Let’s compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky

How to join Mastodon:

• First pick an instance!

User: What is «instance»?

• Lectures user for 10 min. over what federation is, comparing it to email federation

User: Ok… but what instance should I use?

• You gotta figure that out yourself!

User: picks random instance.

Now one of these things happen

1. Every thing goes well

2. They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.

3. They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn’t give you a good idea of what the average post is like.

No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:

Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”.

Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.

Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:

No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.

I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.

just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.

Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.

You need the plurality of site content

I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.

Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?

BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network

Yup. Very well said. People don’t realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.

More on wealth inequality here.

Listen, I know that the term “AI” has been, historically, used to describe so many things to the point of having no meaning, but I think, given the context, it is pretty obvious what AI they are referring to.

It’s not even generative

It doesn’t need to be generative to be AI.

It’s a scraper that uses already available information to then “learn”.

That’s just every single “AI” product out there, that’s how they work: They scrape data from all over the internet, create a model that makes predictions based on that data. Chat-GPT doesn’t understand anything. It is simply a really complicated model which predicts what word is most likely to follow a given sequence of words. These “AI” aren’t inteligent, nor are they creative. They, by their very nature, stay as close as possible to the data they are given and never deviate, as a deviation would mean inaccuracy.

From an historical point of view, the word “AI” simply means “cool new technology”. That’s what it has been used to describe, while people think that AI means “artificial person”, like we see in the movies. So we need to be careful while using this word, because it can mean so many thing to the point that it has little meaning.

I would say this is an overall positive: The more people are aware of how easy it is to create fake this with AI the better, I would say. That would make people less likely to fall for it in the future, especially for something with greater consequences than just a parade that didn’t exist.

I don’t see the logic.

I think we can all agree that genocide is bad, right? And we can all agree that is happening in Palestine is genocide, correct? And therefore we would like to elect someone who would be more likely to stop the genocide.

The Democrats don’t seem to want to stop… But neither do the republicans. I don’t see the argument.

To my understanding, neither party has any plans to stop the genocide so what the point of contention? I understand that simply voting will do nothing to fix anything, but picking the lesser evil (which is still evil) will buy us more time. Point is, voting for Trump wouldn’t be any better, nor voting for a 3rd party due to the flaws of the First Past The Post voting system.

If one should not vote for the Democrats, then who should we vote for? Trump? Seriously, what’s your plan?

Really? I didn’t know that! What is it called? How can I use it?

Philosophy is fine and all but we can’t forget that from a practical standpoint, all this philosophizing is useless. We can’t live our day to day lives operating under the belief that the material world doesn’t exist and using The Problem Of Knowledge as a way to dismiss empirical evidence by stating that we can’t be sure if the material world even exist is impractical and useless. Remember: Philosophy is completely useless. The only value you will find in it is the development of critical thinking skills.

Just imagine if a murdered caught red handed could get away scoot free by just saying “Hey, you can prove the material world exist, therefore you can prove the victim ever existed!”

It’s the problem of knowledge all over again. Something which philosophers have been debating for centuries. But I highly doubt you have studied any of it.

That whole thing of “facts are just opinions” is nothing more than the devaluing of empirical evidence and turning observable facts into a matter of opinion, turning any and all political discussion into a shouting match where nothing ever comes of it because “it’s just my opinion”. This propaganda tactic is called “The Fire hose of Falsehood”.

I could go on and on about the nature of knowledge and the evolution of science, but I highly doubt you would care as you do not seem to know even the most basic things about The Problem of Knowledge and choose to go the self-contradictory skeptic route of “Knowledge doesn’t exist”.

Edit: I would just like to add that just because our sense are 100% reliable that doesn’t mean that everything is false.

Nope.

When humans make art, they are constantly making decisions. Decisions, decisions, decisions. With every stroke of the pen, with every color (not just a generic pink, blue or yellow, but specific tones and shades of those), with every everything they to while making that piece, they are making a lot of micro-decisions. Those decisions are made in respect to the person that is making the art, as their personal life experiences are what dictate how they make such decisions, even if they don’t notice it.

AI art is not like that. With AI, you type a prompt and outcomes an image. The user does not have a say in any of the micro-decisions that when into making that piece. The AI it self isn’t making any decisions either, it is just making the mathematical weighted average of what images with a description with similar tokens look like, and simply copying said decisions. The AI does not decide, it simply regurgitates previous decisions.

People that say that AI could be used as a tool to help artists clearly as never pickup a pencil to draw. The thing that makes an artists voice, that makes that art theirs are the decisions they make while making their art.

When you are drawing something, you are constantly making small micro-decisions with every stroke of your pencil, and those decision and how you make them is what makes art so beautiful, as no two artists make those decision the same way and each artist as a certain consistency in those decisions that evolves with them as a person. As such, art is so much more than a pretty picture, it is a reflection of the person who made it. Those decisions are also the fun part of making art.

AI art doesn’t let you make any decisions: you type the prompt and out comes an image. An image made of an weighted average of human made images with a similar description. You have no say in the micro-decision the machine makes, you have no say on where exactly the pencil strokes go. Therefore this machine is useless for artists. You might say “Just edit the image!”, but that doesn’t help either, as editing the image still doesn’t give you that micro-level of decision making. Also, editing a flat image with just one layer is just as useful as any other image form any search engine image search result. Unlike text, which can be easily edited to be exactly what you want.

I know their might be some wait to integrate machine learning into art, but right now the tools available don’t do that.

This kinda stuff should be opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Just think of how many people don’t even know this is happening, or that there even is an opt-out.

I don’t think you understand exactly how theses machines work. The machine does not “learn”, it does not extract meaning from the tokens it receives. Here is one way to look at it

Suppose you have a sequence of symbols: ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ And then were given a fragment of a sequence and asked to guess what you be the most likely symbol to follow it: ¹§ Think you could do it? I’m sure you would have no trouble solving this example. But could you make a machine that could reliably accomplish this task, regardless of the sequence of symbols and regardless of the fragment given? Let’s imagine you did manage to create such a marvellous machine.

If given a large sequence of symbols spanning multiple books of length would you say this pattern recognition machine is able to create anything original? No… Because it is simply trying to copy it’s original sequence as closely as possible.

Another question: Would this machine ever derive meaning from this symbols? No… How could it?

But what if I told you that these symbols weren’t just symbols: Unbeknownst to the machine each one of this symbols actually represents a word. Behold: ChatGPT.

This is basically the general idea behind generative AI as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m wrong. This is obviously oversimplified.

No… Capitalism is when a handful of individuals own the means of production and have full authority on how they are used.

Communism is more akin to when the workers decide what to do with the means of production they operate.

You got this literally backwards.

Yeah… The label of “tankie” seems to be used to describe “anyone to the left of me”.

It’s so widely applied to the point of reaching meaninglessness.