Never seen an explosion on the surface of a stellar remnant*? This year, you’ll have your chance

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

Credit where credit is due, if we define a generation as a 15 year period of time, and we decide that Gen Z started in 1995 (for easy math), you do, in fact, land on 1665.

I don’t know why the author thinks that Gen D doesn’t exist yet, when the pattern of X, Y (Millennials), and Z make a pattern that both implies that the Latin alphabet’s use is coming to an end for this purpose (ignoring that Gen X was named not as part of a sequence of letters, but by Douglas Copeland’s book, which was titled itself using an existing phrase), and that can easily be extrapolated backwards through time.

Damn, five figures. Nice! 912800 here.

I had the app on my phone, just to check in on my friendslist. None of them had logged on since about 2004 or so, at the latest.

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it’s the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon … [isn’t] very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it’s really impressive!

🤨

Mastodon has an order of magnitude more active users than Lemmy - and the whole rest of the Fediverse - if not two orders of magnitude.

Lemmy’s a great platform, but Reddit is already the niche social media site among the mainstream, and the kind if niche interest forums that ultimately built Reddit just haven’t reached critical mass here yet, and that means Reddit remains very sticky. Pile on people being kind of uncomfortable with the local namespaces for both users and communities, and I don’t know that Lemmy’s really the killer platform for the 'verse.

Fediverse adotion is going to be a collective effort. Loops has a good chance of attracting people. It would be nice if Mastodon would actually use a standard ActivityPub implementation so it played nicer with neighbours. And microblogger discovering something other than Mastodon would be nice.

But it’s not going to be just one platform. If it is, then the fediverse idea has totally failed.

Cool. You… don’t have to use it, or any sites that leverage it. But the Fediverse is an open network, and to that extent it should be able to support everyone’s needs. But if we want the Fediverse to be anything other than an internet enthusiast circlejerk, rather than a backbone technology for the internet, then supporting a wide variety of use cases is necessary.

Yeah, if we want to get people off of centralized, private social media sites, we really need Patreon integration for a range of fedi services. It’s one of the significant pipelines for Discord adoption.

Lemmy/*bin, PeerTube, Matrix, what have you all have immediate drop-in replacement value. Other services, like Mastodon, don’t have the same level of potential segmentation and exclusivity inherent in how they’re built, but it’d be a way to set up paid access servers.

These kinds of gateways are important for actually making the fediverse seem like a viable alternative. Right now, the incentives are driving people toward closed gardens and destroying the open internet.

Wow, JWST continues to impress on the desktop wallpaper front

Honestly the most impressive part of LLMs is the tokenizer that breaks down the request, not the predictive text button masher that comes up with the response.

Yes, exactly! It’s ability to parse the input is incredible. It’s the thing that has that “wow” factor, and it feels downright magical.

Unfortunately, that also makes people intuitively trust its output.

It “knows” as in it has access to the information and the ability to provide the right info for the right context.

It doesn’t, though, any more than you have access to the information in a pile of 10 million shredded documents.

It’s an accidental misspelling of Kichea, and was my Eve Online character’s first name. The misspelling made it unique for many years, until a kitchen sink company came along and started using it

Discourse has ActivityPub support coming via a plugin, IIRC, so it should be an option for Fedizens soon enough.

@[email protected] is also in the process of adding AcitivtyPub support to nodeBB, and it’s really, really cool seeing a traditional forum UX with distributed users on https://community.nodebb.org.

The simple fact of the matter is, the Fediverse is public. It’s a space specifically built on sharing. Finding your posts is trivial, and that’s by design. Blocking another account from viewing your posts is an incredibly weak hurdle for someone to overcome, and it informs them that you have blocked them.

If anything, doing so risks the possibility of escalating or accelerating harassment.

It’s the whole concept, friend! Welcome to the social we, where independent social media sites cross-communicate

The community belongs to a website, yes. You’re just subscribing to it remotely.

Lemmy is decentealized in the same way the web is decentealized. You can’t get articles from Blog 13705 if blog13795.net goes offline. That doesn’t make the web not decentealized.

At the end of the day, the whole fediverse is a bunch of independent websites hosting copies of other websites’ content. They’re not cloud communities, they’re mirrors.

Self-promotion is not charity. And neither is putty porn. It’s just the cost of doing business when you’re your own brand. And philanthropy is a scam promoted by the rich to help justify their wealth hoarding.

All of it ultimately ends up personally furthering the rich person’s personal goals. It’s all just a way of saying that the rich deserve to determine what society goals should be, and how society should use its limited resources.

It’s taking control away from the masses, and keeping it in the hands of those with money.

The thing is, what a politically engaged person thinks of as “politics” and what a disengaged one does probably has limited overlap. People probably aren’t bringing the Tories or the Republicans up in a D&D community, but bring up race portrayal or representation for disabled people and watch the sparks fly.

But that also means we don’t have enough users or content yet.

This may very well be the case currently, but it isn’t necessarily the indicator for such. A critical mass of people using the fediverse can still result in smaller communities due to the local-first nature of the space. If we had 10 million users interested in a given subject, but they’re spread among 2000 communities called ‘interest’ spanning 2000 servers, that’s not actually a problem. That’s a situation where the global ecosystem is rich and lively, but people are still seeing the same names over and over again in their little interest pocket.

I mean, I wasn’t here a decadeo ago or so when the groundwork of the Fediverse was being laid, so I don’t know how it was originally “marketed”, but people make things without understanding the true implications of their decisions all of the time. And the current crop of leading products in the fediverse are a generation or three removed from the original designers.

People build on top of stuff with goals that are off-target of the original goals of tech. Building a bunch of square pegs and ramming them through round holes just, ultimately, results in those pegs either not slipping through, or having their corners cut off.

But that goes against the original point of the fediverse IMO, which was to make a resilient social media platform where it doesn’t really matter what instance you join, you’ll get the same content.

If that was truly the original point of the Fediverse, it failed at the design phase. The way content is hosted and passed around has meant it was always going to be a constellation of independent nodes, each doing their own things. There’s nothing in the fundamental design of how these networks work that points to them being a networked simulation of centralized social media. And the repeated attempts to make it work, or at least look like it works, that way has resulted in exactly what should expected from trying to jam that square peg into this round hole: A poor and messy simulacra of centralized social media.

It has always been – and this is necessary by design – a weekly interconnected network of social media and networking sites. That’s the true, fundamental nature of the space, based on the engine powering it. Trying to pretend otherwise is just adding complexity on top of it, not removing it.