Hummm… Maybe I could find some videos showing some class warfare. Let me see… Found some tangential ones.

The Reason You’re Poor (It’s more than just taxes)

Welfare: For them, but not for you!(How YOU Subsidize Everything)

America’s Unemployment Problem

Landlord arguments suck (Debunking Arguments Landlords Use to Justify Their Existence)

This is what could find in a short period of time. Hope it helps? You should defensively read up on class struggle.

I could spend an hour writing a long winded explanation of why capitalists “earn” their wealth through wage theft… but Comrade Hakim already made a video that explains this concept pretty well so here.

You are severally over-estimating the computer skills of the general population. Here is some data on that.

Comrade Hakim made a great video explaining the origins of the term and exploring how it is used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcJ5NrJtQ8g

They are an actually crypto-fascist instance judging by the events the preceded our defederation with them

Crypto-fascists?! The hell did I miss?

“Yes, the USSR performed atrocities, but the fact that the west has as well excuses that.”

I don’t think that’s what Kieselguhr was trying to say.

As I see it, they are simply pointing out that, when ever the USSR does something bad the west are quick to let you know all about it and how EVIL the USSR is, but when the west does something bad or worst, they don’t seem so eager to let you know about it. It’s not that the west did something bad, it’s that they usually don’t tell you anything about it, but at happy to show the atrocities the others have committed.

But I’m not them so I guess we could ask them to clarify.

Even a big centralized fediverse server is better than yet another walled garden they can’t easily migrate off of.

No it’s not. If a single server holds a critical amount of the fediverse’s content, they can enshitify.

The reason why the fediverse is resilient to enshitification is due to the fact that it makes migration less painful: If you want to abandon Xitter, which is centralized, you will be unable to access Xitter’s content, which is why it took so long for people to abandon it; but if you want to abandon… let’s say… mastodon.world, you can just make an account on another instance and still access the same content. For enshitification to occur, user’s must be locked in, the federation stops that.

However, this system has one major vulnerability which can completely subvert the fediverse’s ability to resist enshitification: centralization of content. If one instance holds a critical amount of content, they can pull up the drawbridge, that is, de-federate from all other instances. You might think this would upset the users, but it wouldn’t. Most wouldn’t know what federation is, all of mainstream is on the default instance, only the computer nerds are on other instances, so if suddenly, the default instance de-federated from everyone else, and thus becomeing a walled garden just like Xitter, few would notice and fewer would care. And now the default instance is centralized just like Xitter and the enshitification cycle repeats.

If you want an example of this look no further than Gmail. More or less 95% all emails are Gmail. If Gmail de-federates from your instance, you are removed; that means Google can basically dictate what other instances are and aren’t allowed to do. If you do something Gmail doesn’t like, they can de-federate and you instance is now basically useless, since you can’t email 95% of people. Gmail could easily kill Proton Mail by de-federating.

Not a solution. Defeats the point of decentralisation, putting most (like 90%+) users in one instance. Big instance is sold to Venture Capital Firm because a bunch of amateur moderators call moderate the whole of twitter… and just like that enshitification shall commence.

Perhaps… But how exactly?

What do I think? I think it’s normal to have wallpapers that aren’t related to the kernel of you OS and I’m struggling to make sense of how people setting their wallpaper to something they like could possibly be a problem.

For example, I don’t use Gmail and I run my own personal Mastodon instance using masto.host, this doesn’t stop me communicating with people on Gmail or major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social.

I mentioned Gmail because, when a single instances holds something like 95% of the users, that gives them a lot of power. If Gmail decided to de-federate from you… you are kinda screwed. That’s my concern. Although, as you said, that is still better than a fully centralized platform.

Sorry for the long, poorly organized response. I just had a bunch of thoughts on this that I wanted to get of my head

The thing I have noticed is that the fediverse does not have an elevator pitch. It is really hard to explain things in simple terms.

Usually, when just simply trying to make an account, people expect to simply go to a website, create account and done, you are in.

While in the fediverse it is like:

• First select an instance!

And the user is like:

• What is “instance”…?

And them they get lectured for 10+ minutes over some tech concepts that look alien to them.

