I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don’t become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.
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I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately
Thing is, mate…fascists rarely stay inside their boarders. This is going to be the whole world’s problem in about 3 months.
international us policy is very similar between republicans and democrats. you guys are already the whole worlds problem. 🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
im sorry but trump will be your problem. until the empire decides to turn up the violence dial again that is, which is something both parties do sometimes.
4 years if laws and constitution stay the same and are followed… first term he had people alienated into him who were at least slightly appropriated for their positions, this time people who has nothing to do with their positions are being appointed simply for being loyal to him… Let’s see if any of them won’t let him do anything drastic within 4 YEARS
It’s more than 4 years. We just crawled out of Trump inflation and now are going right back in.
Dismantling and breaking is easy. They can do a lot of that in 4 yrs. Building takes decades.
There’s also a global effect. Would Putin have ever attacked Ukraine without a Trump term? How about Israel’s taking self defense into genocide territory?
America leads by example and the last example was an impulsive 3 yo with a giant military force and a dead diplomacy department in the executive branch. There’s permissiveness in that.
Nah, most people are going to live their lives and see absolutely no effect from anything done. No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have. That’s why you get the big swings back and forth between the two parties. Also, the news is very good at sensationalizing absolutely everything and making you think that, oh my god, it’s the end of the fucking world. What are we going to do? Run around like chickens screaming with our heads cut off and shit.
We know that Ukraine will be betrayed by the Trump government. A Russian victory will embolden Russia to further threaten Europe. This will also embolden China and other authoritarian states.
We also know a Trump government will stop climate action. Unfortunately, this will also signal to many other governments that they can do the same.
We also know that immense cruelties will be perpetrated such as the family separation policy of the 1st Trump presidency
But yes, if you are white, straight and middle class or rich, you’ll be able to think all is OK until such time as the authoritarian ascendancy led by China and Russia affects your own life, which might be a decade or more away.
No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have.
Women in need of reproductive health services in red states would like a word.
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I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately
You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.
Anyway, get your passport now. They’re good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump’s circus.
The new online passport process is unbelievably good
They better not ruin it
Mastodon
Bsky federates. I follow several people from my Mastodon profile.
Edit: I should add a caveat here. Federation doesn’t work as smoothly as Threads yet. You have to use a bridge service: https://fed.brid.gy/
For now. They’re still in their growth phase. If they ever become dominant and they need to make money, they’ll turn into a walled garden like every other. Everyone seems to forget that Twitter, Reddit and Facebook were also all about openness at the start
“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.
This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.
At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.
A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.
A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.
Oh, well that’s good anyway. Is it true that they only have like one major server? Because I’ve heard that, but I haven’t looked much into them, so I’m not sure if it’s still the case or not. To my understanding, they are meant to be a federated network, but really only have the one server.
Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.
What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.
Not only federates but can also be partially self-hosted and is also open-source - by the way, I don’t mean it’s perfect but a lot better to reach people from there than Twitter, but be wary of this), anyone knowledgeable of US politics will know the names mentioned and how shady it looks. I still think Mastodon isn’t ready for this kins of exodus. People who waited this long to leave either wants convenience or is waiting for some of the people they follow go elsewhere, or both. Mastodon has too many mobile apps options, BlueSky official app is so much closer to how Twitter looks like and people are used to and don’t need to choosee instance as it already comes pre-selected by default (although people can change). Then comes the issue of scability if there was an instance to be the “default” for these people who just want quick and convenient alternative, will it be able to handle this much people at once? I have no idea but I doubt it. Most of us who go find alternative in the Fediverse is aware privacy-focused alternatives usually more than often comes at the price of convenience, not really the mindset those people are in, hopefully some of them get into it by learning what decentralization is from BlueSky?
Has an aggressively unpleasant user base and nowhere near the blocking functionality that Bluesky has, which is essentially mandatory now for minorities on the internet. Not to mention an onboarding process that can confuse the tech literate, much less the average person.
This comment is not an invitation to talk about how actually it’s very simple and intuitive if you follow a 20 step process that relies on detailed knowledge of how federation works.
