maegul

maegul, 1 year ago

Awesome!! Hadn’t seen this before.

I think this goes on some list I’ve started of old-style fecking awesome web pages that represent exactly what us old timers are talking about when we say the internet has lost something vital. No frills, community driven, information rich and dense web page producing long lasting value. Just compare this to some recipe page with flocks of ads.

maegul, 1 year ago

Thanks!

Without knowing any information about this, the hachyderm instance is one which would host such a thing. They’re tech focused, and well organised with a co-op umbrella organisation running the instance that has pretty clear rules and ideas around how incorporated entities can engage and join it. So it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

maegul, 1 year ago

Voyager might want a word …

It was always a part of it though … travel times were always there and relevant, the delta quadrant was very far away, getting to the battle in time wasn’t always possible, being alone when in trouble was almost always the point … space hadn’t been reduced from a final frontier to an irrelevant playground.

a single ship having it

Well this was part of the contrivance … once Discovery made it work why wouldn’t the whole federation be running spore drives ASAP? Security wise they’d be nearly unstoppable.

maegul, 1 year ago

And Star Trek was never about human ingenuity coming together to make near-magical technology work? Stamet’s DNA changes weren’t recorded? They weren’t studied and replicated or had the essence of their effect distilled into an interface that mimicked the physical effects?

This all seems like clutching at very untrek-like straws … which kinda encapsulates the whole issue that some have with Discovery.

I personally don’t mind the idea of a mycellial network, or more broadly, some sort of futuristic bio-physics phenomenon/technology. I just think Discovery didn’t land the handling of it. I think there are plenty of possible reasons for the spore drive not being used by all of the federation that are more interesting than these “lucky, only one person got the DNA so I guess it’s over now” reasons … reasons that would actually contribute to the Sci-Fi of it all. Like, just shooting from the hip … it has an immune system that learnt to kick out foreign starships.

maegul, 1 year ago

but for something fairly simple like that? Nah, the show is just bad.

Ok, why was the ship erased from the records? Why did it have to go into the future? What was the sphere thing again? How were Discovery going into the future again … couldn’t they have just sent the important thing separately? Does Discovery going into the future and being “erased” actually prevent the problem … which was what … AI?!

Honestly, I don’t know the answer to all of those questions. And as much as I personally liked the idea of doing Trek 900 years in the future (finally, something new in trek), I remember the plot of the backend of season 2 being just a bit too much “what? really?”.

I can’t break it down, like at all, but I’m personally not convinced at all that Discovery needing to be erased made much sense. Convince me otherwise, please. But also, to anyone else … do you honestly remember why Discovery had to go into the future and be “erased” … and even if you do … does it feel like a good or interesting story point to you? If you answer with at least one “no”, then the whole “erased” thing just isn’t a good explanation or defence for why the spore drive in a prequel is somewhere between bad and awkward.

Personally, I’d go further and say the whole “erased” thing cant be anything other than contrived … because it’s simultaneously so extreme and completely necessary to handle the issue of the spore drive … they had to do something like this and it’s just too hard to not think about the writers trying to work their way out of the problem. That their reason for needing to be erased and go into the future doesn’t seem to have any connection to Discovery or its spore drive, but just happens to have struck the same ship with a spore drive and no other ship, only affirms the contrivance.

Maybe I’m missing something here, it’s been a while since I’ve season 2. But the “erased from the records” plot point might just be a part of the problem we’re citing here, not a defence against.

maegul, 1 year ago

Absolutely, I think the 32nd Century is pretty great, and the time jump was the means to that end.

Oh I’m all for the jump! Just not sure the justification for it makes much sense. Was the sphere sentient by that point?

They couldn’t just destroy Discovery? Or spore drive the ship far away?

maegul, 1 year ago

I’d personally completely forgotten about the river of time stuff and the intention to never emerge. Though wasn’t there stuff also about Michael setting a beacon in the future? Also, in season 3 they seemed unsurprised at emerging in the future IIRC.

maegul, 1 year ago

Appreciate the honest and (somewhat) applicable answer!

I also DO NOT appreciate the downvotes … we really need to get rid of those. Don’t agree, fine, move on or respond civilly. A downvote is a manifestly uncivil action sanctioned by the interface.

Otherwise … to respond to the abortion argument … where this falls down for me is the complete lack of any mention of the mother or woman in your reasoning.

