It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.

There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.

People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.

Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.

Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.

Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

What they’ve done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.

In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it’s 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We’ve seen this story play out too many times to assume there’s nothing to worry about.

So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That’s not irrational.

It’s the difference between a theme park and a casino. Both are legitimate forms of entertainment for many people, and both do need income to maintain their operations.

One of them charges for entry and then you enjoy the park, only paying for additional but ultimately optional things like merchandise or food. The fun ends when you decide to leave or the park closes.

The other is designed so you have to spend small amounts consistently, and it is designed in incredibly manipulative fashion, literally employing tactics that trigger addictive responses. The fun ends when you run out of money to spend, therefore compelling you to keep spending.

The people designing the theme park are designing something entertaining, the people designing the casino are perfecting a skinner box.

One is more deserving of income than the other.

Also because the install base for mobile devices is just about everyone everywhere, and yes, a fair amount of people, particularly young people, would much rather play something on their phone than a PC or even console.

The difference in potential customer base is orders of magnitude larger.

Click reader view and refresh, without leaving reader view.

Right but you could at least be reasonably sure it wouldn’t be outright spied on from the person you’re sending it to. Now it’s almost a guarantee.

Like if I sent something to a friend of mine, I could be fairly certain it wouldn’t end up in the wrong hands unless they got compromised or did something stupid. I could trust their competence.

Now everyone that isn’t actively managing their own windows installation is absolutely compromised, as a rule. Like I can’t just send an email to my mom anymore, from now on its always my Mom and Copilot.

Yes, and that’s a valid concern, but there’s no good answer here. That’s why it’s such a problem. From now on, one of the most widely used operating systems in the world is going to be harvesting data from any and everything that appears on it. Meaning any software you use to send any form of electronic communication, if a Windows computer opens it, and the user either hasn’t bothered or doesn’t know how to disable recall, your information has been harvested by Microsoft.

There’s just no way to limit or avoid this. We need regulation.

I feel like I’ve been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site’s growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don’t have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn’t help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

It’s legitimately embarrassing how many people can’t seem to grasp that this isn’t the “fuck you” they think it is.

They aren’t shocked or upset, they’re not panicking because you left, because it’s all the same to them either way. You either access the site while blocking the ads and they get no income from your views, or you go away and they don’t get income from your views. Exactly nothing has changed for them except now they don’t have you pulling bandwidth.

The point is not to get YOU to turn your ad blocker off, the point is it will get SOME people to turn it off who aren’t you. If you’re not willing to turn it off, then what you do matters very little because they appreciate there’s no way they’re getting income from you ever.

It’s got the same energy as “You expect me to pay admission to enter this theme park? Well now I’m not going in, don’t you feel stupid?”

Moreover, they’re going to want an emulator that can be managed alongside the rest of the museum software.

That’s like saying what’s the point of the air and space museum if they’re not actually flying the planes.

They’re not going to use the original hardware and put wear on them. That’s a standard part of archiving.

Just for the record, this is exactly what any museum would do, because they’re not going to actually run anything on the original hardware. Those systems are part of the collection, and it behooves a museum to not put any wear on them.

Also because emulators can be managed remotely.

Secure from what exactly? You need to have a threat model here.

Which is funny, because developers use “secure” like this all the time as a way of scaring users into compliance for any changes they implement. If they voiced aloud what the actual threat was, they’d have to admit that often its the user’s freedom they’re afraid of. The user may do something stupid, therefore their ability to do it is dangerous for everyone.

They’d remove the front door on your home and call it more secure, all because some people don’t lock it.

Ever go hiking?

On a trail, where you are not subjected to anybody else’s noise for more than a second as they pass you by?

Skiing?

You’re skiing down a slope and a person is skiing next to you with a Bluetooth speaker?

Sit in a park?

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Maybe it’s hard to conceive of for some, but the world shouldn’t be shielded by headphones.

You’re right, it’s already shielded by air. The air that you can put between yourself and the other person.

The point was regardless of whatever they’re doing, you are only as subject to their poor behavior as you choose to be.

If you’re not going to do something about it (and please tell me what you would actually do about this beyond complaining on the internet), then your only other choice is mitigation, which involves just keeping headphones with you to block out other people’s noise or learn to find more peaceful spaces.

It’s normalized because it’s not a serious problem, it’s a minor, and extremely temporary annoyance the vast majority of the time.

Right, but they were suggesting it should be silenced at all times, by default, even for the very first notification.

Well they should silence it at that point because obviously they’re paying enough attention to it and expecting responses, so they should be waiting for the vibrate if not looking at it directly.

But people don’t need to have their phone silenced at all times while in public, they just need to be attentive enough to answer and silence it. I frequently don’t even feel the vibration.