I think it’s easy to understand Mastodon, or any federated service, using a metaphor for a country or large place, where you can say “I want to move to X country” but then you have to actually pick a place IN that country to live, like a specific city or rural district. Once you decide on your instance, it’s really not that hard
As a progressive worldly usa person which instance should I choose?
Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?
Thx
You dont need to explain email so federation does not seem to be the issue here IMO. The problem is money which FLOSS projects usually don’t have. The successful ones have perhaps enough so that the devs can put food on their table, but not much else. Most of the apps are after Dayjob hobby projects. It’s hard to compete with those who have teams of paid staff.
Don’t forget the disproportionate control individual mods have over the network due to the shared defederation lists. I was on a general purpose instance which found itself defederated from a large part of the network because a mastodon.art admin had disagreement with a mod on the one I was on.
Putting aside control and anecdotes, neither of which would be fair to comment on without more context and a lengthier discussion, this breaks the email metaphor a bit, doesn’t it?
The Fediverse is just like email, where we all talk to each other, except Outlook blocked Gmail because MS and Google had a fight during a meeting so you’re gonna have to migrate to Yahoo or learn to self-host.
That’s not necessarily a criticism, I just find it funny.
Those people will either learn one day or they will end up in the same vicious cycle over and over again for the rest of their lives until they do learn the lesson or die. The only reason the blue sky process is better is because, at least currently, they only have the one server. If it ever actually federates, like it’s supposed to, then that point is completely moot. Because then they won’t know how to sign up for blue sky either.
Oh no, not the same thing I’ve been doing since the mid 90s! I might die if I migrate sites again! Or something.
Making a social network only usable by around 5% of the population and then complaining when only 5% of the population shows up is a pretty indicative attitude of why so many FOSS projects struggle to get widespread adoption. You don’t get to choose how tech literate the population is. You either make it more useable or you accept a limited audience.
Bummer that isn’t mastodon but any inconvenience to musk is appreciated
Actually not a bummer in my opinion, let people sort into different platforms based on their interests like we used to do with forums.
A fragmented internet is a better internet
But it’s not fragmented. Mastodon is still the odd “vegan” option while BlueSky is becoming the main Twitterlike platform. Mastodon is still coming out the other end mostly the same.
that’s not how the modern internet works and unfortunately i am forced to be on facebook because all 4 of my hobbies no longer exists outside of it.
if people moved to the fediverse instead of bluesky or such, then we’d actually be able to have a fragmented internet again - due to how the fediverse interconnects through federation.
which i think is the best selling point the fediverse have - no longer would users need to be on multiple services, they could just be on one, and still interact with the services across the fediverse. but unless there is a mass-migration of one single service to the fediverse, such as people choosing mastodon over bluesky, to be the dominant service - it’s just never going to happen.
A fragmented internet is a better internet
I’m going to quote that at every opportunity.
I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.
They don’t like algorithms. They want you to select which content you see.
That’s all I’ve got. Mastodon is a better, more open tech. And it’s pretty easy to get set up, relatively. It’s insane that companies haven’t jumped on it.
You don’t even have to quit Twitter. You can just post to more than one place and give people the option.
Mastodon is, like, fine, but it has one gaping flaw that makes it utterly unusable for me.
Basically, the issue is you cannot be assured that any particular instance contains the entire conversation thread/replies, because they’re not necessarily sent to every server participating in the conversation.
Bluesky fixes that by the ‘firehose’ feeds federating out to the PDSes and providing complete reply chains, which just flat out makes it a better experience since you can actually see what everyone is saying, not just what people on servers you might be following already are saying.
It’s a giant stupid flaw in Mastodon (since other AP based platforms such as, for example, Lemmy don’t have it) and really should be addressed since it makes the platform darn near useless since why am I following people to only get half of what might be a useful thread?
Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way
300 Billion dollar portfolio, 34 Billion dollar loss (~22 Billion after he writes it off in “taxes”) and he has his own right-wing media company chocked full of nutters.
I don’t think he cares much about the individual Billions much these days. Half his Tesla stock is securing his debt.
It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.
He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Do you think the same about lemmy?
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…
I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They took crypto bros VC money.
Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.
They’ve followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I’d perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what’s to stop a fork? Once there’s interop between the protocols will it matter at all?
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
