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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

    Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

    Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

    Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?









  • Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

    If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

    • statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it

    • value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.

    • actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

    With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

    Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.


  • I feel like we need different ways to share and learn things about harmful posts and comments. Like, sure maybe your server aggregates the posts, and because you own the server you can remove or edit things if you really want to. But I should be able to say “this is objectively wrong in a dangerous way, and here’s proof” in a side channel that the server owner can’t block.

    And for it to have any point at all, clients should be able to subscribe to feeds. Like, a science educator I respect can say “I trust this foundation that fights harmful disinformation” and I should be able to click a button and see their stuff. Without the server owner banning me for some weird reason.