Got a link? I’d be curious to read that.

It’s not hopeless! The Fediverse is AFAIK entirely nonprofit, and smaller instances means more moderator eyes on everything, too.

If I had to predict the future, I think apps like Reddit, Twitter, Tioktok, etc will be the places for entertainment and the Fediverse will become the place for conversation.

Reddit has been trying hard for years to move beyond being a discussion forum to another mindless scroling app.

The reason is because in the time people read one discussion thread they only see one ad, but scrolling memes, etc they will see many more. It makes the ads much more valuable.

The reason is because they use that stuff to help determine if you’re a bot.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise interacts with the customer backend and webpages to trigger a sequence of JavaScript, HTML, and token authentication events.

It seems like we agree on the facts, and I certainly won’t disagree that it’s worse now, but I would characterize Twitter’s (pre-Musk) response to extremism as “measured, lacking and lethargic”, before I would use “imperfect”, which still implies “pretty good” and from my perceptive it was not good enough to make me want to use it. I think maybe we just have a different tolerance for hate speech.

They absolutely were, without question. That said, there’s nothing this guy can do to make that happen on Mastodon instances he doesn’t own.

You’re correct. ActivityPub is an open protocol and Meta, or more importantly anyone else, can use it however they want.

How so?

Yeah, it’s easy to see, but I don’t have to respect it.

I’m curious, is there actually so many 42’s in the system?

Sort of, it’s not actually picking a random number. It does not know what “random” means. It is analyzing the number of times the question “pick a random number” was asked and what the most common responses to that question looked like.

Step 2 of enshittification:

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Eh I’m not with you there. Nintendo didn’t kick anyone off of Discord.

but what are they expecting the server admins to do after moving off Discord when Nintendo’s lawyers send them a letter

…Not… kick them out? Discord doesn’t kick out extremist groups. This seems comparatively mild. I think they had a reasonable expectation to be left alone.

Well said, private companies are incentivized to make their customers happy. Corporations are incentivized to make their shareholders happy. Sometimes those goals align, but they are not the same.

But how would us blocking ourselves from following Threads accounts via Mastodon stop them from… anything? That’s the part I don’t get. It feels a bit like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, yeah?

Can you explain how defederating prevents Meta from extending open standards (ActivityPub) with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage Threads competitors?

That looks like they’re going for a Slack-like interface which is awesome.

You just reminded me of this piece by Danah Boyd

With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

Corporate social media may be dying, but that’s only one small part of the Internet.

I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.

Dude yes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I worry that users curious to leave reddit are going to go to a big instance, see concentrated worst-parts-of-reddit, and decide it’s not for them.

In theory, decentralization enables freedom from the average user being forced to put up with toxicity. But we don’t really have that (yet) until the ratio of jerk to non-jerk improves.