Scientifically, this challenges the “humanness” of a foetus in the way it is tightly coupled and dependent on another human to live. Morally, it raises much of your reasoning in relation to not fucking with people once you consider what is effectively done to women by forcing them to carry any foetus to birth which is a massive, very active and obviously risky undertaking.

Whether these are convincing for you or others, the lack of any weight given for these considerations indicates that the act of birthing is presumed as a duty of all women. A presumption that IMO undermines the completeness of your scientific and moral arguments.

To take that a little further … should people be legally compelled to secure and save the lives of babies? As it is now, that’s not the case anywhere I know of. Causing harm would be criminal, obviously, but failing to save a baby or anyone else from harm is not.

In debating the legality of abortion you enter into similar territory. Only by presuming birth as a duty can you think otherwise.

While aborting a foetus is a positive act, there’s the complication that it’s purpose is to avoid the onus of pregnancy and birth, which can be easily seen as tantamount to “simply not doing the thing that would save the foetus’s like”, ie all the work of pregnancy and birth which is probably all too easily presumed by men (which I’m guessing you are) as a more passive and natural event than an act of effort, toil and cost.

maegul, 1 year ago

Honestly, this seems like the depiction of a bunch of people that are safe and prosperous and can’t imagine how their views could possibly be problematic, and don’t need to, and so avoid political discussions because it’s just a bit too yuck and they’d prefer to lead their happy lives.

Basically the conservative - privilege coupling that is so shit.

maegul, 1 year ago

I know it’s contentious, but the downvotes don’t help anything.

To your first para: viability outside the womb doesn’t, I think, affect my initial argument. If it’s viable outside of the womb, then so be it. Actively harming it would be illegal, but being legally compelled to care for it would be problematic.

Viability would alter abortion laws though, I think. In that it would make sense at some point to prohibit the mother from electing to terminate rather than submit the foetus to whatever the extra-womb viability state is. What happens then would mostly put the foetus in the same position it is now in that the onus of providing the viability of its life wouldn’t be something others are compelled to do, unless of course it’s trivial and withholding is tantamount to actively killing.

On the issue of convenience, I think that’s a misrepresentation. The thrust of the argument is consistency with the rest of social norms where the “convenience” is the freedom for a whole gender to not undertake 9 months of drastic bodily transformation and work and the remaining parental duties. If the rest of society were so committed to life and prosperity as ensuring every foetus gets taken care of, then that’s a different conversation, in large part because the mothers would be taken care of too. But consigning a whole gender’s major life experiences and burdens to a matter of “convenience”, I think, marks the dissonance that a libertarian outlook encounters when it tries to compel or outlaw actions. It’s not just convenience (in principle at least), and that this onus needs to be considered trivial indicates IMO the biases against women involved treating the issue as legally black and white.

Nonetheless, I agree with your general reasoning about not facilitating the depreciation of life. I personally extend the same reasoning to animals in my arguments in favour of veganism.

maegul, 1 year ago

I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.

Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.

Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.

maegul, 1 year ago

Yea, just checked now out of curiosity. First, it was definitely a bit mirror universe creepy. Second, yea, it did seem a bit shallow and childishly dumb from what I saw. Funny.

maegul, 1 year ago

the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared

I’m with you. The problem is that this promise is mostly empty, at least at the moment.

ActivityPub, from what I’ve gleaned, is too vague and open ended and under-developed in terms of software for this to be true. The result is that each platform is implementing a sub-set of the protocol and often adding their own custom twists/additions to it. Which means that just because two platforms use ActivityPub does not mean at all that those two platforms can communicate in anyway. And, even if they can communicate, there’s no guarantee at all that this will be usable.

The interaction between lemmy and mastodon is illustrative. Technically they can communicate, and at times this can work well. But the two platforms are hardly mutually enriching each other because the interactions between them are fairly limited in number. And that’s because they don’t talk to each other well. Some of that is because they’ve implemented different parts of the protocol. Some of it is also their differences in design and UI/UX that just add too much friction to consuming and meaningfully interacting with content from the other platform.

What’s more, this problem is fairly predictable and has been criticised as a false promise in the past. At the moment, I’d say it’s fair to say that ActivityPub has not been proven as a way to enable communication between substantially different platforms. That might change over time, though I suspect the load on developers to make that happen will remain high without some major foundational work.

But right now, unless there’s something I don’t know/understand, I don’t see the extra-platform capabilities of ActivityPub playin any role in the success of the fediverse in competition with BlueSky, at least as far as Mastodon is concerned which, as a platform, is relatively happy just doing its own thing.

maegul, 1 year ago

I was going to say the same but don’t know enough about BlueSky’s ATProtocol to be sure about the possibilities.

