’s not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

    Every time he’s tried to start something, it failed - he can’t build a team to save his life.

    He’s good at hype and having money, I used to say “he’s a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up… That’s not the worst thing to be”.

    Now? He’s convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They’re driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

    I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could’ve done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn’t have done it from scratch