On a related note, it's long been a dream of mine to "download a car" by 3D scanning a nice 1:18 model of something exotic (like a Ferrari 250 Berlinetta Lusso or BMW 507), pay a company to create a full size model by milling it out of a huge block of foam with a huge 5-axis CNC machine, cast fiber glass molds of the body panels, build a spaceframe chassis underneath, fit the rear subframe of a Tesla, and the front axle of a Miata, and live forever in glory.
BarackObama
joined 1 year ago
My personal predictions:
Reddit will continue to exist, but become an increasingly zombified dumping ground for screenshots from other platforms, videos of people being injured/humiliated in public, and lowest-common-denominator "discussion" of culture war topics. It may also to continue supporting small niche communities like r/HVACadvice where you can get a quick answer about something specific from a domain expert, but will largely just become a firehose of diarrhea.
Large Lemmy instances like lemmy.world will pick up the slack for the mostly good-natured people turned off by the advertising and shitshow at reddit and other corpo social medias. It'll be better than current reddit, but increasingly enlightenened centrist, and importing braindead redditisms (shit like "and my axe" etc.)
Smaller Lemmy instances that care more about the kindness and quality of discussion will pour more grassroots efforts into strict moderation, and defederating from mainstream instances. They will tradeoff a wider userbase for a more kind and nurturing atmosphere.
Why do you want to just fuck shit up, when you don't even understand how it works?
I still look at r/boxing for similar reason.
They clearly don't think that, since right after they said:
Of course, due to substantial inequality between instance size, we expect to see a power distribution, with a spike on the left that quickly falls and tapers out. Power laws govern much of the real world; many phenomena behave according to this unequal distribution.
But look at that graph. Calling this distribution a power law would be generous to say the least. There is a massive spike corresponding to just a few instances, and the rest of the graph is nearly invisible to the naked eye, so tiny and so overshadowed by just a few giants. Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law.
All of your comments in this thread seem to have been a strong defence against perceived criticisms of the Fediverse, when the article isn't so much criticizing it as it's proposing that it needs additional safeguards (besides decentralization) to ensure it remains aligned with users' interests:
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Firstly by alleging that the author advocates everybody running their own instance
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And now alleging that the author only considers Fediverse successful if all instances are the same size.
These are really disingenuous and uncharitable ways to read the article. I'm sure the author has a perfectly good understanding of the concept of Federation, as they detailed several examples, and they have a lot of experience in highly technical computer science work.
Then it seems like we're in agreement. The thrust of the article is not that the fediverse is bad, or that it doesn't improve upon the FAANG cartel model, but rather that decentralization by itself is not a silver bullet. It also needs to include the "bottom-up consensus seeking" that e.g. Wikipedia uses for its decision making.
Maybe I'm not quite following you. Out of 3070 instances, 50% were registered in just the top 3. Whether it's the top 3 or top 1, doesn't this clearly show a tendency to cluster into large centralized monoliths? This type of power-law clustering is ubiquitous in all kinds of human behavior, but this would correspond to a really high exponent value for the distribution.
The article contains a graph showing that (at least at the time it was written) Mastodon was strongly dominated by a single big player, with the top 3 instances holding 50% of users.
They don't complain that not everybody will host their own server, quite the opposite:
Nor is it enough to “save ourselves”, self-hosting our own decentralised digital islands, while ignoring the reality of the masses. We cannot close our eyes and rest, content with freedom in our personal bubble, ignoring the reality of our non-technical friends and family who do not enjoy the same luxuries of privacy and free speech.
What I think they're saying is that over time, people gravitate to the biggest instance (which seems to be happening right now with lemmy.world), which can lead to effects that work against the goals of decentralization.
I'm not sure that they are personally advocating for anything particularly precise, but in the end of the article it mentions Wikipedia as an inspiration for the "information democracy" model.
They're definitely not saying that "hearing alternative views" is a bad thing. But here is a great comment I saw on Beehaw that identifies the practical flaws in this line of thinking, as it relates to online discourse:
The problem with these discussions is that we seldomly use common definitions, which creates more heat than light. There was a strain of late 20th Century American conservatism that was rooted in fiscal restraint, loosely regulated free markets, and a privileged place for the nuclear family, civic duty, and the church as the glue holding (small) communities together. I’d vehemently disagree with most of these as policy anchors, but none of them are beyond civil discussion per se.
But here’s the problem: this late 20th-Century old school conservative thinking has been thoroughly hollowed out and co-opted to the point it is now completely meaningless. (The last administration was neither fiscally restrained, family oriented, nor in any way tied to any recognizable New Testament ‘love thy neighbor’ teaching. Yet, modern ‘conservatives’ can’t get enough).
Into these conceptual containers has been smuggled a toxic strain of (white) (Christian) (popular) nationalism … some may use the ‘F’ word … that is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-science, intolerant, and is now emerging as violent - not just to vulnerable groups, which is a show stopper in itself - but to the whole damn country and democratic process. You don’t debate people like that. You crush them at the ballot box (or at Gettysburg or the beaches of Normandy if it comes to it).
So (pardon the TED talk), I think if someone wants to show up and debate whether we should be running budget deficits in excess of 3% of GDP, or whether we are regulating nuclear power too tightly, or whether industry X should be privatized/nationalized, they are probably good (at least by me - I can’t speak for others). But there is an understandable level of suspicion around the whole ‘conservative’ discourse, and if someone tries to smuggle ethno-nationalism, economic Darwinism, or bigotry toward vulnerable groups into the discussion under the guise of ‘traditional family values’ and ‘fiscal restraint’ … they are going to have a tough time.
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Can confirm