• 16 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2022

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  • Servers do not “follow” servers. Servers may allow federation with other servers (utilizing either white or black listing based on specific configuration) but do not make requests to a server unless they have a user who has followed a user on that server.

    The word “user” here can refer to several different types of entities including your user account, a peertube channel or a lemmy community.

    If you follow a peertube channel then it should show up in your timeline provided that your filter settings are not excluding it, say for instance by viewing the local only timeline.

    This is my layman understanding at least from social osmosis but I have never read the activity pub specs.


  • Zuckerberg frequently talks about the “pivot to mobile” which is the successful big bet that he is clearly determined to recreate the conditions of. The article calls VR his idea of the next frontier but I think what he really is looking for is the next gold rush. Zuckerberg didn’t give marching orders but the only reason anyone was willing to walk out into the desert was because someone with a high profile was saying there’s gold out there.

    Meta was intended to be a platform on which the objectionable stuff would be built or as the saying goes in a gold rush sell pickaxes. But in a wasteland the more apt metaphor is the one selling weapons while considering themself above the fray.

    It is true that social media reflects our own society. However social media is much more than a mirror, it is both an engine that actively shapes society molding it into a more profitable one and itself a product of that society which already was increasingly atomized and profit driven.

    It’s not enough to just ignore or silo the indecent, we have to build our own engine that encourages people to engage positively. Commercial social media is fundamentally incapable of this as it conflicts with their profit driven motive. We can’t blame people for getting on the train to the wasteland, we need to build the train to utopia and convince people to get on it.








  • I got pay walled but I’d agree with the title alone on the basis that McKinsey and other consulting firms are often brought on as a sort of scapegoat to to come to the conclusions that the hiring firm has already made but knows will be contentious. I can easily imagine a future where layoffs and sunsettings are justified on the basis that the perfectly rational and unquestionable AI suggested it, just as it is already being used to justify blatantly racist sentencings.




  • At this stage we can’t really know what the future of it will be. My take away is that the early indicators for bluesky are not promising (ie; venture funded, leadership with bad track record, invite only, launched with the decentralization not actually implemented yet) while the AP alternatives of mastodon, plemora, calckey etc are already a living example of a decentralized network.

    Bluesky so far to me sounds more like a strategic concession to give up the minimum amount of control to users in order to maintain the overall pyramid of social media. Facebook won the competition but people have started to question the privacy implications. If bluesky is successful in convincing the masses that it resolves the privacy question then the competition is reset to which tech giant can dominate that second layer, which of course is currently operating in a manner as to give themselves the first mover advantage.

    I am far more optimistic that AP will continue to grow and improve than I am that some kind of benevolent floss implementation will succeed on that second layer of bluesky (if one ever gets the chance to compete at all).



  • It’s not a very useful ratio in general. There are four times as many Chinese citizens than American to start off with. It’s pretty normal for criminals to outnumber the police. But most importantly is the factor that Chinese hackers do not exclusively target US assets and US cyber assets are not exclusively targeted by Chinese Hackers.

    There is probably just no easy way to enumerate the number of combined public and private cyber staff necessary for a country to protect itself form all global cyber threats. This statement is just using a scary number and the name of a geopolitical rival to get funding. The funding is probably in all honesty needed but it’s a shame that the only way they can get it in this climate is through politically charged fear mongering.