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maegul

@maegul@lemmy.ml

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Fantastic framing! Not just of the internet, but the whole economic sector including big tech, various publishers, of course the ads industry and now all of the push for winning the AI platform wars.

It's a toilet economy! Fueled by the attention, tastes, inclinations and urges of people taking a shit! And now, as AI "learns" from the internet, also fed by and literally made of the writings and thoughts of people ... taking a shit.

It's also a nice litmus test for what kind of internet space somewhere online is based on where people are when they comment or post: "Is this a toilet or desk space". Depending on what you're after, you will probably want to know if you're in the right kind of place.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I've found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don't understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it's been their main internet experience in life or something.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I hear you ... most people are still there (I've claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).

But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I'm not saying there's nothing useful on Twitter (I don't actually know). But we're talking about microblogging and social media here.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

a mutated form of free TV.

Fantastic description!

Similarly, Casey Newton described it as "Managed decline", on which I riffed "big tech is moving on from the internet".

But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.

‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services (www.theguardian.com)

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

  • Money back requirements
  • Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
  • Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
  • If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

truth is that everything is scattered. And different alternative social media platforms or ecosystems ... fighting and competing looks a bit silly once you zoom out a little. Both fediverse and BlueSky are sitting around 1 million monthly active users ... which is nothing compared to the likes of twitter and threads and IG etc.

It would be physically impossible to say that "all of the scientists are actually on BlueSky/Mastodon". By any reasonable approximation, they're all on Twitter/Threads, with some experimenting with alternative social media. And those few are likely on both because they're still interested in getting their messages out there.

maegul , (edited ) to Fediverse
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

The fediverse won’t succeed at putting up a substitute and that’s a problem?

Just an impression: All the pieces seem to be there. But what’s required is a team, with devs, PMs and coordinators, dedicated to making a particular place in the .

That’s resources and decently sized financial and organisational demands, especially to get a critical mass of users.

Is the fediverse up to that challenge? If not, is it an issue worth addressing?

@fediverse

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea. That's more or less what I had in mind. This isn't merely a matter of writing the software. Like I said, many of the pieces are basically here already. It's building the place/platform, which has to include a whole bunch of just "work" including the moderation that you mention.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

yea ... it's just a chat about the fediverse, come on. I, like many here AFAICT on the fediverse, are here out of interest in the ecosystem/idea, and so are happy to talk about it.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes and no, I'd say. I think there's something to be said for specialising UIs and platforms, and SO strikes me as something that benefits from some of that. Lemmy could certainly be the base of a SO substitute, IMO, but putting it on a separate instance with some specialised UI and policies and even dedicated development of some additional features/tooling on lemmy core as is necessary, could go quite far to making a SO work well.

Federation could still work well, though friction would likely develop between the UIs, which could hopefully be managed over time.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m aware of the previous post, I’d commented in the discussion already.

Otherwise, sorry to say, but I really am not sure what you’re talking about here. What sort of purpose could dishonesty here possibly serve other than plain trolling or drama milling (both of which seem unlikely on the face on my post)?

If you’re serious about “goading”, apart from planting ideas and expressing demand, I don’t think any other post like this could possibly influence devs into doing something serious like this.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yep.

I think some sort of flair like feature for marking posts as questions and marking accepted or best answers as such are missing. Flairs are desire anyway. Tags perhaps as well.

Then, if there are to be “super votes”, such as the OP accepting an answer or even a moderator highlighting an answer, that would be new too.

If the UI can communicate with a plug-in, I’d imagine that could all be plugin side.

what is the situation ATM for plugins affecting the UI in custom ways?

But yea, this seems like maybe a perfect test case for the plug-in system.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

👀

iPad Pro with M4 chip boasts impressive performance jump compared to just-released M3 MacBook Air (9to5mac.com)

On raw performance might, the M4 really does live up to Apple’s promises, should deliver. Single core is up about 20% compared to all M3 chips and more than 40% compared to M2. The generational computational leap from the previous M2 iPad Pro is at least a 42% jump on single-core and multi-core.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Market segregation is worth it for them and the chips will be used in plenty of other hardware anyway, so dumping them in iPads doesn’t hurt, even if it’s mostly just marketing fit the products, nor does it necessitate a product change.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Oohhh. Seeding the alternative with all the old data, if possible, could be an awesome move here!

