Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not entirely convinced that "the fediverse" is really the answer, but I do think that developing viable alternatives is. The same applies to Free Software and such in general; complaining about "Microsoft GitHub bad" is nice and all, but if all the Open Source alternatives are demonstrably worse then ... well ... (some of them are okay, but still lacking in various areas especially for more serious use, GitLab is a mess that barely works, and don't get me started about that atrocity of GNU Savannah).

Anyway, re: fediverse; I suspect that it will have the same problems as Facebook if it really takes off, if not worse. The reason there's no problems now is because basically, few people use or care about it, but once it takes off bad actors will start looking for ways to abuse/manipulate it and we'll be back where we started.

there are many issues around social media that are still unresolved and existing fediverse implementations are not necessarily more advanced in this respect.

but the transparency, evolvability, standards based architecture are all aspects that would much accelerate finding solutions

Perhaps; although I'm not so sure. Another story from yesterday which didn't take off much, but I thought was pretty good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010941

I don't really see federation improve on that all that much, but maybe I'm just lacking in imagination.

its a good read but remarkably it manages not to mention once the fediverse (and mastodon in particular) where alternate strategies are already facing empirical validation.

if they did do a more thorough research of how it is setup they would know that some very simple choices have huge calming effect: e.g., not showing the number of "likes" on the timeline and not allowing "comments" on reposts. and those are just tiny interventions in the scheme of things. having open source codebases that can be forked but still interoperate via activity pub means that a fragmentation, speciation, niche creation will happen organically which will further reduce the phenomenon of irrate digital mobs

its not like people don't have imagination, but a "system" that sucks in XX billions of profit per quarter acts as a black hole: any light-ray of hope is crushed back into its reality distortion field

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