Sure, if a big instance started to dominate the fediverse it would be a form of centralization. However, the protocol being designed with federation in mind makes it much easier for people to migrate from that instance if it becomes a bad actor.

Going back to the original point though, I do think that fediverse could be marketed better in a way that would appeal to more people. Since we agree that federation is a desirable feature, the focus should be on figuring out how to explain it to people in a sensible way.

Sure, but all of this basically comes down to poor marketing. It’s not an inherent problem with the technology or with the concept of federation.

It shouldn’t be surprising either given that Mastodon is a niche platform developed largely as a volunteer effort. The reason people advocating Mastodon tend to focus on stuff like on the flaws of the centralized social media is because that’s what matters to them. We see pretty much the same thing happening with Linux, and many other open source projects.

This is the point I was making above, BlueSky has a professional marketing team that understands how to sell their product to the general public. That’s the main reason BlueSky is gaining users at a faster rate.

Regarding the Gmail problem, it’s true that we could end up with one major instance most people are on. I don’t see that as a huge issue in practice since you can still choose use different instances. That’s a fundamentally better situation to be in.

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.

What I’m saying is that the amount of friction this adds is completely blown out of proportion. It’s just not that hard, and people acting like it’s a huge barrier are not being serious. If this was the case email would’ve never taken off. The fact that we’re at the point where it’s hard to imagine a regular user going outside a walled corporate garden is really the problem here.

Unfortunately people aren’t as informed and most really just don’t care.

The flip side is that we shouldn’t care too much either. Fediverse already has millions of users, and it can just keep growing organically at its own pace.

I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that federation is a significant obstacle in practice. Email is a great example of a federated platform that even the least tech literate people are able to use just fine. It could be argued that Mastodon onboarding process could be smoother, but that’s not an inherent problem with it being federated.

In my view, the simplest answer is that BlueSky has much better marketing because it has a ton of money behind it and it’s been promoted by Dorsey whom people knew from Twitter. So, when people started abandoning Twitter, they naturally went to the next platform he was promoting.

I’d also argue that there is a big advantage to having smaller communities of users that focus on specific topics of interest and can federate with each other. In my experience, this creates more engaging and friendlier environment than having all the users on the same server. Growth for the sake of growth is largely meaningless.

Absolutely, and there’s actually been a substantial amount of research on the subject as well. The way we perceive time is a product of our emotional state, and the environment.

Yet, the fact remains that people did get comfortable with email, and even the least tech illiterate people are able to use it.

That’s a recent phenomenon though, and it’s effectively been forced on people by the largest email provider making it difficult to use others. My original point was that people didn’t find it confusing to register for different mail providers when that was easy to do.

You don’t have to make an informed decision. Signing up for an instance isn’t a blood pact. If you find the instance you singed up for isn’t to your liking, You can easily migrate your account to another. Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587

Mastodon being federated is absolutely not a flaw. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place. The fact that people got used to using centralized platforms is an aberration and this needs to be actively fought against.

How is picking a Mastodon server different from signing up for email, finding a discord server, signing up to follow channels on youtube, and so on. Somehow people have no problems figuring those things out, but when it comes to Mastodon this is constantly brought up like some insurmountable challenge.

Indeed, and I’d argue most of actual useful industry exists outside the west at this point.

I use Lemmy and Mastodon about equally. I find I like Lemmy for discussions, while Mastodon is good for news just because there are a lot more users overall, and you can follow different news feeds on it.

UBI is the wrong solution in general in my opinion. The proper approach is to have universal basic services. People should have access to all the basic needs provided unconditionally. I think it will be interesting to see how China will handle automation as it will definitively show whether it is moving towards communism or not. In a capitalist society, rapid automation would mean mass unemployment and economic strife. However, in a socialist society automation can simply translate into having a shorter work week.

If you read the article, you’ll see that these are being used in combination with traditional automation. The advantage of humanoid robots is versatility and ability to work in spaces designed for humans. As a side note, I always find it amusing how people always assume that nobody bothered to think of these obvious arguments before going ahead and building these robots.

This indeed would be a big problem in a capitalist society where people have to work for the sake of working.

There’s some truth to that, but realistically speaking I think the window of opportunity on that has closed now. The US has lost every one of their own war games against China in South China Sea. So, if China decided to take military action there’s little the US can do short of starting a nuclear war.

TSMC doesn’t care about preserving anything. The chips being made in Taiwan is their ace card in getting western support. If they ever started making cutting edge fabs elsewhere then their importance to the west would fizzle.

unfortunately looks that way

yeah sadly

Every society is three hot meals away from chaos.