maegul

I’ll add to hendrik’s sibling post … it seems you’re relatively new to the fediverse. You may want to get a feel for the place before advocating for such wide reaching actions.

I’m all for expressing your feelings on an issue, but I do wonder if your eagerness is a bit premature. I myself “called for” defederation early in my time on the fediverse … and it was dumb of me.

Since then I’ve come to view most arguments around the idea of defederation suspiciously. There’s usually a bit of personal drama or a shallow opinion or people who want to loudly voice opinions without wanting to put work into making this place better. Usually, if defederation is actually needed, the admins will know before you do and it will be obvious.

All that being said … I’d ask you … what do you think federation and decentralisation is for?

It’s called a federation. Its design is intended to give people options. To provide a diverse network of content that people can navigate as they see fit.

The internet can naturally do a bad job of facilitating good and robust conversations.

Federation is the only cure I’ve seen for social media … where separate but connected and navigable spaces can co-exist, enabling a discourse through contrasting biases and perspectives, for those willing to use the content that way.

Can’t stand a community or instance? Don’t subscribe. Or unsubscribe or block.

Instance defederation is an extreme action and requires extreme justification IMO. It reduces the size of the network and the value of the ecosystem. Especially for lemmy world’s size … it has a responsibility to support the network.

What some loud people find unacceptable is likely interesting to some quiet others.

Differing political “sides” or perspectives isn’t enough. Politics isn’t everything for everyone. Moreover, it’s exactly the domain in which a diverse array of content is most valuable and important … because no one has all the answers!

It's brilliant IMO (I haven't seen the latest season but the one before ... season 3 did feel like it was losing its way a bit).

The thing with mainstream super hero stuff is that it seems to very much about supporting the status quo without really examining it. Generally, the MCU has been pretty guilty of this AFAICT. It's also why Winter Soldier is probably the best MCU film IMO ... Captain America becomes "the enemy" by standing up for his principles and destroys shield.

The Boys is about examining the status quo and so stands out massively compared to all of the other mainstream superhero stuff.

One area that I am somewhat knowledgeable about is image/video upscaling

Oh I believe you. I've seen it done on a home machine on old time-lapse photos. It might have been janky for individual photos, but as frames in a movie it easily elevated the footage.

Yea this. It's a weird time though. All of it is hype and marketing hoping to cover costs by searching for some unseen product down the line ... even the original chatGPT feels like a basic marketing stunt: "If people can chat with it they'll think it's miraculous however useful it actually is".

OTOH, it's easy to forget that genuine progress has happened with this rush of AI that surprised many. Literally the year before AlphaGo beat the world champion no one thought it was going to happen any time soon. And though I haven't checked in, from what I could tell, the progress on protein folding done by DeepMind was real (however hyped it was also). Whether new things are still coming or not I don't know, but it seems more than possible. But of course, it doesn't mean there isn't a big pile of hype that will blow away in the wind.

What I ultimately find disappointing is the way the mainstream has responded to all of this.

1. The lack of conversation about what we want this to look like in the end. There's way too much of a passive "lets see where the technology and big-corp capitalism take us and hope it doesn't lead to some sort of apocalypse"
2. The very seamless and reflexive acceptance that an AI chat interface could be an all knowing authority for everything in life ... was somewhat shocking to me. Obviously decades of "Googling" to get the answers to things has laid the groundwork for that, but still, there was IMO an unseemly acceptance of a pretty troubling future that indicated just how easily some dark timeline could arise.

yea, heard good things.

The thing about firefish is that at the time there was still an energy among newcomers to mastodon to look for and even build new things. It's death and the way it happened genuinely burned some people I think and definitely let an opportunity slip.

Yea I was part of the firefish hype from pretty early ... it was a sad moment for the fediverse.

Discourse and NodeBB developments are definitely awesome to see!

The other microblogging services have apps? Like akkoma ... has a mobile app? Is that what you mean?

From what I've gathered, there's a decent amount of widespread bitterness out there about mastodon and gargron's choices exactly like what you've just expressed.

Mastodon is gargron's personal project. He runs exactly how he wants to and doesn't care too much about what others think. Except it's the one big player on the fediverse and has been put there because of a lot of other people's work and adoption.

It's influence and dominance over the fediverse is likely a serious problem because of exactly what you're talking about. There was a moment last year when fedi-enthusiasts kinda realised that some platform diversity is likely necessary in the fedi microblogging space. Some efforts were made (firefish was the one I was closest to), but no real inroads were made.

Personally, I'd like to help the threadiverse (lemmy and other group-first platforms) provide that diversity. I think these platforms can grow into providing user-based features similar to k/mbin but in a way that's not beholden to the microblogging baggage of twitter while also providing other features, structures and spaces.

They have a groups implementation on the road map. How long it takes, I don't know ... but mastodon aren't fast generally, so it's not happening soon in all likelihood.

Lemmy devs have taken a look at their spec for it and stated that it's not at all consistent with lemmy's implementation of communities over AP ... so even when it lands it probably won't help that much, at least at first.

Lemmy's communities aren't the only groups on the fediverse. The friendica/hubzilla groups have the same problem with mastodon's handling of groups (they're the only platforms apart from k/mbin that does both groups and users). Mike Macgirvin, the original dev of friendica/hubzilla, doesn't have a high opinion of mastodon's commitment to sensible standards (actually he's been quite scathing in the past). I haven't seen him comment on mastodon's plans for groups, but given his prior criticism I take it as more likely than not that mastodon will do groups in their own way and in a way that won't work well with the other group-based platforms.

Sorry for no links ... this is all impressions and recollections.

The automatic hashtags in lemmy since v 19.4 makes it much easier.

See a quick post from me on it here: https://lemmy.ml/post/17563476

I think it’s entirely on mastodon.

They don’t have a “subscribe” mechanism. Only following. And so everything coming from a group like a lemmy community looks like it’s coming from someone you follow, so you see all of their posts.

The alternative, which is also a general problem on mastodon, is that you wouldn’t be able to see any of the comments at all, because you’re not following the users making them.

Cheers! Huuuge amount of credit goes to sorrybookbroke and jayjader running their twitch streams every week!