I'd never considered how bang-on this viewpoint is...

It's not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.

No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse as well and I'm not feeling quite as optimistic as the author here. But they're absolutely right about the corporate side of the internet. The mainstream that is controlled by the rich and driven by greed. You need FOSS to have at least a good base you can build on top of. Profit oriented platforms have failed us as a society.

What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it's disappointing in lots of ways too.

Added: the article is mostly about Mastodon which is more pleasant than Twitter because it lets you listen to just your own selected coterie, also not entirely good.

Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a ... different read on things than I do.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

IMO it's the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn't.

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be "broken" (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world's bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

I can't tell if I'm just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

Those are very basic algorithms and they are public. You can see exactly how they work.

I can't tell if I'm just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant

Prolly both :D

This article would have been better without the ableist slur against people with NPD.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

Well it's a bit more complicated. A really significant reason search isn't that comprehensive even on a big instance like mastodon.social is that Mastodon prioritizes privacy and has made it optional to be included in the search results with mastodon.social also opting to make it disabled by default when they added it.

A second problem is that if you're on a smaller instance you may not be seeing enough posts because they don't propagate there. This also affects hashtags. There's projects like Holos Discover fediverse search engine and Fediscovery that are addressing this problem but they won't change the fact that many users simply have indexing their posts for full text search disabled.

Totally. Social media (and other types of computing platforms I guess) need to be more grassroots and not driven by profit.

Y'all will find something else to screech at. It's just a never ending loop off finding something to be pissed at.

I don't like that the logo of Lemmy is the logo of LW in that picture.

Other than that, good read.

It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

It is a return to the internet in 1996.

I have NPD, and I don't like it when My disorder is shortened and used as the word to identify Me. I'm not a "N*rcissist", I'm a person with NPD. Call Me a person, not a disorder.

Serious question: isn't the word separate from the disorder though?

We can describe people doing antisocial, paranoid, or dependent things even when they don't have the associated personality disorders. We can also describe someone generally as antisocial or paranoid if they display those traits regularly, regardless of any underlying diagnosis. Is it different with NPD?

The word "autism" originally came from psychiatrists' perceptions that autistic people are preoccupied with ourselves. So if I say "My boss is so autistic, it's disgusting", is that okay? Etymologically, it's valid. I'm not talking about a disorder. But I don't think it's an okay thing to say.

When psychiatrists made narcissism a label to apply to vulnerable people, I think they made it off limits for casual comments. I'm careful about labelling people as antisocial or paranoid too. Those are serious words used for serious conversations about mental health. That means they can be dangerous in untrained hands. Think of those words like power tools. You don't pick up an angle grinder and start waving it around without the proper training and carefulness. That's going to get someone hurt. These words have just as much destructive potential, so we need to treat them the same way.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I'm glad someone's into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There's no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That's why it was written and that's what it does. End of story.

So refreshing to see someone call out Bluesky for what it is.

Where's that space jam website?

I appreciate the example and I think I see your point. I agree with the underlying logic, in general, but applying it to the N in NPD seems an over extension.

Dictionary definitions for the two terms, as records of common usage, are notably different. Autism refers solely to the condition so your example sentence would be an inappropriate use. Acceptable and understandable in the language, but an uncommon application of the word. On the other hand, narcissism is used for general egoism and self importance first and for NPD second.

This of course doesn't invalidate your feelings when hearing the word or desire to protect others from the same, but maybe this can offer some comfort if the most common usage is not intended or even understood as a slur or even a reference to folks with NPD.

Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn't a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.

It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn't stop me.

I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what's happening. It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

So, a few things. One, I appreciate the authors evolution on this, but I also think for anyone who lived through the US's campaigns in the war on terror, on resistance movements like BLM, Dakota pipeline, Occupy, Me Too, on and on..

The American (and often global) experience is a eventual experience of realizing you are being lied to and finding a way to the truth. For me it was being enlisted and finding Democracy Now! because it was a show I could download on an mp3 players and put on mini-disks when I was preparing for underways.

The same sentiment that the author is appreciating is one that some people in the 90's got when they first had access to the internet. That kids in the 2000's felt when they found alternative media (DN!, others, many coming from the WTO protests of the 90's), that kids in the mid-2000's felt when they found social media, when kids in the 2010's found the second wave of social media, when kids in the 2020's found the fediverse, and on and on.

Yup.

Though I thought of it as the Internet from 2010. No ads. No algo. All chronological. Once you figure out where the slow mode setting is and turn it off, Mastodon is the fucking best. I even pay a voluntary sub every month to help my instance host itself.

And it requires just enough setup (5-10 minutes tops) that the vast majority of the Internet is too lazy to use it, which keeps the quality high.

No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse

Yeah, but there's a huge difference: human moderation coupled with better curation tools. You can block a user or a whole instance, which quiets the Nazis pretty fast.

And the people doing the moderation are volunteers who actually give a shit.

