Melmi

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you’d have to mount it first.

A lot of Linux ISOs are hybrid images which can be booted if flashed directly to a USB stick.

There are already AI-written books flooding the market, not to mention other forms of written misinformation.

Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.

But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!

I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that “good for humanity vs bad for humanity” isn’t a debate, there’s no “We want to ruin humanity” party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they’re a psychopath or a nihilist.

There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to “good for humanity” vs “bad for humanity” is going to be inherently political. I think “what’s best for humanity” is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others’ political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.

In other words, it’s not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it’s not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.

I don’t think that “everyone is inherently equal” is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I’d argue that it’s more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.

This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it’s important to distinguish because some people don’t accept the axiom that “everyone is inherently equal”. Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more “fit”) than others, they’ll argue, and it’s unjust to impose arbitrary systems of “fairness” onto them.

In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for “equality” are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.

People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.

And it’s worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn’t inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you’re completely amoral, you won’t kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.

The problem with a “beneficial to humanity” axis is that I think that most people think their political beliefs, if enacted, would be beneficial to humanity. Most people aren’t the villains of their own stories.

The very act of politics is to disagree on what is best for humanity.

That’s not what’s going on here. It’s just doing what it’s been told, which is repeating the system prompt. It has nothing to do with Gab, this trick or variations of it work on pretty much any GPT deployment.

We need to be careful about anthropomorphizing AI.

I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.

I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.

Like other people have said, this is very similar to how the Internet already works. All you need to do to connect to the Internet is connect to a single router that’s a part of it, at least in theory. The Internet is already decentralized on the backend, it’s just that only big players get to be a part of it for the most part.

A fundamental problem with your decentralization idea is that on a mesh network, you become reliant on your upstream(s) for your connection. You think Comcast is annoying, or your connection is slow? Imagine trying to troubleshoot your Internet connection and having to go deal with your neighbor instead, but he’s at work so you have to wait for him, but oh he’s too tired so he’ll help you tomorrow…

Not to mention that this severely limits speeds. No longer can your connection go from your house, to the street, to the backbone, and then straight to Google’s servers, now it has to go bounce around between a number of potentially unreliable consumer connections, run by non-professionals.

In a system like this, inevitably local organizations or companies will pop up to take the burden off individuals, which would provide massive QoL improvements, and we’d end up with ISPs again.

That said, there’s a lot of people doing hobby network stuff out there. I know some hackerspaces have their own local hobbynets, that then connect to each other over the open Internet using VPN tunnels. This solves some of the reliability problem, plus it’s just a hobby thing so it isn’t a problem that it’s slow and kinda bad. Then there are even individuals who get their own routers (or VPSes) and plop them in datacenters to participate in the internet alongside big companies and ISPs. Neither of these require new protocols, everything can be done with TCP/IP and BGP. (Plus a splash of VPN protocols here and there.)

Do you have any source for your claim that comments on the Internet are public domain? It’s a common sentiment that anything posted on the Internet is public, but I don’t believe it has any legal basis. Often websites have a ToS saying that anything you submit belongs to them in perpetuity, but programming.dev doesn’t have that.

I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn’t care if you sign it. And it’s not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).

It’s still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance’s stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they’re more active in the discourse.

You’re right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren’t even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.

It’s hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.

That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don’t care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.

It’s interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.

You should ideally be updating manually so you can handle any issues as they arise and you don’t wake up to a silently broken system. Manual intervention is occasionally required. Usually it’s associated with a breaking change that’s announced on the mailing list, but sometimes it’ll just happen.

It’s kind of ironic taking a project that’s already written in Rust and writing a replacement for it in Java.

Usually things get ported to Rust, not the other way around.

“as opposed to” is an idiom that just means “in contrast”. You’re creating a contrast between what they’re actually doing as opposed to what they’re supposed to be doing. “As supposed to” doesn’t work as a preposition and doesn’t actually create a contrast on its own.

Apple products are an ecosystem. It’s not just the physical devices they’re selling. It makes sense from a business perspective to keep iMessage on iOS only, because it keeps people in the ecosystem.