Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

I’ll inconveniently only have it online when I’m at home

So this is like a dial-up website where you have to hope that the webmaster’s in?

Sure. But social media is becoming a nightmare. It’s literally destroying democracy. As things stand, I’m not even convinced the fediversal version is an improvement. And if it’s not, then personally I don’t care how many people are pushed away. In as far as technical fixes are possible to the myriad problems of social media, I believe these might be a couple of them. That’s all I’m saying.

Sure. But in theory, with (slightly) better resources, this would be my solution.

On posting, crawl the link and cache its content. Compare with quote on the basis of some generous threshold of similarity.

do I just want to shit on ai in the comments

Laudable honesty. The problem is that other people have to read the shit.

But to vote without engaging with the actual content is just to “sort” posts based on feelings. Who cares?

It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article

This is the root problem. Upvoting and downvoting headlines on the basis of vibes. It adds zero value. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not least the upvoters and (especially) downvoters themselves, who get nothing out of it but the tiniest of vacuous dopamine hits. It’s the original sin of social media.

My preferred solutions:

• no voting at all without a registered click on the linked article
• no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article

Deep-seated problems call for radical solutions. Both of these are technically feasible.

Some interesting thoughts - and questions - here. Seems you posted them in the wrong place, given the paltry response. Or possibly at the wrong time (i.e. 6 hours after the herd had moved on, a perennial problem with social media).

It isn’t based in XML, and modern devs don’t want to use XML. As I’m not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

XML is space-inefficient with lots of redundancy, and therefore considered to be ugly. Coders tend to have tidy minds so these things take on an importance that they don’t really merit. It’s also just fashion: markup, like XML and HTML, is a thing of the 90s, so using them is the coder equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants.

This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

A nuanced take in response to casually lobbed accusations of Nazism? How come you haven’t been banned?

Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it’s not worth the trouble. If you’ve had a difference experience then good for you.

Try expressing a centrist or - heaven forbid (I haven’t actually tried this one) moderate conservative - position on a hot-button subject and see if you still feel that way.

Just don’t try to debate politics unless you already subscribe to the prevailing groupthink. In fairness, that’s true of any social-media forum, and the corporate ones have other problems on top.

Pretty convincing arguments. Thanx.

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

I generally agree but I still feel it’s important to keep some perspective. Bluesky is not the solution but it’s definitely progress compared to existing corporate platforms (because it has real fundamental differences - several articles posted here went into detail about this).

IMO the best argument against Bluesky is that it will suck up the oxygen for other, better, solutions. That’s a fair theory but it seems to me that there’s plenty of market share to go round right now. Everyone is still on the evil corporate platforms.

RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Agree, I use it every day.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Sure, images and video are the exception. But I figure that a redshift app can only help so much when a video suddenly cuts to a picture of a white sky. That’s really another problem: choppy contrast. Only solution is to increase ambient light behind the screen.

Use dark mode at night and you won’t need Redshift any more. It’s only relevant for white screens.

PS: This IS in fact the optimal solution - if not for you then for others. I used Redshift for years, suffering its periodic breakages, babysitting the timezone issue, and it was worth it, because a retina-searing reddish-white screen is better than a retina-searing whitish-white screen. But a dark screen is SO much better for my eyes than either of those. I can’t believe I waited so many years to do that and I’m never going back.