SirNuke

Supervisor cats would also like to remind you to replace the flapper if you don't know how old it is.

While I would also pump the brakes a bit on any particular effort, the Biden administration is pushing back against the dominate thinking of "antitrust bad" that emerged in the 70s. I believe he's made a lot of appointments reflecting that, which hasn't happened since the Carter administration.

What kicked off that shift? Robert Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, which is yes that Robert Bork. I honestly think people could use more knowledge about the sausage is made when it comes to government.

I agree with your point. Metaface is the most hilariously transparently bad actor on the internet. That well is so poisoned there's no olive branches that will save their reputation. The incentives for these companies are clear and produce a consistent pattern: build something useful and start building walls around it so you can exploit whatever you've built to produce the most shareholder returns. Any instance that cooperates with a Bookmeta instance is willfully ignorant how it will end, even if MaceTook truly does not have malicious plans at the start.

But beyond the other responses, I think it's worth thinking deeper on this. It's easy to reduce it to "It's simple. We kill the Zuckerberg."

There have always been bad actors, and will always be bad actors. There are probably bad actors in the room with us right now. If this whole threadiverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able robustly handle them even when the bad actors can bring a lot of resources to bear.

Also the real fun happens when TheMeta.Com starts proposing changes to ActivityPub. Even if the changes are purely technical and make perfect sense there's going to be slapfights.

I'm inclined to say I'm not a fan of my idea on a philosophical level, but we can't ignore the practical considerations here either. Endlessly banning spam instances is not going to be fun and takes away time and effort on the admin's part that could be better spent on useful things. A site clogged by spam is also not going to be useful, in which case it doesn't matter how well you adhered to your principles.

These interests are competing, but I think there's a compromise to be found. I'm going to suggest rate limiting for new instances until they've produced a certain amount of content (so say until they've produced X comments+links with a minimum Y days), plus a system that automagically puts new instances in the timeout box if enough users report their content. Admins can manually skip the warm up period for new instances, and also review the timeout box to see if it's actually a concern.

Seems like manually approving new instances before they are allowed to push content to Kbin would be a good idea. Shouldn't gatekeep but blindly accepting them means playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.

I doubt this is really from spez. It's the investors who've poured money into Reddit as they've dicked around for 15 years. But now money is expensive. Personally I think they are looking to tap into the sweet, sweet VC money being pumped into LLMs (for which Reddit's API is prime training material), which might go down worse than "hey we're going to not so discretely kill the apps you all have built and love!"

So spez is an idiot, but replacing him wouldn't change things.

On a side note, my god was Digg's Kevin Rose also an idiot back in the day, but he was such a far better class of idiot. He did care about the site, even if he was hilariously incapable of running it. You just don't appreciate these things until they're over.

God I hope they are dumb enough to follow through with this. Going to be hilarious when a subreddit votes out a Reddit employee who was installed as a mod.

The luster on this fact isn't what it used to be, but Tesla uses Godot for visualization. I feel like they also at least used to use it for some UI work as well.

I think this is an important consideration. What should be done different to mitigate toxicity?

Honestly it's exciting to be able to ask these sorts of questions and potentially be able to act on it. I'm inclined to say:

1. There's an optimal size to subreddits. Small subreddits can be toxic, large ones are unless they have ultra strict moderation (so basically askhistorians).
2. Massed users from other subreddits can easily overwhelm and torpedo communities, even ones larger than themselves if coordinated enough.
3. There aren't any sort of feedback mechanisms or checks on moderators.

Instability now because software issues/immaturity, but chaos long term because instances get to decide how to do things. Is any of this going to work? If you like chaos in your internet browsing website interaction experience you've found the right place.

There's an idea of "building a plane as we're flying it." Creating something where you inherently do not know what it'll look like or even if it'll work. The only thing that everyone agrees on is hitting the ground is bad.

The Fediverse is like a squadron of incomplete planes flying together. Each plane has webcams for users in other planes, if they want them. Sometimes planes will veer off and form their own squadron. Sometimes long lost planes will fly back and rejoin. Each plane has people simply enjoying the ride, and others trying to figure out what they've build and what's next and whether the ground is getting bigger in the window. Sometimes anger at the pilots boils over into people grabbing parachutes and jumping off. Some go to other planes, some try to build their own plane where they can put their ideas for how to fly into practice.

We don't have established theories how to administrate sites, which I believe is because we don't really know how to grant and check power IRL. Experience is clear moderating/administrating internet sites requires a lot of leeway, but that leeway will eventually trend towards abuse. Modern platforms are good at suppressing user revolts, which has lead to a lot of stagnation on the internet.

Instead each Fediverse instance gets to decide for themselves how to run things; including what other instances to interact with and on what terms. Users in turn get to decide what instances work best for them. An instance that believes downvotes are harmful can ignore them. An instance that believes downvotes are important can give them extra weight. Which one makes more sense? Let's find out!

This leads to my Grand Unified Theory of Good and Deep Link Aggregation and Discussion (GUTGooDLAD): this is about finding your Cool Kids and hanging out with them. You'll know when you are accepted as a Cool Kid, but it'll be the communities with the spiciest shitposts, cutest cat pictures, and of course the most interesting links and comments.

So go forth and find your Cool Kids, cool kid. And if you can't find them, build the communities where your Cool Kids will find you.

Are you still using it and happy with it? I've been increasingly using single purpose dev VMs in a server, and a declarative configuration system would make the process of spinning them up faster and more robust. My current shell script system is clunky, and I've been looking at Ansible.