Re: [tlug] cobalt cube / tech topics

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

lain. writes:

 > Then I look up reasons to ban servers on primarily leftist/Marxist
 > instances,

Glutton for punishment, aren't you?  I'm pretty much as progressive as
(conventionally-trained) economists come, but a lot of left-wing
political economy makes as much sense as the MAGA version does, which
is to say "OK, now I know you are REALLY GOOD at lying to yourself".

 > Because the whole purpose of Fediverse becoming a thing was to
 > communicate freely with one other, and those instances want
 > anything but that, they just want a self hosted version of the porn
 > site formerly known as Twitter (so an echo chamber), rather than a
 > free communication system.

You have that exactly backward.  The people who created the Fediverse
technology (activity pubsub or whatever it's called) indeed intended a
distributed network enabling unfettered communication that can't be
interdicted by a monopolist (which was my point in the first place,
but we've already digressed).

But the Fediverse became a "thing" because it's extremely costly to
curate a Xitty feed that gets the information and community you want
but keeps the clout or click chasers, 4chan asshats, bluechecks, and
crypto scammers at bay.  (Eg, I'm about to give up.)  So people wanted
to close the gates to traffic flows that are mostly sewage.  I'm sure
quite a few sites go overboard with that.

You can call that a "padded-room echo chamber" if you like (and you
would mostly not be wrong), but it's what most people want.  In fact
an awful lot of people are actually mostly happy with Threads or Blue
Sky, as saccharine and technically backward as they still are.

 > Some being as ridiculous as banning by association.
 > Like, "banned instance A for federating with instance B", what if
 > instance A doesn't even know what instance B is, or doesn't care?

I'm curious, what loss is that to you or me?  Is there valuable,
interesting content on these "ridiculously administered" hosts?  My
feeling is that the demise of Twitter has really hurt the flow of
news-ish information globally, and there's no good substitute.  I'm
even considering subscribing to the NYT. :-)  At least, neither the
Fediverse nor Bluesky have been good substitutes for pre-Musk Twitter.

Steve