this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
974 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
59653 readers
4186 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn't the holy grail you think it is.
Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.
If this sounds familiar, it's awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.
Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn't have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can't move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.
I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.
I'm not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.
Oh, but mastodon doesn't have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch
The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.
Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.
Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn't display the posts in the right orders, by example.
You're right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, "feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests". Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.
Because it's hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm
I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.
You friended and followed things, and then you'd see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as "the algorithm" took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.
Fuck the magical algorithm that's tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).