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else

Well, unless interoperating exclusively/mostly with mastodon is still substantially incentivised because of its size. Hopefully mastodon comply with the testing suite’s standard, but I can see that being a slow process, and I can also see grey areas persisting.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea agreed. It’s not the forking that matters though IMO, it’s the commitment to a true and stable alternative, whatever the best way to that is.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea wow. As a 90s kid I’d never thought of comparing smart phones to consoles. Great point. Gaming together on the couch or a truly fun and social activity and way more wholesome than doom scrolling

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Seems like people were politely dancing around the fact that he was both an essentially absentee board member and a problematic one in openly criticising bsky and poisoning its well in terms of reputation. Seems that push finally came to shove and that he really needed to go and was happy to leave.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I'm thinking that things are getting to the point of maturity that it'd make sense to have a general rule about this.

Something like:

  • You're expected to do a little research to see if your new community is very closely aligned with an existing one, and if so, provide at least some statement as to why you're making yours or what's different about it.

It's not to prevent people from making their own communities at all, it's just that it actually helps clarify the promotion of a new community while also helping the community ecosystem.

New piefed feature , anyone can subscribe to any post or comment (piefed is a reddit and lemmy alternative) (codeberg.org)

This is a feature that as far as i know lemmy does not have, so it might be worth it to checkout and support piefed, it will probably be useful if there are certain topics that are really relevant to you and you want to develop in depth knowledge of.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea that’d be a handy feature to help keep conversations going. It’s too easy to forget about conversations you’re interested in if they’re not in your feed.

maegul , (edited ) to Fediverse
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment"

which was about a year ago now, I can't help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of in the

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that's smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

1/

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Copying the linked thread here (cuz I stuffed it up):

So the basic story would be that mastodon's dominance is pretty entrenched and the "migration" event is mostly "over" (whatever other "events" are on their way)

But I wonder about the details of the firefish moment

I think it revealed that there are/were plenty interested in novel & different platforms. We're novelty seekers after all right. Generally, I'd wager any new platform needs some degree of novelty to "make it".

Further, its collapse showed how hard creating a new platform is.

2/

Firefish did well at presenting itself as "professional", capable and rich. But these were over-promises, and despite a number of people being involved or contributing, a good deal of user enthusiasm, the whole thing fell into a heap.

And that's the bit that concerns me. How many people/teams are there both capable and willing to put up a good, successful and sustainable platform?

The lesson may be that the fediverse just hasn't attracted a healthy building culture/personnel.
3/3

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Lemmy is pretty good example (from the other side of the scale) as well - we’re at version 0.18.4 - and the devs are pretty hostile.

Don't know exactly what you mean ... but AFAICT, this is a relatively beehaw situation, for better or worse.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea it’s descendant too. There’s also sharkey and catodon too.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m only vaguely aware of the history here. Any chance you’ve got some links to these PRs? Not sea lioning (or at least that’s not the point) … genuinely curious to see what happened.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Thanks, but I couldn't find any links to PRs in there (which is what I was mainly interested in). The rest of the dynamic explained in there I'm roughly familiar with.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I did not know this about iceshrimp and c#! Any links to their reasoning etc?

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Not until mastodon is no longer the dominant platform. Which is a fair way off.

To illustrate, in the linked thread, a mastodon dev says the following:

I am not very knowledgable about ActivityPub so I cant discuss the specifics, but we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon.

Mastodon lives in a very mastodon specific world. And that’s because the vast majority of activity on mastodon is between mastodon instances, and when it isn’t it’s with a platform working fairly hard to be compatible with mastodon, as the OP quote demonstrates.

