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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

Edit: DW changed the link after they published the piece. Sigh. Updated.
Edit2: again. What the fuck.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.

Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.

I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.

1
submitted 6 months ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/parlamentarna@szmer.info

cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/1556885

Tuż po incydencie Grzegorz Braun wyszedł na mównicę sejmową. Do głosu dopuścił go prowadzący obrady wicemarszałek Bosak.

(...)

Wcześniej chęć odwołania Bosaka, a nawet pozbawienia Konfederacji miejsca w prezydium Sejmu, zgłosiło Prawo i Sprawiedliwość.

1
submitted 7 months ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/parlamentarna@szmer.info

Stare (2011) ale jare.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 14 points 11 months ago

They should have asked the candidate about the crying baby. Maybe it was not theirs? Maybe he was so stressed he blocked it out?

Instead of being human and humane, the company interviewer acted like a robot, trying to find a catch not to hire the guy. Note: the interviewer also had to ignore the crying baby and not acknowledge it on the call! What if the baby was in danger?

Revolting. Corporate drone brain-worms.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 18 points 1 year ago

The problem with AI is the problem with capitalism.

Hiper-capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, who had been pushing cryptocurrencies for a long while and still seems to be doing so, have vested interests in generating the AI-hype.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 38 points 1 year ago

Figures that Techdirt is the first (and only so far) place that I've seen to mention Lemmy/Kbin, and also not do a mess of it!

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[-] rysiek@szmer.info 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I did not say "lemmy = tankie", I said Lemmy has certain tankie baggage, and that is in fact true. The developers are pretty clearly tankies, they also run a strictly tankie instance (Lemmygrad; many Lemmy instances do not federate with it).

Pretending this is not the case is not going to help in the long run. It might slow down the "unreddit" movement now, but I'd wager a bet it will make it more long-term viable and resilient, if people understand that choice of instance is important (there are quite a few great Lemmy instances that I would recommend wholeheartidly, like BeeHaw), and that there are alternative, independent implementations on Threadiverse (like Kbin).

7
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/349217

As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.

Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.

Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.

When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a "fork" of Lemmy. 🤣

Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes "this is why Lemmy will fail." Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how "poorly" Lemmy and Kbin were able to "capture" the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, "confusing interface", and ask "thoughtful" questions on "how will they monetize".

Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as "proof positive" that Lemmy and Kbin could never "succeed".

What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.

It's a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.

178
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.

Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.

Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.

When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a "fork" of Lemmy. 🤣

Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes "this is why Lemmy will fail." Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how "poorly" Lemmy and Kbin were able to "capture" the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, "confusing interface", and ask "thoughtful" questions on "how will they monetize".

Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as "proof positive" that Lemmy and Kbin could never "succeed".

What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.

It's a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 14 points 1 year ago

I find it very active, once you follow a few active accounts. People boost interesting stuff into your timeline, you can follow hashtags directly, and on smaller thematic instances the local timeline is a great place too, so there is plenty of ways to get a nice active feed.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 14 points 1 year ago

lemmy might be counting people who have posted this month and kbin might be counting anyone who has cisited the site.

The data is from The-Federation.info, and the idea is that the metric is about users whose accounts were active over the last month. I think "active" in both cases means "has logged in recently".

Big respect to all the devs for handling this growth so well.

Absolutely. Sending all the hugs and good vibes, the Big Wave has not even started yet, I think.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 29 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is written in Rust, has been around for a while, and there are a bunch of established communities on established Lemmy instances already.

KBin is sadly PHP, relative newcomer, arguably better interface, and no baggage.

That's all I got myself. Hope others will chip in.

[-] rysiek@szmer.info 28 points 1 year ago

I don't think you need to worry about it. It's up to a given community whether or not that baggage affects it or not, I think. Building communities that are very explicitly not tankie is a great way of helping overcome that baggage for the whole project.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.

It's obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is "better" or more "long-term viable" or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it's all one happy family.

That said, it's notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the "Reddit-like fedi instance" game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.

Anyway, the more, the merrier!

KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184

Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986

1
What is mathwashing? (www.mathwashing.com)
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

Extremely useful term in the context of all the AI hype.

16
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (the software project and the non-profit) has on the rest of the Fediverse.

Good. We should be worried.

Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.

This has poor consequences now, and it might have worse consequences later. What also really bothers me is that I have seen some of this before.

I go on to dive a bit into the history of StatusNet (the software), OStatus (the protocol), and identi.ca (the biggest instance) on a decentralized social network "grandparent" of the Fediverse.

And draw an analogy to show why mastodon.social's size, and Mastodon-the-software-project's influence on broader fedi is a serious risk we need to do something about.

12
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

1
submitted 1 year ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@slrpnk.net
[-] rysiek@szmer.info 24 points 2 years ago

Well duh. "PC" means "Windows", obviously.

sigh

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rysiek

joined 3 years ago