maegul

maegul, 8 months ago

From the little I saw (and zero Rust, or Tokio (I think they use that) knowledge) … federation workers weren’t persisting correctly whenever it would hit certain errors or problems.

maegul, 8 months ago

Awesome!!

Sorry for linking to a comment of yours. It’s always tricky territory whether it’s polite or impolite to do so, especially if it’s clearly a heated situation/topic. I tagged you because that’s the only etiquette I’ve picked up about this sort of thing.

maegul, 8 months ago

well, I won’t share any details out of respect for their deletion.

Suffice it to say that they had problems with the moderation of Risa and evidently wanted to create a community with the kind of moderation they want. As TenForward has multiple moderators, Stamets was clearly not alone in this.

I think if you were to read the comments in the linked welcome message for TenForward, as well as the welcome message itself, you’ll get the picture.

maegul, 8 months ago

I was always under the impression that he sucked and was lucky to have had M Piller and J Taylor to find the soul of TNG era trek (ENT is what happened when they both left).

But I did not know this. JFC. Fuck that guy.

maegul, 8 months ago

Yea for sure …

I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.

We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.

These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.

maegul, 8 months ago

Sounds like you want forums, basically :D

Not really. I prefer the Reddit like format, like you, and see it as a superior substitute for flatter forums.

A private community operating alongside public communities is what I’m talking about and I think that’s a different breast.

maegul, 8 months ago

Exactly … and the lesson then wouldn’t be to ditch lemmy/kbin/fediverse and declare “we only need reddit now”. The lesson would be that you need countermeasures to keep the corps honest and you should never let up on such pressures.

maegul, 9 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Laziness.

Plus, if it’s too many ads and too much tracking, maybe it’s my using the thing that’s the problem.

maegul, 9 months ago

I saw someone else post this:

The legal presumption of the “reasonable person”, often criticised by legal scholars, has most successfully been debunked, of all things, by social media.

maegul, 9 months ago

assuming the name of the community can be changed that is

It’s just like with user accounts. The alias can be whatever you want but the address is static. Fortunately I’d say “house of the dragon” counts as a decent catch all for a ASOIAF community.

maegul, 10 months 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, 10 months 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, 10 months 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, 10 months 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, 10 months 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, 10 months 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, 11 months ago (edited 11 months 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.

maegul, 1 year ago

Worth acknowledging the nice homage to Apollo in that app name too.

maegul, 1 year ago

Not to be a bully to some of these new projects, who people have I’m sure worked hard on, but a few lemmy instances are big enough that they could probably count as their own “Reddits” and have distinct enough “personalities” for this list …

beehaw.org

lemmynsfw.com

feddit.de

lemmy.blahaj.zone

maegul, 1 year ago

I think we have some scope to try to establish and monitor cultural norms.

maegul, 1 year ago

I don’t disagree.

But

and that makes it a bad comment.

Goes too far. That a social media comment is the limit of what is possible as far as persuasion and learning goes, especially on difficult or controversial topics, is plainly wrong. Mind shifts can be hard work. And so there’s plenty of space in which a comment can be making a worthwhile point, politely and clearly, without it ever being able to be persuasive, just by the nature of the audience and topic.

maegul, 1 year ago

Otherwise … and I’m essentially quizzing you here, so feel free to ignore me

Do you think lemmy/kbin’s relatively poor and insufficient moderation tooling is partly to blame for what you’re seeing?

Do you think that the communities based structure make this sort of thing more likely to be bad or problematic?

maegul, 1 year ago

the HOA stuff is often driven by people who don’t care if we’re on guard, or actively want us to feel unsafe

… sighs … yea

I think @zens / @bri_seven puts it quite well whenever someone tries to describe aspects of the fediverse as inevitable … they repeatedly say something to the effect that the real danger is the one that tries to convince the victim that the abuser/monster is simply a force of nature that must be accepted.

Just my ranting there … hope your instances go well and the moderation work isn’t too much for you!! And thanks for the response!

maegul, 1 year ago

I think there’s definitely something healthy behind the idea that depression is actually a fairly natural or reasonable state, however hard and painful it can be. Especially for anyone that wants to be mindful of the danger of psychopaths or sociopaths who are probably the types of people that seem oddly immune or unable to understand or empathise with depression.

Otherwise, I’ll just say that a “second childhood” can be a thing (as far as I can tell), where all of the concerns of middle age fade away and we’re forced to wrestle, naively perhaps, with the sheer reality of existing.

maegul, 1 year ago

So apparently Peertube works well, in part because the structure of the two platforms map onto each other well. Communities -> Posts -> Comments = Channels -> Videos -> Comments.

I experimented once, and from memory you can definitely subscribe to a peertube channel here. But I don’t know my way around peertube so I don’t know how well it works.