I just like the fediverse and hope it does well.

Any pronouns

  • 3 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you… edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website’s UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you’re browsing from?

    This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia’s content moderation problems, but it doesn’t do much against that that wouldn’t also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others’ pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you’d have to make a new account to edit things.

    I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you’d know that all the options were wikis that haven’t been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki’s admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

    I don’t know. I’m happy this exists. I think it’s interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.










  • Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

    I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.



  • This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

    If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

    Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.






  • I tried out Lemmy because I wanted to support the protests against Reddit corporation, then I found I like the topic-based format a lot more than the person-based format most sites use. Tried out Mastodon to support having a good Twitter alternative back during the musk takeover, didn’t like it as much and stopped posting there.

    In general I’m excited about federated social spaces, since they allow for better moderation and less enshittification than the walled gardens that populate Web 2.0. If more Fediverse social media sites come around that start gaining genuine traction, then I’ll use them just because they’ll make me feel excited for the future.

    I’ve also used Tumblr because my favorite youtuber recommended it, and I liked the posts that got screenshotted off of it, and I stuck around because I liked learning about disability and queerness (and discovered from tumblr that I myself am asexual). I only ever lurked, though. Lemmy is the first social media platform that I’ve genuinely interacted with, unless Discord counts.




  • I don’t think that’s true. Like, yes, priming is a real thing, the mere exposure effect is real, and the advertisement industry exists for a reason, but something you don’t pay attention to is unlikely to stick with you; the danger in algorithms is much more how they influence your emotions and your consumption patterns than how they inject your brain with unwanted thoughts