 We say that the #Fediverse is better than centralized social media platforms. I obviously believe that as well. But: Can we prove it? In ways that are not just anecdotal personal experience or beliefs, but with objective data? I'm looking for pointers. There are obviously many dimensions, from, say, higher "engagement" to reduced harassment and a thousand things in between. Who has good numbers on any of those? Would it be worthwhile to collect them somewhere? “The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being hacked too effectively.” Excellent piece by Bruce Schneier. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/rethinking-democracy-for-the-age-of-ai.html  @J12t seems like the current crop are very much "weak AI", and demonstrating very clearly how far from "strong AI" we are. I think what's giving many of us pause is how clearly people esteemed by society and educated at prestigious universities are demonstrating that they're not any better at thinking than weak AI In all the hoopla about #AI you’d sort of think people would be debating strong vs weak AI vs the limits of “thinking” by any kind of machine as it has been debated for centuries. Like the Chinese Room thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room But I see nothing of that. Why is that? Do we simply now assume these issues have been resolved in favor of unlimited machine intelligence and all the doubters have been convinced? @J12t seems like the current crop are very much "weak AI", and demonstrating very clearly how far from "strong AI" we are. I think what's giving many of us pause is how clearly people esteemed by society and educated at prestigious universities are demonstrating that they're not any better at thinking than weak AI Apparently #DWebCamp starts in three weeks. Time is passing too fast! I better check the state of my tent, sleeping bag etc. Just finished reading The Future by Naomi Alderman, which came out last year, and although Sci-Fi, more or less plays in the present. If you are worried about the state of the world, from environmental destruction to the impact of commercial social media and ever larger tech monopolies, and wonder what levers there are, this is an amazing tale that will make you think. It has made me think. It’s also extremely well written. Highly recommended.  @J12t Yes! It was such a superb book that left me wishing the same transformation could happen in the real world. BTW Alderman is on Mastodon at @naomialderman 💫 Getting a laptop with 32G RAM was a really good idea. No memory pressure ever, in spite of running VMs, sometimes more than one. Been a long time since my first computer that had 64kB, and where I recall I had to implement a custom swap-the-middle-portion-of-the-program-from-disk for something I wrote. In BASIC. So Adobe put me on some kind of annual plan that requires me to pay a cancellation fee. I don't recall signing up for an annual plan, and I sure do not remember anything about a cancellation fee. Fortunately, loud yelling caused them to take it off. I'll not be back. Stay away is my recommendation. Which business genius would ever think that charging a cancellation fee for a individual / SOHO software product makes any business sense whatsoever?  FediTest version 0.3 has been released! Release notes: https://feditest.org/release-notes/0.3/ This release is mainly a maturity improvement over our first release. Who is doing the best work on cross-instance user experience in the Fediverse? Pointers appreciated. Things like remote follow, share to fediverse, same account for multiple instances etc. Followup to https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112775362045378963 : Today I booted a new/fresh copy of Firefox from tarball to test something unrelated, and the first thing I saw was this screen. Absolutely dumbfounding. And yes, when I looked in the prefs, "Ad measurement", the feature specifically designed to secretly follow you around the web and report the results to ad corps, *was* turned on in this copy. Well, I guess it's half true: Instead of the companies following you around, Firefox will do it on their behalf.
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 @fediversereport TIL https://social.overheid.nl exists, immediately followed a whole bunch there The #Ghost people are doing excellent #ActivityPub marketing with their weekly newsletters, such as today’s. I don’t agree with some of the details of their points of view, but that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, they are doing a great service educating potential users beyond the niche of today’s typical Mastodon users. Recommended. And you can get the newsletter by following @index https://activitypub.ghost.org/its-all-about-the-infrastructure/ Are is there any generative "AI" out there that is good at drawing SVG-style diagrams, rather than pixel-style paintings? Or even one where I can say "draw a UML-style data model that shows that customers can place orders which contain N lines, each of which refers to a product?"  @J12t I think it's a great milestone. It's taken more than a year of weekly meetings to get through them. I should be clear that there are no _untriaged_ issues. Some of the issues are still open, but we know what needs to be done. There are no more open issues in the #ActivityPub issue tracker! Thanks to all, but mostly to @evan who diligently and tirelessly did much/most/all of the work!! Onwards! https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+no%3Aassignee+no%3Alabel+ @J12t I think it's a great milestone. It's taken more than a year of weekly meetings to get through them. I should be clear that there are no _untriaged_ issues. Some of the issues are still open, but we know what needs to be done. Federation as a feature that helps to compete. This is first I think in the #Fediverse. That's how I read this #Techcrunch headline about #ghost 's work on #ActivityPub. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/08/substack-rival-ghost-federates-its-first-newsletter/ Openvibe combines Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr into one social app https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/09/openvibe-combines-mastodon-bluesky-and-nostr-into-one-social-app/
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@Sarahp It's a great pitch but it doesn't really solve the problem they raise in the "sell sheet," that you have to have accounts on all those distributed networks for the app to work Learned a new word: "solastalgia" Although I'm intimately familiar with the concept, unfortunately. Wonder what metrics Meta cares about? @mosseri enumerates them in this interview with @caseynewton : "impressions per day, time per day, daily people, monthly active people, engaged dailies, engaged monthlies" https://www.platformer.news/threads-175-million-users-adam-mosseri-interview/ This is the kind of thing the rest of the #fediverse needs to do: focus on specific user segments with specific use cases and solve their needs @mosseri says: "When we launched, we were very focused on facilitating conversations... a broader use case, which is sharing your ideas. It's a place for commentary about what's happening in the world... @J12t @mosseri @caseynewton it's so weird to me that there are still people using meta products. |
Gregory's Server
@J12t I and many others got death threats and chased off an instance that has become the target of a hate campaign, primarily from the kolektiva instance but others too, so I'm not too wild about this place tbh. Definitely didn't get chased off twitter for being trans amusingly.
@J12t what would you hope to achieve using that proof?
Not sure "the Fediverse" exists as a unitary entity. It's more like there are many parallel Fediverses, depending on what people and instances are in your network. That might make getting any meaningful data difficult.
@J12t