[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

Walking into the interview and seeing everyone on the entire floor is Indian. This is for software jobs.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 5 points 1 year ago

Income tax

Federal Reserve, paper money

People can riot and loot without being shot by police or their victims.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

Fantasy map. There's zero chance of winning states that didn't fix the vote fraud problem.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

Speech is dangerous. If you have a large enough audience, you will get doxxed and then assaulted. People will start calling your job demanding you are fired.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

It's also an unnecessary move. Big Tech makes a "shadow profile" for non-logged-in users who browse the site.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

Some websites are just defective by design.

One example is StackOverflow. It is extremely hostile and toxic to new users. The site owners and admins are happy with the way it is. They made it that way on purpose.

Another example is lemmy/ActivityPub. The only way to deal with "troublesome" instances is a complete block at the site level, i.e. defederation. People made a feature request to enable site blocking at the user level rather than instance level, but that was shot down by the devs. I.e., they are being jerks, on purpose, by only supporting the extreme coarse tool "defederation" to handle nodes where some people disapprove of the content.

Now some people say "We're paying for server costs. We don't want to pay for right-wing content." That is just plain silly. For a plaintext website, the hosting and bandwidth costs of adding a small instance is basically zero. There are other ways to cut down on costs, such as only keeping stuff one of your users requested or only keeping it for 60 days. Those are not implemented, because the point is censorship and not openness.

By intentionally fragmenting sites, that limits the potential reach of the project.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 3 points 1 year ago

You're missing the point. It isn't "oops, we don't know how to block people and communities." Their attitude is "People who disagree with us do not deserve to have a voice at all."

They aren't content to just "not visit those communities or block those users". They're only content if those viewpoints are completely banned.

It isn't "If you don't like it, don't read it", which is what a reasonable person would do. Their attitude is "If I don't like it, nobody should be allowed to read it."

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I already said how this is going to end. Lemmy.world is the biggest instance by far. They're going to say "Defederate from exploding-heads, or we're defederating from you and your instance is going to be worthless."

That's why ActivityPub is doomed. It's just going to fracture into groups defederating from each other. You aren't going to attract enough right-wingers to make your niche viable, because all the right-wingers who were going to leave Big Social Media already left years ago for alternate websites.

Running a lemmy node that is defederated from everyone else is no different than just running an ordinary webforum.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

Alex Jones would never have been approved by the Senate.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This convinced me that ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy are doomed and are not a viable alternative to Big Social Media.

All the right-leaning people already left Big Tech a few years ago when they started deplatforming conservatives. They've already migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red. The only people left to leave big tech in the Twitter/Reddit exodus are the leftists. This means that all the big Mastodon/Lemmy instances are controlled by leftists.

In 2023, standard operating procedure for leftists is to censor people on the right. That is NOT how Big Social Media did it. When they were new sites, they were welcome to everyone. Only once they had a monopoly market position, they kicked out the right. If Lemmy is alienating half the population from the get-go, that's a nonstarter. It might seem reasonable for political discussion, but for niche interests, you aren't going to get a critical mass of users to displace Reddit. Things I'm interested in like Godot or Retrogaming have WAY MORE users on Reddit still, and lemmy is now hopelessly fractured. I won't go back to lemmy.world, and the other instances just don't have enough users to support a niche interest.

On Mastodon, the big sites go to all the smaller sites and say "You defederate from the same sites we block, or we'll defederate from you and your instance becomes useless." Lemmy.world now has the same negotiating position for lemmy, and they're now throwing their weight around and demanding other sites block exploding heads.

ActivityPub is the decentralized protocol that is controlled by a handful of large websites. I.e., it has zero chance of actually delivering on its promise as currently implemented.

ActivityPub is defective by design. The decision to block or defederate should be done at the user level and not at the site level. A site can and should maintain a default blocklist, but individuals should be able to override the settings. The fact that none of the implementations do this shows that it is designed to create echo chambers and not a true open network.

I can't use lemmy.world, because it's controlled by censoring commies. There's no point staying on exploding heads, because there just aren't enough users to make a difference. What does exploding heads offer that patriots.win or forums.red or reddit offers? For niche hobby interests, reddit is still the place to go. For politics, you won't surpass patriots.win.

I also read about how Google killed XMPP. XMPP was an open chat protocol. Then Google started their own implementation of XMPP. Eventually, more than 75% of XMPP users were using it via Google. Then Google decided they weren't going to follow the XMPP protocol anymore. They made their own proprietary changes and broke compatibility. If you were a Google XMPP user, the net effect was that a few of your contacts disappeared (and you may not have even been aware Google was using XMPP). If you were a non-Google XMPP user, this was a disaster, most of your contacts were now gone and you had to switch to Google.

Facebook is making an ActivityPub client. I assume they're going to use the same playbook to kill ActivityPub that Google used to kill XMPP. Facebook could even offer the big ActivityPub nodes $100M each to buy them out and the network would then be dead.

Bottom line for me: ActivityPub has no future. Now that it's fractured into a large group of commies and a small group of free speech posters, lemmy offers me nothing that other free speech websites offer. For niche hobby interests, it's back to Reddit. For politics, lemmy has no advantage over established free speech forums.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

It's a huge fairness and safety issue. Fairness examples: swimming, cycling. Safety examples: rugby, volleyball, MMA.

[-] fsk@exploding-heads.com 6 points 1 year ago

Everyone on the right already quit Reddit a couple years ago and migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red.

The only people left on reddit are the extreme left. When they quit reddit en masse, they're going to create a left circlejerk website. There just aren't a critical mass of conservatives left on Reddit anymore, because they would have left already.

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fsk

joined 1 year ago