In principle, you’d hope they’ve added enough flexibility on there for different platform types. If they have, next year could get interesting as they open up federation. There seems to be a bit of buzz and interest around BlueSky, and if they garner the interest of enough developers who feel like they can make new things on the platform/protocol, then new things could happen and, if they attract a sizeable Twitter migration, go kinda mainstream pretty quickly.

maegul, 1 year ago

It seems BlueSky have explicit plans for their protocol to extend to all types of platforms: atproto.com/blog/building-on-atproto#what-to-expe…

Which means they’re coming for the fediverse, and may just succeed.

maegul, 1 year ago

Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here.

Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.

Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.

That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.

The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).

maegul, 1 year ago

What do you mean kbin doesn’t really support microblogging?

I could be wrong about this … but as I understand, you can’t see a feed of microblogs/posts from people that you follow. Instead everything is viewed through magazines, which pickup microblogs but combine them with the ordinary threadiverse content posted to those magazines. Following people and viewing their personal posts is, I’d say, the essence of microblogging.

Not a criticism of kbin at all BTW … easily the youngest platform on the fediverse but doing quite well it seems with already a fork that’s doing well too (mbin).

maegul, 1 year ago

Thanks Ernest!! Hope you’re going well and kbin development isn’t too much of a burden!!

I’ve seen that view before, and just checked it now again. It still feels like there’s more in the feed than should be. I’m probably missing some of the boosts etc that you cite, but it feels to me like some posts are coming in without it being clear why they’re there. My guess has always been that my subscriptions are playing a role somehow.

Anyway, hope the new changes go well!! And thanks for the response!

maegul, 1 year ago

one thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to set custom categories for Lemmy communities that I subscribe to/order them

Yep. Lemmy doesn’t provide any community management tooling, which is a shame, because a little can go a long way. Some clients provide some help, but generally it seems to be a lacking feature set.

maegul, 1 year ago

I think it’s an underrated practice in general.

Writing notes, saving notable/interesting things or highlights from articles/books/films etc and then going back through what you’ve saved.

maegul, 1 year ago

I haven’t seen anything. Hopefully nothing tragic happened. Otherwise, there’s obviously a bit of scope for this, for a single admin to just walk.

I think as communities/instances get to be more of a big deal, we as users should ask for multiple admins and moderators and multiple contact points (eg a mastodon account) so that there are fail safes and clear signals. So, if a single admin walks, there’s someone else with the keys. Or at least if the instance goes dark we have the alternative contact to at least get a signal about what’s happening.

maegul, 1 year ago

yea, maybe, but the admin of lemm.ee has been very open and responsible in their administration of the instance. If they decided to walk I think it likely they’d hand things over to anyone willing to take up the reins.

maegul, 1 year ago

But users can moderate communities on instances other than their own. So it’s common for a user to create an account on another instance just to create a community, then add their main as a moderator just for convenience. So it’s not a show stopper if OP wants to keep using this account.

maegul, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Honestly, I think the only true antidote to this sort of thing is to foster spaces in which people of vastly different opinions and positions can come together and communicate in a civil and genuine fashion. Pushing back on biases and presumptions through antagonistic or challenging conversations seems the only tried and true method we have for getting to the “truth” (or, more realistically, how little we know of or can grasp the actual truth whatever it may be).

It’s hard, especially online and many just don’t have the behavioural and cognitive muscles for it at all and very few in the world are actually strong at it.

Moreover, the moderation task would be monumental, which is why I’d think there’d have to be community buy-in from users/members and a grass roots enforcement of the ideals of the space as well as probably a good amount of gate-keeping unfortunately.

Additionally, I suspect that the technology of the platform actually has a role to play in fostering such a space. The technology is never a complete solution, but I think in such heated environments what’s missing from real life are contextual and gestural cues and meta data that we can all use to moderate how reception and reaction to any statement. Social media basically allows for none of that. But there’s no reason that we can’t try to represent a post/comment/statement in some way that tries to capture the sentimental and gestural context it is being made from. I think this is an example of modern technology actually losing sight of the mission of humanising technology.

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EDIT: It would be an interesting idea for a lemmy instance, to try to foster such a space. Maybe it has no users of its own, just communities? When it comes to gate keeping, it’d be cool of lemmy allowed invite only community subscriptions or something similar.