It is, but it also sucks that it is. I don’t know why people continue to have such blind spots, but given who and what is behind bluesky, why would anyone, ever think it was ever going to be open or anything but twitter 2.0?

I’m really baffled at why people are so unwilling to learn from history.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

Slow mode?

Yeah, when you're on the global feed, posts fly by at a dizzying rate. Turning on slow mode makes it so that they stop auto-scrolling and only scroll when you click that you want to see more posts.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be "broken" (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

Search is broken beyond the choice of being an opt-in. The fact that there's no way to sort search in any way except chronological order means it's hard to find anything relevant. Instead it's usually just a bunch of spam blogs or replies

I know it's a really ordinary thing to do, but the idea of people using micrblogging to find people, and not just to follow and talk to people they already know, will always be wild to me. The idea of scrolling through infinite feeds where every post could be potentially triggering (and 80% of them are just reposts anyway) gives me terrible flashbacks to when I was younger. Thank god there are people who can handle that and actually make meaningful connections to people that way.

At least we have hot chips now while we're being lied to. Society has come so far

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world's bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

Yeah, remember these are the folk moving from Florida to Alaska with nothing but a knife and a Canadian tuxedo and being surprised when they die after two weeks.

For algorithms, anything that isn't a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

As for community of communities, that's how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.

Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other "local" users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it's what the brain evolved to do.

We can see the consequence of systems that don't respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.

This article is confirming the extreme merit of Citizen Controlled Media, which has only become more and more important as an essential form of prefiguration as time goes on, since these alternative citizen controlled sources become virtually the only way to communicate truth to others that is otherwise censored in state or corporate controlled media.

IMO it's the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn't.

Honestly, I couldn't give a shit. Like I couldn't give a shit about celebrities and journalists signing up to Mastodon.

The Fediverse with which I interact is vibrant, and full of (mostly) good people, all sharing knowledge, jokes, art, etc... I don't personally care if Taylor Swift signs up, because the people who currently live on here largely play by the rules, and the vibe is good.

I don't care if Bluesky's protocol ends up 'winning', because it doesn't affect Mastodon. Or Lemmy. Or Pixelfed. Or Peertube. Or whatever federated services anyone else uses.

But if we go even further back in history, to the very origins of the term, it's not good. There's an ancient Greek myth about this teenage boy, Narcissus. He was 16 years old and very beautiful, so everyone wanted to marry him. But he just wanted to be alone in the woods and be a hunter. Bring back food for his community. But every time he returned to civilisation, he was inundated with marriage proposals. And he was just a boy. So he loses his temper and tells one of the people sexually harassing him, Ameinias, to go kill himself. Ameinias actually does if, because he's genuinely obsessed with Narcissus, and as he does it, he prays to the goddess Nemesis for revenge. So Nemesis curses Narcissus to be capable of beholding his own beauty. Next time the kid comes across a pond, he sees his reflection in it, becomes obsessed with staring at himself, and dies of thirst because he can't tend to his basic needs.

So this is an aro/ace child in an aphobic society who was sexually harassed, lost his temper, and sentenced to death by a god.

A lot of people perceive Narcissus as some kind of abuser, and I think these readings of the myth come from just how aphobic Greek society was at the time. They thought if you're pretty, then you owe people sex, and if you don't want to have sex, then you're stuck up and full of yourself. It's disgusting. And I'm not comfortable with the way our society has spent 3000 years mocking a queer child. Even a fictional one.

So no, I'm not going to become okay with hearing the word used as an insult. I've genuinely done a lot of research on this issue and I'm convinced it's bad. As an asexual, I relate to Narcissus. As someone who suffered child abuse and now has a harmful relationship with My self-image, I relate to Narcissus. Our society hates people like him and people like Me because its values are all twisted up, same as the ancient Greeks.

For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

I would say scrutability in itself doesn't automatically make an algorithm good. "Demote everything that doesn't support Trump" is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

I haven't noticed much difference between instances either, though I haven't been on many. I moved from lemmy.world to lemmy.ml because .ml has a bit less censorship (e.g. .ml lets me subscribe to !covid@hexbear.net). They are otherwise about the same, as far as I can tell.

That’s going to get someone hurt. These words have just as much destructive potential, so we need to treat them the same way.

Offense isn't harm: no one is getting hurt.
You're overstating the harm of expression by appealing to clinical language & understating the need for resilience & enough judgement to discern that in context, the word has a looser meaning.
It's a bit overdramatic.

Moreover, conventional language doesn't operate the way you suggest: there's no such rule about psychiatrists & "off limits".
No one is obligated to share your opinion on this: it's not fact.

Are you making something not about yourself about yourself?
That…checks out.

Ironically, it might support the author's point.
Now I've got to reexamine how much this explains other social media interactions.

