That could be true. People do seem to tend to tolerate slow declines in platform quality surprisingly long before jumping to available alternatives. I think that’s at least in part due to that ‘critical mass’ effect described elsewhere in this conversation that makes people prefer to stay where they believe everyone else is.

If federation does end up being the only solution that pans out, I hope to see additional approaches beyond ActivityPub. As capable as it is, its design seems to confound any implementations of private communications or revocation of access at many levels where it would be very useful and empowering to admins, moderators, and regular users alike.

I would love to see a federation model where each user has an encrypted profile and content in their own archive that they manage and/or have stored somewhere for them, which they can then use to join servers and choose what data from their profile they share with who else on that server, as well as participate in server local and federated public channels, as well as private data exchanges facilitated but not readable by the server or federated network of servers you have a user account signed up.

I’m not sure it could promise revocation for all data on servers of unknown configuration, but could accommodate info that is facilitated by but not readable by any of the participating servers. Posts in public areas would have and require much lower revocation/deletion assurances, but could still have them in a manner at least as robust as ActivityPub.

I’ve been watching the space as time permits and am interested in a lot of the amazing things people make for free for the ‘love of the game’!

I think they are continuously repeating, specifically formulated patterns merely creating the illusion of endlessly increasing stupidity. It the Shepard Tone of political dumbness of action.

I don’t see much of the former, but the latter seems pretty ubiquitous already: vegans hunting vegetarians for sport, communists splitting socialists into equal chunks among them, clones clawing over one another to be standing more to the west than each other.

“The Left: Where the Perfect is the Arch-nemesis of the Good”

I get the sentiment, but I feel that the majority, if not all of those benefits can be achieved by a floss threaded forum server application and companion client applications. So long as the software’s design objectives includes content ownership and portability, you could bail to another instance with all your stuff and re-share it or not as you see fit.

As much as I understand the goals of federation, it introduces many, many, intractable problems with efficiency, privacy, security, moderation, and ease administration in exchange for openness benefits that can likely or definitely be attained in other ways.

I believe that the idea of federation is not fundamentally bad, per se, but seems to have had a hype wave at a really opportune time, that made it the forerunner among the solutions to lock-in being discussed at the time. Plenty of other solutions seemed just as valid, but they lacked newness and novelty that made them less hyped when Reddit alternatives were being heavily discussed.

One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:

Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like “check here to verify you’re not a not” or “choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say”, then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.

I don’t know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.

Fining companies that commit a crime a small portion of the money they gained by committing that crime is not progress, that is the problem here. Meta still made more money, after the fine, than if they had not perpetrated the crime. This is more of the status quo, which is why people are complaining about this the same as they had about the previous million times this same thing happened.

Many of us are doing those things, but that is beside my point. I am more referring to the notion that civilians deserve the hell of warfare, particularly when policies they personally voted for are what led there.

I believe this sort of “give them what they deserve” thinking is what allows our leaders to even wage war at all, and without it, there would be little to no public appetite for warfare.

I find it helps me to remember that even the most violent and rabid constituencies are voting based on a concerted multi-billion dollar constant misinformation campaign, and holding them responsible for their position in that scenario is blaming the victim. The people that are callous to the other side and cheer on bloodshed were programmed daily for many years to behave in that manner. Rather than kill them or wish for their death, we can work to dismantle the apparatus that took our friends, neighbors, and family members from us and turned them into those ghouls. I believe most will return to sanity on their own if the spigot of falsehoods stops.

I call BS! I have it on good authority that Bilbo Baggins is at least eleventy-one.

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What’s funny about that is, at least in the USA, they never really did. It was decided in a courtroom that corporations are legal persons as a part of a case over 100 years ago and has been worshipped as legal precedent ever since. Practically this whole mess in the USA, in my opinion, was destined to happen the day that court ruling was made.

And the other half that did vote, and starkly against all that–where does their culpability lie?

It seems to me that ICE is operating in a target-rich environment, which makes their choice of targets seem particularly poor for their optics. You’d think they would not want to intentionally nab people that garner public sympathy like this when you’d think they could just as easily find just as many that don’t, but this seems to keep coming up.

It doesn’t seem like a clean path to electoral victories, that’s for sure anyway.

Trident was such a cooler name than WebKit, too. A rare instance of Microsoft giving something a name that was neither confusing nor lame.

I mean, those ActiveX controls were a little… well… Trident was a cool name!

There is never anything fundamentally bad about more choices, but that doesn’t mean that some of the choices are not fundamentally bad.

While that’s true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn’t stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.

So, again, don’t give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn’t even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.

I think those are part of the “object lessons” curriculum.

Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.

The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.

Unlike Pandora’s box, though, a lot of the dumber applications of this stuff will go back in when the VC money dries up.

, or hateful, or murderous.

You are making that “first reaction is the wrong one” assertion like it is some sort of law of physics. Many people have read all the published materials and are knowledgeable in the field, and come to the sober, measured conclusion that this technology is mostly a turd. To make matters worse, its a $2500 turd that makes the room hot and the electric meter spin real fast.