tronk

Conveniently, someone just asked for a Reddit alternative in /r/AlternativeTo. They would probably like to hear about this or something 😉

This is a great space for FLOSS and federated software to fulfill a need.

What I mean is that Tinder and otherwise for-profit software uses drop feeds, so they deliberately give you only a bit of what you like in your feeds. How do they know what you like? The same way Facebook (via Facebook.com, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and all other for-profit social media companies do: they collect absurd amounts of data from you based on your behavior on the platforms. They then build predictive models to know what to show you, when to notify you, how to ask for money in the forms of "boosts" or "unlimited superlikes". For example, "you found some attractive people today but didn't kick it off with anyone just yet? Well, come back! Tomorrow we'll send you a notification telling you someone liked you! Oh, you could also just boost your profile by paying."

In effect, this keeps you on the verge of finding someone you would really kick off with quickly. This doesn't have to be the case at all given what we know of how humans develop relationships and how algorithms can be used to arrive at clear-cut goals.

So FLOSS and federated software has the opportunity to actually define those algorithms in such a way as to satisfy people, either in a hookup-y sense or a relationship sense. That incentive, and not the one to maximize engagement and profits, is what could make stuff like Alovoa flourish.

I do think any FLOSS (and federated) dating app should leverage this as a marketing point: people are really kicking it off quickly.

“who died in 1985 of intestinal disease before taking office as Brazil’s first democratically elected leader”

So the U.S. killed Tancredo in favor of Lula?

Knowing America's history of meddling in Latin American politics, this wouldn't surprise me. However, why would the U.S. want a working-class and clearly leftist politician like Lula in power in the middle of the Cold War? Especially since this president advocated for agrarian reform, the very same policy that just 30 years earlier got Guatemala on the U.S.'s sight.

More broadly, by the time Tancredo was elected, the U.S. had spent the last ~30 years supporting rightist military dictatorships in Latin America, of which arguably the most infamous were Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina. These were set up to protect American interests.

And so a question arises, how could a leftist president represent American interests in the middle of the Cold War?

But perhaps more pragmatically, Lula supported Tancredo in the 1985 elections. I don't know the exact reasons why, but it's not hard to imagine that it has to do with the fact that Tancredo was a social democrat.

This doesn't exclude the possibility of conflict, which is why I'm asking both (1) why Lula would want to kill Tancredo and (2) why Lula would be of interest to the U.S..

Interesting. I didn’t know this. How did America make Lula president?

I agree that maybe there's something that could be done.

Fact checking is tricky

As to fact-checking, I'm not really sure what to do. On one hand I worry the 'reputation' system would be too restrictive. On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven't seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn't like to see) I'd hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.

Nudging cognition and affect is as well, but seems more viable

But there is something that could be done regarding the way in which the Lemmy interface nudges our thoughts and feelings. The paradigmatic example in the Fediverse is Eunomia. I wonder (and don't doubt we could find) literature on these nudges to improve interactions.

The goal could be to avoid finger-pointing as well as aggression, and to incentivize thought/understanding, kindness, and, in general, positive emotions so that we're able to be both flexible and critical. Note that the positive emotions part is not me being hippy-dippy; by now it's well established that positive emotions enhance cognition and permit a much broader set of automatic thinking habits than negative emotions. In particular, negative emotions have no desirable characteristics that positive emotions can't deliver (make sure you read p.110 ¶2 sentences 4 and 5).

It would be great if we can find a way of changing interfaces in such a way as to nudge us towards positive emotions and critical thinking.

But until the heavy lifting for that is done (something that, once I feel comfortable with my CS training, I could attempt), I wonder if the minimal Democratic manifesto could be done with tricky situations like these in mind. In other words, make an explicit, clear, and widespread expectation that we're here to share, understand critically, and interact kindly.

This is honest of you and a fair point: federation can sometimes be invisible. The basic idea becomes clear if you think about how you access websites. Think of Facebook. When you go to it, you type "facebook.com" in the address bar. And you go there. Notably, if you want to use Facebook, you can only go to "facebook.com". This is different with federated systems.

Federated systems make it possible to go to, for example, "fb.com", which will have its own version of Facebook, different to "facebook.com" or "facebookfed.com" or "333.com" (if someone decides to call their version that). Each one of these websites will have their own servers, their own logins (so you'd have to create different accounts), rules, and mods.

Sometimes, those websites talk to each other so that content is shared between them. That way, you can publish once in fb.com and another person can see your post in facebook.com. Other times, depending on the service and the version/instance, you'll have a sort of private Facebook.

So federation here means that there are many different servers ('instances') that run the same software. These servers talk to each other so that you can see the content of the rest of the instances, in the case of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a federated (hence the name) network of different services including Lemmy, Mastodon, and PixelFed. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the idea is to be able to share content in between all of those (someone plz correct me or explain this to me? hahahah).

Federation is also tied to certain values, like owning your own data. For example, Facebook's servers hold all of your Facebook data. But, in the case of Lemmy, if you were to run your own Lemmy instance in your room, you would own your data (assuming no hacks or other shenanigans). This autonomy and privacy goes along well with the values surrounding Free and Libre/Open Source Software, where anyone can copy, modify, and run their own versions of code.

So you get this synnergy of FLOSS and federation that brings a bunch of people who are pumped to share stuff on websites like Lemmy, a FLOSS and federated link aggregator!