• This raises the question: “Why is [fediverse platform] like this? Why so complicated? Why can’t it just be like every other platform? Go to site, log in. Simple. What’s that all “Federation” for?”

And now they will have to receive another 10+ minute long lecture on the flaws of the centralized social media.

20+ minutes worth of lecture, just so they can use a social media platform. If they hear they whole lecture, and understand it, they will probably give the fediverse a try, but if they don’t because they got overwhelmed with information from your lectures they won’t even try.

And all of this and I still haven’t explained a single feature of the platform itself.

We need to come up with an elevator pitch that gives people some clue of what federation is.

I know what some might be thinking: “Why do they need to know what federation is?” Well yes, I could just say, go to [big Mastodon instance here] and create an account. Cool, they are using Mastodon.

But inevitably, this will happen: Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”. And now they come to me for tech support (because I was the one who introduced them to mastodon), and I end up having to explain federation anyways.

Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.

Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:

No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.

Now that I’m writing this I’m realizing that this seems to be an UI problem: The instances look to similar to be immediately recognizable as distinct and that’s confusing. Therefore we should work towards ensuring that instance, or at least the big ones, have a distinct appearance, their own “brand”, so they can be seen as distinct so that the example scenario I showed earlier doesn’t happen.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things… Maybe it’s as easy as: “It kinda works like email. On email, you can go to a number of different sites, like gmail and outlook and send mail to anyone. Mastodon is also like that, there are many websites, each one with their own rules and mod teams. You can join any of them and see post from people from the other sites.”

But even this explanation has a problem: It does not explain de-federation. If they end up trying to follow someone who is on an instance their main instance as de-federated, they won’t be able to find them and they won’t know why. Most are not familiar with email de-federation as most only ever need to interact with the big instances which all federate with each other.

I guess my problem is that, by simplifying things so that non-tech people can understand, they will end up running into the intricacies of federation and not know what to do.

Also, if people don’t understand federation, we will end up with a Gmail situation: Everybody is on the same one instance. Understanding the need for this separation of Mastodon into different instances can be hard. If we simply tell people to go to the big instance, that’s what they will do. And then we end up with Gmail.

Federation and separation into smaller communities is a good thing, but it can hard to explain how and why.

I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.

The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.

perhaps the federated nature of Mastodon could be its greatest strength as well.

I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.

The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.

One of the reasons why I like Mastodon is precisely because I want to interact with more of a niche community on a federated platform.

I agree. Mastodon being niche isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

basically immediately sold out to crypto people.

Wait what? I know very little about BlueSky and even less about the people behind it, so I didn’t know that. Could you send me a link to more info?

Really? I didn’t know that! What is it called? How can I use it?

Philosophy is fine and all but we can’t forget that from a practical standpoint, all this philosophizing is useless. We can’t live our day to day lives operating under the belief that the material world doesn’t exist and using The Problem Of Knowledge as a way to dismiss empirical evidence by stating that we can’t be sure if the material world even exist is impractical and useless. Remember: Philosophy is completely useless. The only value you will find in it is the development of critical thinking skills.

Just imagine if a murdered caught red handed could get away scoot free by just saying “Hey, you can prove the material world exist, therefore you can prove the victim ever existed!”

It’s the problem of knowledge all over again. Something which philosophers have been debating for centuries. But I highly doubt you have studied any of it.

That whole thing of “facts are just opinions” is nothing more than the devaluing of empirical evidence and turning observable facts into a matter of opinion, turning any and all political discussion into a shouting match where nothing ever comes of it because “it’s just my opinion”. This propaganda tactic is called “The Fire hose of Falsehood”.

I could go on and on about the nature of knowledge and the evolution of science, but I highly doubt you would care as you do not seem to know even the most basic things about The Problem of Knowledge and choose to go the self-contradictory skeptic route of “Knowledge doesn’t exist”.

Edit: I would just like to add that just because our sense are 100% reliable that doesn’t mean that everything is false.

Reminder that neutrality and compromise isn’t always a good thing.

Huh, how does the action of one political party dictate what a global movement want?

Do you even know what the terms “Left” and “Right” mean in this context? (No, they are not a synonim of “Democrat” and “Republican” party of this one country)

Also since when was Biden on the left?