modulus

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

Not so concerned on that–people being able to establish their tolerances for whom they want to talk to is fine with me. But if the system goes towards allowlists, it becomes more cliquish and finding a way in is more difficult. It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they’re not handled another way.

It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

I run my instance and that’s definitely not my experience. Which is of course not to say it can’t be someone else’s. But something, in my opinion not unimportant, is lost when it becomes harder to find a way in.

I’m concerned that people are already eager to bury the fediverse and unwilling to consider what would be lost. The solutions I keep hearing in this space all seem to hinge on making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

Same thing with reply policies. I can see the reason why people want them, but a major advantage on the fedi is the sense that there is little difference between posters. I think a lot of this would just recreate structures of power and influence, just without doing so formally–after all the nature of scale-free networks is large inequality.

It’s possible FF wouldn’t get away with something like integrating ad blocking by default, but in no reasonable universe were they required to do the PPA stuff and turn it on by default. Nor is it clear that it will lead to websites caring about FF compatibility–unfortunately many already don’t.

The usual pro-advertising take. “It’s ok that we’re going to experiment without your consent on how to manipulate you, because we only use aggregated data so it’s not personal, it’s business.”

Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.

IMO bridging or translation isn’t federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it’s hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.

I wouldn’t really count Mastodon/Bluesky bridging as federation. They’re incompatible protocols that were never intended to work together (arguably Bluesky was explicitly designed to avoid using AP).

For me the weirdest part of the interview is where he says he doesn’t want to follow anyone, that he wants the algorithm to just pick up on his interests. It’s so diametrically opposed to how I want to intentionally use social networks and how the fedi tends to work that it’s sometimes hard to remember there are people who take that view.

So, not super sure what this is or how this works. Is the idea that you run the cgi, it sets up static files, and it responds to AP requests like follows, mentions, boosts and such? I realise lots of people don’t like long docs but I didn’t really understand the use case very well.

On my instance, the following control measures apply:

• Only public posts are visible through the web interface.
• Only public posts appear on RSS.
• Following requires approval.
• Authorised fetch is required.

So I think I have reason to feel fairly strongly that follower only posts are not public, and even unlisted posts are reasonably restricted.

Hypothetically? Maybe, but it seems extremely unlikely. Even if the referendum would have run normally back then, what would have happened next?

In fact, the declaration of independence lasted seconds, because anyone who knows anything can realise the extreme infeasibility of a unilateral declaration and all it would entail.

that said, if the Spanish state is so fragile a vote could split it, then it should probably split.

I would expect that, but I’m not just talking right wingers. I personally know Sumar voters who said they will now vote for cannabis party or any random thing because of the amnesty.

Not that hard left (I gave money to Sumar but I’m realistic that it’s the best we can get, more than what we want).

I know some people who are really pissed off about the amnesty, and personally I don’t get it. Like in what world is the personal fate of a few hundreds of people who, let’s say for the sake of the argument, ran an illegal referendum, more important than labour rights for everyone?

I played it and enjoyed it. The first time round I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of game mechanics, just went by what I would do in that place, and my moderation speed fell to 0 so I lost.

Second time I managed to finish the game, with some compromises but not too awful.

There is literally no instance in which expanding the scope of copyright law is a good thing. Never.

Not saying this won’t have any negative effects on people, however I think it’s a little premature to guess at what it will be like. About 3/4 of the article is commenting what it will do to men when we find out only at the end women are the majority of users.

As far as I can tell, this is incorrect. If there’s a post on instance A, a reply from instance B, and someone on instance C follows the OP on A but not the RP on B, they will only see the OP without the reply.

Source: I very often notice this because I run a single-user instance, and when I open a thread it’s incomplete, lacking posts from instances that I have not suspended.

Not that I expect a lot of consistency from imperialists, but essentially the same lines of argument can be used regarding the Russian Federation.

An advisory opinion would effectively settle Israel’s “bilateral dispute” without the state’s consent.

Ditto for .ru and .ua.

The court is not equipped to examine a “broad range of complex factual issues concerning the entire history of the parties’ dispute”.

Same thing, especially if we get back to the formation of the Soviet Union, independence referenda, and so on.

An advisory opinion would conflict with existing agreements between the parties and negotiation frameworks endorsed by the UN.

This would be Minsk I and II.

The request is not appropriate as it asks the court to “assume unlawful conduct on the part of Israel”.

Ditto.

The biggest issues for me are:

1. No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.
2. Account migration.
3. Implementation compatibility.

No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set–and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.

Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.

Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).

Historically many if not most conflicts started with the breach of an agreement. Without getting bogged down in irrelevant detail, there are issue of self-determination of Crimea, which repeatedly in 3 referenda (2 if you wish to exclude the last one) pronounced in favour of either autonomy or being part of the CIS (effectively Russian Federation). Likewise, and setting aside the 2014 events for the moment, there also were agreements that, in principle, may have served as a valid status quo, such as Minsk II, and were not complied to by the parties.

So, sure, some form of trust-building will be necessary. But what’s the alternative? Endless war?