thanks, I should have provided that link.

you’re welcome!

Blocking a somewhat fluctuating list of 25k+ instances is still considerably harder than blocking a pretty stable infrastructure of a single major social media platform.

I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.

At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can’t simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.

Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to “convince it” to take a thing down.

The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (mastodon.social is way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.

What absolute bull. 🤦

fixed again. jeebus.

Updated with a new link from EBU.

I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.

Good to hear.

They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.

Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.

This Tech Won’t Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.

Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps “whatever Mastodon is doing”. That’s problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.

I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That’s fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.

Oh no! The browser that forked the browser that a browser made by the largest ad vendor in the world is based on in order to be able to serve different ads is legally threatening a browser that forked it in order to remove said ads?

Did I get this right?

Actually, if we’re nit-picking, it means “Personal Computer”, but the colloquial meaning has shifted somewhat since the good old IBM times to first mean desktop computers (as opposed to laptops), and then to mean non-Apple computers (including laptops), which for most people means “a computer that runs Windows.”

Which is the basis of my heavy sigh.

I don’t think it is anymore.

Meanwhile, Threadiverse is on the verge of reaching 100k active monthly accounts.

Of course, the numbers are incomparable. But this whole thing made Threadiverse into a viable space for a lot of people. Reddit app developers are starting to develop apps for Lemmy/Kbin. Dozens of new instances got set up. The whole space is bigger, more resilient, and leaps and bounds more vibrant than it was in May and before (I’ve been here for years).

A lot of people will come back to Reddit. But a lot of people will also remain here. And this space will be there the next time Reddit craps the bed, better prepared to take the influx.

Eh just what I came here for, glorified Markov-chain spam vaguely about torrents. 🙄

The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. T

I think that’s taking it too far and jumping to conclusions. I cannot think of a single instance of an instance admin inflating their numbers with bot accounts or in any other artificial way, and I’ve been on fedi before it was called fedi.

This is almost certainly external bad actors taking advantage of captcha-less open signups.

If only there was some kind of a protocol, widely supported, that would allow publishers to push content to their readers directly. Readers could “subscribe” to (say) “channels”, which would get populated with items published by publishers.

It could be a really simple method of sindication! I even saw a nice icon that I think would work well for it:

The concept of copyright did not exist for most of human history. The current shape of copyright and paying for culture is antiquated and puts creators at a disadvantage.

Instead of pondering if anyone can stop “digital piracy”, we should be pondering how to reform the copyright regime such that sharing culture is not considered “piracy”, and such that artists get paid. Rip out the middle-men.

The problem with AI is the problem with capitalism.

Hiper-capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, who had been pushing cryptocurrencies for a long while and still seems to be doing so, have vested interests in generating the AI-hype.

🥳