I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

This is mostly getting into normative vs descriptive philosophy. If it's scrutable that a site/instance is demoting everything non-aligned with a worldview; then on the Fediverse it's users' choice to leave (and part of 'community values').

In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

To some degree, yes. New Reddit is particularly bad about this, it actively buries unpopular replies (but it goes further, and doesn't just use upvotes) — Software like Lemmy is better, you can easily set Sort by New or sort by Top as the default. There's also no 'Karma' system that propagates across the site.

Sycophancy is a human trait, so it'll always emerge in social systems; but normatively, our systems should not cater to these negative traits (e.g. Twitter).

There are some Lemmy instances without downvoting, but none without upvoting. That affects what gets posted. Also it doesn't matter much what an individual instance does, since a lively community has users from lots of instances contributing. That's the point of federation, I thought.

this is how Fox News etal dominate though, so while I don't use it, I do give a shit and always encourage others NOT to use it. I also castigate those who would pollute the fedi waters with that APIs etc allowing the shit to flow though.

Words can get someone involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. Words can be used to take away rights. Words can affect national policy. Words were what Adolf Hitler used to send people to the concentration camps, and they're what Donald Trump is using to do the same thing today. Words are extraordinarily dangerous.

When we legitimise words that dehumanise the mentally ill, words like r*tard or n*rcissist, we give more power to fascists, because they can go on to use those words and people won't be offended. Ordinary people's offence is a defensive weapon that can be used to protect against the misuse of words. Ordinary people's offence is a valuable resource it makes sense to cultivate.

I want people to be more easily offended, so that they'll resist messages of hate spread by fascists. If people learn to be okay with hearing slurs casually thrown around on the street, words like f*ggot and n*gger, then things are going to get worse for the people those slurs describe.

Yeah, I mean that's true of any social space though, if you say something agreeable (definitionally) you're going to get agreement. If you view upvoting as consensus building (i.e "I like this" / "I agree") it's just a more concise representation of a reply saying as much.

But that is scrutable.

What becomes a problem is content getting surfaced/buried on non-scrutable metrics (typically engagement) — ragebait isn't anything new, online or in societies. But when algorithms target content that gets engagement, ragebait is naturally surfaced in higher proportions. Often time such platforms completely bury content or make it impossible to find something not explicitly surfaced (YouTube search for example is widely known to be terrible here, FB rabidly buries comments on posts).

WRT communities, there definitely are instances and communities with very different rules, values and expected behaviors. Federation allows communities to pick and choose what other communities they think they'll get along with. This includes banning individual remote users if they don't follow local rules, or defederating entirely if other instances have drastically different values.

The federation model as described does well by my metrics. I can pick an instance that shares my values, participate in communities (in the Lemmy technical sense) that share them as well — and largely avoid or choose not to engage with people from communities (in the instance sense) that I don't share values with. This is extending "freedom of association" to online spaces in a way that large platforms largely cannot and willingly do not enable.

Words can get someone involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. Words can be used to take away rights. Words can affect national policy. Words were what Adolf Hitler used to send people to the concentration camps, and they’re what Donald Trump is using to do the same thing today. Words are extraordinarily dangerous.

Nah, none of those.
All instances of harm require unnecessary action taken by choice.
Words can be disregarded.
Acting on words is the actor's choice.

When we legitimise words that dehumanise the mentally ill

They're not doing that.
Moreover, using such words alone doesn't do what you claim.
There are a number of steps between a word you find offensive & adverse action: that argument is a slippery slope.
Unless the words incite imminent action, people have an unbounded amount of time to think & arrive to a decision before taking action.
Any amount of discussion can occur during that time to influence & inform decisions.
Rather than an overgeneralized attack on using a word, a more focused & coherent argument to support human rights could be raised.

Over relying on offense & emotion to steer their judgement discounts people's capacity to reason & infantilizes them, which is condescending.
Offense & emotion are not reliable guides of judgement.
Speculation that it would promote better outcomes is not a valid argument.
That such an approach would work better than reason is poorly supported.
We could at least as plausibly appeal to reason rather than to offended emotion with the bonus of not irrationally overgeneralizing.

People can interpret context to draw distinctions & you're overgeneralizing.
The overgeneralization underpinning your offended opinion isn't a valid argument.
Neither is the speculation offered to support it.
Telling people their words mean something they do not, disrespecting their moral agency & ability think, & insulting their intelligence to discern meaning is unpersuasive.
Promoting a rational argument more specifically supporting the outcomes you favor would be more persuasive.

A lot of hot takes. Definitely don't agree with calling every youtuber and twitch streamer a narcissist. If you just go on the front page, sure. But there are thousands of normal people on there making great content. They just don't appeal to the algorithm as much so you haven't heard of them. But they're out there

It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.

So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that'll still lead to centralization with "trusted" instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there's also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that's besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.

I miss the mid-2000s YouTube when there was no monetization incentive. People just made videos and posted them because they believed others would enjoy them. That was it.

Good times.