The nodbb lead dev is part of the threadiverse workinf group, which is focused on interoperability between different AP-based platforms, and the federated nodebb forum topics are currently available via lemmy: !activitypub@community.nodebb.org, !forum-wg@community.nodebb.org

As if development teams choose their projects in publisher owned studios.

Right. So, no software ever, then. Even if you have a license that grants you perpetual usage rights, that doesn’t extend to anyone else shouldering the responsibility of perpetual hosting.

Your right to use software does not give you the right to expect others to store your digital junk for you.

A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

It was major human infrastructure failure.

And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.

It’s great for gaslighting people into thinking they don’t know what a bicycle looks like!

It’s not “widely misunderstood”, it’s been widely hyped by the people actively selling it. The tech bros are pumping and dumping it, just like with every other tech panacea.

It’s not the public, it’s the snake oil salesmen.

Musk <-------------------------------- LYs -----------------------------------> Self-Driving car

Any questions?

It’s something that should be publicised not because OpenAI has promised privacy, but because a lot of people seem to assume it where it has not been offered, and they need to be reminded that they’re kind of out to lunch on the issue.

Like, people in companies keep using these things to write reports with privileged information. People need to be informed as gently but alsonas firmly as possible that they’re sending this stuff over the internet to an organization that considers everything it can see to be its own.

Oh fun. Who is Elon going to just haphazardly drop the ISS on top of?

I kind of suspect this was an attempt on the IA’s end to get parts of copyright struck down by court ruling. Laws can be clear and still found to not be in the public’s interest, or in violation of some other legal doctrine, and sometimes you’ll see groups come at them sideways.

Ownership laws are really tough ones to chip away at, and IP law in particular has been getting worse and more unassailable over time.

Sure, but if you install DR, then you have DR to do other things. Like chase that YouTuber dream, or field annoying calls from your great aunt who knows you can edit videos to digitize her parents super 8 family videos that are have rotten.

This way they can spend more time rearranging the store so nobody knows where anything is, in turn making us walk past a bunch of stuff we don’t need in an effort to try and induce an impulse purchase!

Efficiency!

Nothing pseudo about it. This is the natural progression of capitalism.

Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.

Yeah, there’s plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That “easy mobility” requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.

But does there?

This comes back to what federation and “the fediverse” is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.

No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they’re different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.

But because it’s framed as “Mastodon” and not “social.website.com” the expectations are different.

Federation isn’t a mess, it’s just… messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they’re perfect drop-in replacements.

It results in a lot of questions about “Why can’t I ____?” and answers of the “Because this doesn’t work that way” variety.

Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn’t as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.

This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which… I mean, at that point, you’re just abandoning the central concept.

“Just use this thing that you’ve already rejected for X, Y, and Z.”

“Have they fixed X, Y, and Z yet?”

" Fuck you for asking."

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

“Futurologist” is a self-appointed honorific that people who fancy themselves “deep thinkers” while thinking of nothing more deeply than how deep they are. It’s like declaring oneself an “intellectual”.