I have. I’ve been in various instances on Mastodon. I am not in Lemmy right now, in fact. I keep forgetting because it impacts nothing.
There are two things instance interactions seem to drive: self-referential arguments about defederation and defederation.
Defederation is not a culture-building tool, though, it’s a moderation tool. A very unsubtle cluster bomb of a moderation tool, but a moderation tool. The entire point of interoperability, in fact, is that content is instance-agnosting. That’s the basic concept of the feature. If the content was fundamentally different across instances then federation would be fundamentally broken.
I genuinely don’t know how people argue with a straight face that “fedi is like email, it doesn’t matter what you run, everything speaks to everything else” but also “what instance you pick is super important and completely defines the culture”. Those two statements are clearly mutually exclusive.
The truth is closer to the former than the latter, by design.
😂 sounds like you’re just not aware enough. Take lemmy.worlds stance on advocating violence vs other instances.
Without federation that distinction would not exist. The same types of variances exist for tons of things:
nsfw content.
Ai allowed va ai content banned.
Twitter links banned vs not.
Pro Palestine vs pro genocidal assholes.
Pro luigi vs hail corporate.
The list goes on and on for the variances. Variances that are never allowed to exist on platforms that are not decentralized. See reddit/twitter/facebook.
Hence the statement ‘the instance you pick is important’. Because it can dramatically change your experience.
Anyways im done interacting with you. Nothing interesting will be gained on my end from this conversation.
This is demonstrably untrue. Those things are fundamentally no different than blocklists. Like I said, a very blunt moderation tool, not a cultural diversity tool.
This isn’t a problem of awareness. Like I mentioned above, I am well aware of all the endless circular arguments about federation and defederation happening all the time all over Fedi. They are pointless purity tests, in most cases, but they’re unsurprising, because the core culture of the place is fundamentally about this design choice of making big moderation blocks be handled at the instance-to-instace level (very much at the cost of moderation tools for and towards individuals, since blocking is basically nonexistent, instance managers don’t have a ton of bandwidth or resources for granular moderation and don’t have control over moderation in other instances).
That’s a good example of how the design impacts the culture: putting defederation in the way it is and weakening blocking to barely a mute does affect the culture across the system, but it does nothing to tweak that culture beyond moderation in other applications, in the same way that blocking every nazi you meet on Twitter does nothing to change the culture of Twitter. The patters of behavior are still what they are, you’re just cherry picking content generated via those patterns.
So no, no lack of awareness, just a different understanding of how this works.
Like i said you’re simply unaware and unwilling. Not our problem. Those example differences are exactly what give rise to diversity of culture.
And yes its unaware since you cant comprehend how they give arise to cultural differences you cant be aware of how they influence such changes. Again not our problem.
I mean, I’ve been around a while, so it can’t be “us Fedi dwellers”, since… you know, I’m pat of that, so I would be part of the “we”, so surely you meant something else, right?
Because man, would it be some weird self-defeating irony to imply that in a thread where one is defending a mostly vibes-based argument that the culture in “our” place is actually uniquely diverse and free-form due to the way the thing is designed. That’d be a remarkable self-own.
So I’m sure it’s not what you meant.
Look, deal with it however you need, I don’t particularly mind, but it’s one of many self-serving, semi-deliberate misaprehensions people around here like to lean on to dismiss the current limitations of Fedi’s setup, and that habit does bum me out. Because, you know, being part of this community, despite your implications, I would like for it to be more popular than it is. Not fully mainstream, perhaps, because I do like the weird, cozy mid-90s forum feel of the thing, but… yeah, a bit.
And definitely I would have liked to see Masto put up more of a fight instead of being steamrolled by Elon. That was a legitimate bummer.
Did I ever claim to be trying to do that? I mean, it’s starting to get convoluted, but my initial point was that people attribute effects to decentralization it doesn’t have by itself, so the differences between the more consolidated Bluesky ecosystem and the less consolidated Masto ecosystem in particular aren’t as meaningful as the graph in the OP suggests.
You were the one who popped up to claim that decentralization prevents monocultures. I just disagreed with that statement and pointed out that… yeah, that’s one of the magic effects people claim that don’t seem to really happen.
Whether that’s a problem or how big of one is entirely up for debate. All I’m saying is it’s not much of a real advantage, as far as I can tell. I’m both here and in BS, so I clearly don’t find either that effect or the lack of that effect to be a dealbreaker, if it exists at all. I’m claiming it doesn’t exist in the first place.
My educated guess is that what would meaningfully change how this conversation is playing out is me unequivocally siding with the home team and bashing the away team. The fact that I’m not necessarily bashing either (or at times I’m bashing both) is perceived as hostility or siding with the away team, because people have squishy brains and that’s how the Internet works and all social media was a mistake.
no you’re just overall confused and I dont particularly care to enlighten you on the topic given your current lack of cognizance and you have yet to demonstrate any nuanced understanding at all on how dynamic systems work and how bluesky’s ecosystem will inevitably crash and burn due to the monoculture it has builtin to its very core via the corporation overseeing it (boom/bust cycle).
There are other larger problems within bluesky’s protocol that will prevent it from surviving as well which are intentional to ensure the administrative control for the corporation backing it.
The blocklists have nothing to do with anything besides ensuring a happier user base.
Go read Chaos by james gleick i guess and come back. thats probably the gentlest primer I can suggest.
edit: and then follow that up with reading about anarchist political theories (its related i promise)
Think what you will. But the evidence to the contrary is fairly obvious one simply has to look at how various instances interact.