Their branding, history and momentum can’t be politely reversed. It has to be forced. It’s useful to appreciate the history of mastodon’s BDFL/CEO here (he calls himself both BTW). This has been his job since graduating from University. This is his whole professional life. He started while in university and has been paid by donations and granted basically since.

Which means he has no reason to do things or see things differently. No other experiences and complete domination of the fediverse. I wouldn’t be interested in other people’s opinions either unless they’d also demonstrated equal commitment and influence over the fediverse, and even then I’d probably be full of myself too.

With real irony, the fediverse has in large part been centralised around one young tech bro’s “vision” and resultant ego. He deserves it IMO. It’s the culture of all those who see the problems that isn’t up to the challenge of organising appropriately in response that’s the problem.

In many ways, an interesting aspect of the fediverse, I think, is it’s a test of what the current open source dev culture and dynamic is capable of when it comes to cultural and social change. Social media platforms are squarely within what devs know how to do. And there is certainly a lot of productivity to be proud of (I mean look at this, we’re doing this all right now on open/free platforms FFS!). But organisationally and culturally, I think there are real flaws.

IMO, there’s a lack of awareness of the need to conceptualise and materialise broad goals and values and the hats requires to enforce and incentivise them, as well as then acting in a way that best pursues those stated goals, especially at a communal/organisational level.

In other words, too much NIH and forking and “I’m the lead dev of this project” and not enough “for the fediverse”. I think you can see the hyper-capitalise biases of the current tech world bending things a bit too much.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

The way Macgirvin has summarised this else where is that mastodon’s lead dev wasn’t mature and competent enough to make good engineering decisions for the fediverse at large. That his platform became the dominant one is likely earned but also likely attributable to the fact that Gargron (masto BDFL) was young and keen enough to go all in at the right time..

Which means, at this stage, dominance and immature mistakes and flaws are likely to go together (sounds familiar huh). Which means that for the fediverse to grow it has to go beyond mastodon. It just won’t happen until masto is ousted as the clear dominant platform. And in reality, I don’t see that happening any time soon the way things are going.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Hmmm ... big fan and "heck yea" on the general idea of better UI interop.

But I have (vague) questions about the specifics here.

I recently ranted about this issue (over on masto: here).

I was prompted by the coming of blogs to mastodon feeds but tried to address the issue generally: do we really want to rely on all the content from all the platforms being folded into a single platform, especially a relatively brutalist one like mastodon?

That blogs and microblogs can have meaningful friction is itself a rather ominous alarm on this front IMO.

And so my questions:

  • Is this not bigger than Article interop with mastodon?
    • But rather touches on the quality of federation across the whole fediverse in terms of all of the inter-platform UI disparities?
    • IE, For N platforms, there are N * N interop problems where the UI frictions can fail. Without a general solution, that's exponential.
  • Is campaigning mastodon's devs to improve Article interop where we want to find the fediverse at the this (kinda early/formative) moment when some form of general approach/framework may be necessary?
    • As an example (and I am speaking with a good degree of ignorance on the technical details here) ... what about all of the other clients, where differences in markdown rendering (for those platforms that support it) can already cause some issues, albeit minor. Or is this not really about formatting/rendering?
  • Are there not more general approaches/solutions that have been thought of?
maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

IIRC, Damon is working on a platform built on this right? Made a decent amount of progress?

They have a community: https://lemmy.world/c/memory

maegul OP ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea the paid subscription question is the big one here. Ghost’s announcement stated that they think it will be easy to integrate that with ActivityPub, which I’d interesting because no one has done it while I think there’s been a good amount of demand for some sort of solution. If ghost sort that out for the ecosystem it could unlock the fediverse for some other platforms. Nebula comes to mind especially.

maegul OP ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Oooh. Crypto and fediverse … The odd couple!

maegul OP ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I suspect it’s more complex than that. If they want any fediverse account to be able to subscribe, which they do, then how do they distribute content only to subscribers and not everyone on their instance?

maegul OP ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

If they want to actually read the article, they’ll have to log in and give them money.

