I don’t think this is a problem.

Channels to get visibility exist.

People can mostly choose what kind of news they want to subscribe to and where. They will seek these things out or they will mute them, respectively.

If people want to join the community, finding the discord server is not an actual issue in practice. You can very much still put a link into the game or the demo.

I’m certainly not subscribing to a channel on a 3rd party program to get spammed with marketing every 2 weeks.

I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.

There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.

There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.

And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.

The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.

I don’t think the timing is quite right.

I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.

The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.

It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.

I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.

You’re a hero for making this happen in… 24 hours? 48?

The issue won’t go away, we’ll see how well everyone else deals with it, but this is a super strong argument for your system / server.

(Advertise it. Advertise it HARD. “piefed, we have private votes”.)

I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.

“We didn’t consider the idea because it sounded silly”

Isn’t something I want scientists to say. So good on them for taking a look at the feasibility.

No.

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/programs/applications#requirements

Take a look.

Though, if you have not heard of the program before, you’re probably not involved with a project that qualifies.

How is it vague?

It’s vague in all the legal ways:

• First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.

• It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.

• It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.

And a few more.

That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.

1. if a random comment on the internet is enough to destroy

your dream

then it was a weak and shitty dream. Get a new one.

2. do it anyway. Who cares. You know what’s the worst that could happen? You try, and it doesn’t work out and then you can look back at it and consider it “gave it a good shot, didn’t work out”. And then you can point to all the people who still sit on their couch and didn’t even try.

3. do it.

Glockness Monster *teleports behind you*

“nothing personal, kid”

It is broken in the sense that it’s absolutely insane that they can take 30% and nobody can build a competing product that only takes 20%.

It is not broken in the sense that they keep doing what they are doing and developers and customers consistently choose their offer.

It’s not a monopoly because they exploit their position.

It’s a monopoly because nobody else is trying hard enough.

I would do this if I could order it and have it arrive in a reasonable time.

Not really motivated to build it myself.

“The computer” decides when to install updates and which ones to install.

No, they didn’t take it back, they did investigate her and they did find the exact thing people said they would find.

The country probably would have been better off with her at the helm.

But the “claims” were accurate.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

“She did it. Maybe without meaning to, but she did do it.”

No.

You know how boxers don’t beat up their trainers?

This is like that.

The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until

• rents increase so much that people can’t afford to live in cities anymore
• cities lose essential employees
• society shuts down
• THEN property loses value
• then it can be bought cheaply again
• and also rented for a low price, because the tax on the low value property is also low

Let’s go people!

When you lament the loss of ready and experienced volunteers, what we lack are people who’ve learned at the side of truly talented people

What I’m actually lamenting isn’t the lack of experienced volunteers.

I’m lamenting the fact that the groups in need lack the awareness that nobody is teaching the stuff they need and that they should do it themselves.

E.g. https://kernelnewbies.org/ I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned them. Their idea of “outreach” is to open the door and wait for people to fall in. They have no teaching material, they have no recommendations. I’m recognizing that there is something happening that is in my interest and I personally would put in the time to learn whatever is necessary to get to the level that is required to seriously touch that code. I just literally don’t know where to start and have no point to connect. There is a https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelMentors mentors program. Not only is their only point of contact a mailing list, if you follow the link, you will find that the mailing list doesn’t actually exist.

A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it’s still the same concept.

E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)

Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you’re tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

People have tried to run economies with it and that… failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it’s not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That’s their entire purpose. We’re just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don’t have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they’re using different systems that have to be maintained.

And the reason I’m writing it here, is that people don’t know about it. Therefore they don’t demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don’t have it.

I’m not saying anything new.

It’s the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we’re just missing one or two last steps.

Yeah, except I’m on your side, and that kind of protest is obviously not getting it done.

Because it’s what has been tried for decades and the problem is still there.

Having this problem can also be managed by going through the loop. If you original goal was “calculate stuff to prevent bad things”, and you can’t do it because you’re choosing too much accuracy, you can experiment with the accuracy until you find a good middle ground.

We can use super detailed FEM, CFD what not sophisticated science, but sometimes the stuff from the 1800s is just fine.