Unfortunately alt-right crypto weirdos have coopted the term “decentralised”, and so it is with this site. It’s a crypto-based… video… hosting… platform? I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works other than that it mines crypto in the background while you have the site open and if you have an account, you get a cut of the crypto you mined.
I have tried looking into it, but they don’t explain anywhere in their promo materials, it’s literally just “earn while you watch!”, which… yeah no thanks. I’ve been on the internet and paying attention for more than 5 minutes, I know that grift when I see it.
“Decentralised” isn’t enough, you need a way to ban people that is also decentralised, and that’s where federation comes in.
I don’t know if they’re eventually going to coopt “federation”. I wonder if that’s the ultimate test of a social technology - if it can be coopted by reactionaries. The less able they are to do so, the better it is.
If you go through his old videos you’ll see him doing exactly that. There’s a non-zero chance your computer’s guts are in there in excruciating detail.
I’ve had the word aliexpress get me a warning for “spam & scams”, and another very short comment got me a temporary ban. I have no idea why, maybe because it looked like fake engagement? I mentioned the phrase “youtube channel”. So strange.
I feel like I shouldn’t keep putting my energy onto that platform and am looking for a good peertube instance to start uploading to.
When I was working IT in a place that produced transcripts - so we had loads of typists all using Windows and MS Word loaded down with a thousand macros - the IT department made all of the servers linux based, and all our production was stored on samba shares. The only reason they hadn’t transitioned the entire workforce to linux was resistance from management.
I imagine there would’ve been resistance from users too, but all of the inertia was due to familiarity and had absolutely nothing to do with technical barriers. The entire IT team was frothing at the mouth to be free of Microsoft’s arbitrary BS. Windows caused us no end of headaches.
In fact, because every typist needed a browser open at all times to research legal terms and other details, I had a number of people complain their computer was running slowly. For every one of them, I installed firefox and made it the default browser and told them they’d need to login to all of their online accounts again. Every single one told me I’d “fixed the computer” and it “works so much better now”.
I really like the idea of an activitypub platform tailored towards writing, fanfic or otherwise. You wouldn’t need to specify because the various styles would probably gravitate to different instances.
I’m sure someone will pick it up eventually, because it just makes sense. I actually do have programming skills but no time to devote to something like this. I have no idea how much work it would involve but the general rule I have for things like this is “more than I expected”.