th18row

But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".

It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.

Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.

> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible

I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho

It's possible that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what's the point of the 'fediverse' is. Looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an overcorrection to the trend from the 2010s to move everything to silos (independent forums -> facebook groups / subreddits / twitter).

Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

Look for them in an escort site, or, depending on the city you're in, you'll know how to find them. Just make sure they don't have an adams apple bro

> Meanwhile, Eliezer Yudkowsky published a piece in TIME arguing that the open letter doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that AI scaling needs to be shut down entirely until the AI alignment problem is solved—with the shutdown enforced by military strikes on GPU farms if needed

It's like the 'shut it down' memes are real: https://i.imgflip.com/2j3kux.jpg

> Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?

I'd rather build something new and actually have a userbase than be something akin to a subreddit with fleeting users. It will be a lot more hard work, but it's worth it.

Also, Mastodon sucks. This whole "let's be free together" but also "don't step out of line" culture is disgusting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086.

> The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.

That's the problem. It's unnecessarily complex and other than a subniche, people in the real world are not interested in it. They just don't care about this at all.

Sorry but I have this strong feeling that the Fediverse/ActivityPub will be one of those ideas that will fail miserably or just become a niche for weirdos. My reasoning is: it's completely unnecessary. Just have different sites, like forums from the early 2000s. Much cleaner and simpler. I don't need a shared identity throughout these places. It's not what the web was meant to be, at all.

On the other hand, I have no reason to assume Twitter will die. What trust are we talking about here? I have no idea. People will just continue using it. In fact, I vastly prefer what's happening now than what the last management was doing.

Not trying to be confrontational here. I'm trusting my gut feeling more because I've seen through so many things that range from delusions to failed ideas in the last decade: Theranos, WeWork, Metaverse, Clubhouse, Crypto [other than Bitcoin], Social networks pretending to be the arbiters of truth, etc. I have a strong BS detector.

That's correct, there'no possible enforcement. I think the beaurocrats in the EU don't even know what they are doing with most of the policies or "fines" they try to impose.

It will drive Europe to a sort of digital isolationism where offshore companies will either a) dismiss and continue b) cease operations there.

He's right though, the EU can do nothing in that case. Quite literally nothing. There is no law to abide because you don't "care" about it and there are no consequences.

Practicality > useless laws