Sandra

There’s a lot of extreme content on the Fediverse (such as harassment).

Not sure. There’s a lot of kinda creepy stuff on here 😰

Correct, and that’s exactly why it does not work for group things.

If fedi is like email, and it is similar in many ways, a Lemmy community is like a mailing list. People can send to the list and the threads on the list from different servers. And there can be separate communities about the same topics just as there can be separate mailing lists about the same topics.

But hashtags in email wouldn’t work as a replacement for mailing lists. Hashtags in email can still have some use, within a mailing list or in a specific conversation, but it’s something very different from a mailing list.

On kbin, if people think that “Oh, here is where the posts about cycling will show up” but the magazine is just based around a hashtag, there’s no way for people to participate deliberately. It’s misleading.

Using hashtags as if it were tumblr or twitter is anti-decentralization and drives people into using the biggest instances only. Groups a la gup.pe and Lemmy and Friendica is a solution to that. It’s only a partially decentralized solution, since each group itself is centrally hosted (exactly like mailing lists were), but it’s at least a solution, whereas misusing hashtags that way isn’t.

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, it works poorly everywhere on the fediverse, is exactly what I’m saying.

Hashtags on Fedi can be good for organizing stuff within a single account or instance, or it can be used for other things like trigger specific bots, but they can not (as you know) work like an IRC channel like they did on Twitter.

That’s why I’m not happy about kbin elevating that misfeature and legitimizing its misuse as if it were as robust as the other federated group protocols are. It’s not the end of the world or the worst feature on the planet, I’m not that worked up about it, it’s just not good, is all.

(Again, not blaming you for that ofc, you only reported on it, and that was awesome, thanks.)

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, keyword search works poorly on fedi is what I’m saying 💁🏻‍♀️
Using that as a basis for group talk can end up being super unreliable in some situations.

@ada @meteorswarm

I believe it is a mistake selecting that particular instance for those communities.

The risk isn’t just that they shut it down, there’s a much worse thing that could happen: pinpoint elision (or even editing) of reporting on the genocide.

(Not shooting the messenger, just as info for other readers.)
Using hashtags for this seems like an idea with some severe limitations because it can only see the posts it has happened to come across otherwise. (Unlike the other group formats.)

@ada @meteorswarm

I’m also an artist, for whatever that’s worth, 🤷🏻‍♀️

Copyright is artificial scarcity which is ultimately designed for publishers, not workers.

One of the many, many bugs in market capitalism is that it can’t handle when something is difficult to initially create but when copies are cheap. Like a song. It’s tricky to write it but once you have it you can copy it endlessly. Markets based on supply and demand can’t handle that so they cooked up copyright as kind of a brutal patch, originally for book publishers in an era where normal readers couldn’t easily copy books anyway, only other publishers could.

It’s a patch that doesn’t work very well since many artist still work super hard and still have to get by on scraps. Ultimately we need to re-think a lot of economics. Not only because digital threw everything on its ear and what could’ve been a cornucopia is now a tug of war for pennies, but also because of climate change (which is caused by fossil fuel transaction externalities being under-accounted for—if I sell you a can of gas, the full environmental impact of that is not going to be factored in properly. Sort of like how a memory leak works in a computer program).

I definitively sympathize with your artist friends and I’ve been speaking out against AI art, at least some aspects of it (including, but not limited to, the environmental impact of new models, and the increasing wealth&power concentration for big data capital).

The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.

no more Brave

So there’s a silver lining. But the WEI project is still overall a complete disaster that needs to rot on the vine. It’ll wreck not just browser diversity but overall hackability, adblocks, mashups, and above all: accessibility.

Right.

Instead, the worry is that devs will write other server backend code that won’t respect browser back-holds, that will demand compliance.