I have. I’ve been in various instances on Mastodon. I am not in Lemmy right now, in fact. I keep forgetting because it impacts nothing.
There are two things instance interactions seem to drive: self-referential arguments about defederation and defederation.
Defederation is not a culture-building tool, though, it’s a moderation tool. A very unsubtle cluster bomb of a moderation tool, but a moderation tool. The entire point of interoperability, in fact, is that content is instance-agnosting. That’s the basic concept of the feature. If the content was fundamentally different across instances then federation would be fundamentally broken.
I genuinely don’t know how people argue with a straight face that “fedi is like email, it doesn’t matter what you run, everything speaks to everything else” but also “what instance you pick is super important and completely defines the culture”. Those two statements are clearly mutually exclusive.
The truth is closer to the former than the latter, by design.
😂 sounds like you’re just not aware enough. Take lemmy.worlds stance on advocating violence vs other instances.
Without federation that distinction would not exist. The same types of variances exist for tons of things:
nsfw content.
Ai allowed va ai content banned.
Twitter links banned vs not.
Pro Palestine vs pro genocidal assholes.
Pro luigi vs hail corporate.
The list goes on and on for the variances. Variances that are never allowed to exist on platforms that are not decentralized. See reddit/twitter/facebook.
Hence the statement ‘the instance you pick is important’. Because it can dramatically change your experience.
Anyways im done interacting with you. Nothing interesting will be gained on my end from this conversation.
This is demonstrably untrue. Those things are fundamentally no different than blocklists. Like I said, a very blunt moderation tool, not a cultural diversity tool.
This isn’t a problem of awareness. Like I mentioned above, I am well aware of all the endless circular arguments about federation and defederation happening all the time all over Fedi. They are pointless purity tests, in most cases, but they’re unsurprising, because the core culture of the place is fundamentally about this design choice of making big moderation blocks be handled at the instance-to-instace level (very much at the cost of moderation tools for and towards individuals, since blocking is basically nonexistent, instance managers don’t have a ton of bandwidth or resources for granular moderation and don’t have control over moderation in other instances).
That’s a good example of how the design impacts the culture: putting defederation in the way it is and weakening blocking to barely a mute does affect the culture across the system, but it does nothing to tweak that culture beyond moderation in other applications, in the same way that blocking every nazi you meet on Twitter does nothing to change the culture of Twitter. The patters of behavior are still what they are, you’re just cherry picking content generated via those patterns.
So no, no lack of awareness, just a different understanding of how this works.
Like i said you’re simply unaware and unwilling. Not our problem. Those example differences are exactly what give rise to diversity of culture.
And yes its unaware since you cant comprehend how they give arise to cultural differences you cant be aware of how they influence such changes. Again not our problem.
“Our”?
What “our” is that? Who’s “we”?
I mean, I’ve been around a while, so it can’t be “us Fedi dwellers”, since… you know, I’m pat of that, so I would be part of the “we”, so surely you meant something else, right?
Because man, would it be some weird self-defeating irony to imply that in a thread where one is defending a mostly vibes-based argument that the culture in “our” place is actually uniquely diverse and free-form due to the way the thing is designed. That’d be a remarkable self-own.
So I’m sure it’s not what you meant.
Look, deal with it however you need, I don’t particularly mind, but it’s one of many self-serving, semi-deliberate misaprehensions people around here like to lean on to dismiss the current limitations of Fedi’s setup, and that habit does bum me out. Because, you know, being part of this community, despite your implications, I would like for it to be more popular than it is. Not fully mainstream, perhaps, because I do like the weird, cozy mid-90s forum feel of the thing, but… yeah, a bit.
And definitely I would have liked to see Masto put up more of a fight instead of being steamrolled by Elon. That was a legitimate bummer.
If you actually identified a problem and eposed an alternative approach worth discussing this conversation would be playing out differently.
Did I ever claim to be trying to do that? I mean, it’s starting to get convoluted, but my initial point was that people attribute effects to decentralization it doesn’t have by itself, so the differences between the more consolidated Bluesky ecosystem and the less consolidated Masto ecosystem in particular aren’t as meaningful as the graph in the OP suggests.
You were the one who popped up to claim that decentralization prevents monocultures. I just disagreed with that statement and pointed out that… yeah, that’s one of the magic effects people claim that don’t seem to really happen.
Whether that’s a problem or how big of one is entirely up for debate. All I’m saying is it’s not much of a real advantage, as far as I can tell. I’m both here and in BS, so I clearly don’t find either that effect or the lack of that effect to be a dealbreaker, if it exists at all. I’m claiming it doesn’t exist in the first place.
My educated guess is that what would meaningfully change how this conversation is playing out is me unequivocally siding with the home team and bashing the away team. The fact that I’m not necessarily bashing either (or at times I’m bashing both) is perceived as hostility or siding with the away team, because people have squishy brains and that’s how the Internet works and all social media was a mistake.
no you’re just overall confused and I dont particularly care to enlighten you on the topic given your current lack of cognizance and you have yet to demonstrate any nuanced understanding at all on how dynamic systems work and how bluesky’s ecosystem will inevitably crash and burn due to the monoculture it has builtin to its very core via the corporation overseeing it (boom/bust cycle).
There are other larger problems within bluesky’s protocol that will prevent it from surviving as well which are intentional to ensure the administrative control for the corporation backing it.
The blocklists have nothing to do with anything besides ensuring a happier user base.
Go read Chaos by james gleick i guess and come back. thats probably the gentlest primer I can suggest.
edit: and then follow that up with reading about anarchist political theories (its related i promise)