A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

It was major human infrastructure failure.

And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.

Uh, probably the default web interface. And Masto servers still lack quite a bit of functionality found on other fedi services.

That is not moderation. Moderation involves removing bad actors from the site, not underground black lists that let you pretend the Nazis aren’t living next door.

Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?

There’s no way to fight them on platforms where they are welcomed by the platform itself. Bluesky doesn’t want to moderate its platform, so there is no fighting the Nazis there.

And we can do this all over again in a couple of years thanks to BlueSky’s refusal to moderte its service, all because internet users refuse to thi:k abput how the internet works, and peoples addictions to being told what to read.

Heaven forbid someone point out the reasons things suck and the ways we could do thibgs different, even if you know no one’s going to change.

Better to just shrug everything off and tell folks “that’s life, get used to it”, right? That does a lot of good!

It’s just absolutely bonkers that they’re using a gun game to campaign while disallowing gun use. You may as well partner with the NFL and then ban tackling, or host a Monopoly game while banning money.

No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

The price is still elastic because many people have another streaming service they can drop. But as they all raise prices, they’ll all be whittled down to just one. And then possibly none.

Locking your front door won’t keep someone out who really wants to get in.

Is that stupid, too?

Mastodon is also somewhat hostile towards new users. Significant swaths of it treat this shared public network as a small private chatroom, and get cranky when September stretches on too long.

Same for almost every book you’ve ever read, every CD you’ve ever listened to, and every movie you’ve ever watched. You owned the leaves of paper the book was printed on, or the plastic disc the music or movie was stamped into, but never the words, the songs, or the movie itself.

We’ve only ever had licenses to consume.

Not just a working test, nodeBB 4 is in beta now. We’re on the threshold

Usenet’s mostly pirated stuff now.

IRC is a shadow of its former self, but if you’re into FOSS it’s still good.

And computers have always allowed for you to write your own software. If you don’t know how to do that, though, it may as well not be an option.

This is is making those alternative stores accessible to the average user:

Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play

Technology chauvinism is unbecoming, and unhelpful, both to others, and to your own understanding of the world around you.

Why advocate for trying to stop climate disaster when you can choose to believe that you can both profit off of it and be the hero that saves humanity from it, both at the same time?

There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

That’s the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn’t actually work.

But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.

Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F “X”.

See that it’s never going to make money, go public, hand the keys over to someone else, and then try again with a wallet full of cash and a reputation for making billion dollar businesses.

This can’t be a new thing. This was one of the conditions Nintendo announced when they dropped their stupid “register with us to be allowed to do lets plays” thing.

Oh, and it’s not just Nintendo. All of the big publishers believe they own your videos that use their games. I’ve been involved in discussions with people personally who were trying to figure out how to demand licensing fees from YouTubers.

This is goingnto get worse before it gets better. This has been a traffic jam caused by everyone waiting for somebody to go first. Nintendo is just the one who has volunteered to be the first mover.