Yea, that's the most straightforward for sure ... but requires leaving the fediverse. I suspect that there are plans/dreams of being fediverse "native" and enabling the full content/publication to be read from ones fediverse account.

Twitter alternative Post News is shutting down (www.theverge.com)

Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”...

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

AFAIU, it was an attempt to be purely dedicated to the sorta mainstream centrist political and news and journalism parts of Twitter, which seems to me to make the egotistical mistake of thinking that they’re the ones that made Twitter when it was likely the other way around and they were the ones getting in on the “party” after it “started”.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

PieFed has something similar AFAIK.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Topics: https://piefed.social/topics

They seem to be admin created and not user definable.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better ... we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Awesome to see stuff like this.

Along with things like bonfire, it really does seem like there will be a second wave of fediverse apps/tools.

If so, what else counts as part of this “second wave”? Pubkit (from dansup)? The testing suite? K/m-bin? BlueSky+bridge (controversial)?

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Still seems pretty uncertain. I saw a chat between ghost CEO and some activity pub dev trying to convince him to federate … this was around the time of Newtons move off of substack … and the vibe was about the same then … “cool idea, unsure about viability, how would it work?”

Seems it’s such a common almost meme-ish user demand now that the request hasn’t let up. Given that Wordpress has done it I’d guess the idea is probably a no-brainer … just do it!

Problem though is the kinda-literal elephant in the room … mastodon. The only fediverse platform mentioned in the article. Federating with it requires implementing a “user” actor where everything is organised around users like on microblogging platforms. It’s what Wordpress did and what Ghost will too.

Which is a shame because us group based platforms get left behind, mastodon controls the fediverse, and the utility of grouping things, which makes a lot of sense for things like multi-author blogs, gets forgotten.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

AFAIU, that's how lemmy federates content to mastodon.

If you didn't know, you can follow lemmy communities (and other groups) on mastodon, but the appear as users constantly "boosting" everything that happens in the community and so can quickly clog up your feed.

Mastodon now has exclusive lists though, which take everything that appears in the list out of your home feed, which is a nice way of managing it.

In fact, for a community I moderate, I've got a mastodon list just for that community, which gives me a reverse chronological feed of everything that happens in the community ... which is actually useful and not quite available from the interface (as you posts and comments have to be viewed separately, which isn't bad really).

Note-taking app that looks too good to be true? - Siyuan

Recently stumbled upon this note-taking app called SiYuan, but it honestly looks a bit too good to be true(?). Has anyone here used it or got any experience with it? Trying to replace Obsidian is a difficult task, and I've been through almost all note-taking apps there are out there, however this one looks fairly similar....

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Hmmm, dunno. Seems well made but also the web page seems kinda full of hype.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Well there are blogging platforms for the fediverse (ie they federate) I forget their names but in it sure WriteFreely is one.

Beyond that, Wordpress has integrations now with the fediverse which federate as user accounts. It seems to work ok, in that I’ve seen blogs appear in mastodon. But one point of friction I think is how comments are federated. Maybe it works fine but I’m key sure they’ve made a choice to not federate comments from Wordpress to mastodon so there’s context collapse.

Otherwise, the idea I’m thinking of hasn’t been realised yet AFAICT. TBF, it would probably require more than a front end for lemmy, I suspect some backend features would be required too. Nothing too big I’d think. But alas no. Still think it’s be cool!

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

That being said, it’s not too hard to run a blog out of lemmy. Just start dedicated communities with moderator posting only and you’re good. Front end might be lacking in someway but that alone goes pretty far.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Well, a Lemmy front-end, whether official or third-party, for a blog, makes sense for an existing Lemmy user, but for sure doesn’t for anyone not knowing what Lemmy is, that’s why customization is required on this part.

Hmmm, at the risk of being annoying, I’m wondering what you’re thinking of exactly. I’m guessing something that’s streamlined in a few ways, like without upvoting etc. and related sorting options? Probably a bit of a facelift too and some elements that make it clear what community/blog you’re looking at?

As I’m writing this I’m thinking that it would probably make sense to have a built in web view specifically for outsiders to see a community as a blog.

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