• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • Ok, I’ll engage you on this one, your position at least seems internally consistent.

    Let’s play out this example - your 2 year old niece is sick, and so are you. You recently found out that she even exists - you didn’t know you had a sister until CPS told you she’s your responsibility.

    An action that risks your life could possibly save her… Let’s say a liver transplant. It has to be you, you’re her only living family member. And because of that, you’ll also be responsible for her - you can put her up for adoption when this is all over, but you’re still on the hook for the medical bills whether this works or not.

    She’s guaranteed to die if you don’t give her the transplant, and you would almost certainly recover quickly on your own.

    If you go through with the transplant, she has a slim chance to live, and an even slimmer one to have a decent quality of life.

    But in your current state, the transplant is very risky - at best you’ll see a lengthy and expensive recovery, after missing months of work you’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Complications could see you paralyzed or in lifelong pain, and it’s very possible both of you die on the table - maybe even likely.

    The doctors are telling you it’s a terrible idea to go through with this, that the risk is unacceptable and it would be a mercy to just let her pass, but they’re obligated to go through with it if you insist.

    Now, no one is stopping you from going through with it - if you want to put your life on the line for another, that’s your decision to make. You’re her guardian now, so it’s your decision if she should have to go through the pain for the chance at life, no matter how small.

    That’s all well and good - I’ve seen enough to know that death is often a mercy, but if you believe otherwise there’s not much to say

    Now, here’s my question - should the government be able to force you to attempt the transplant?

    Some of these details might seem weird, but I was trying to stick the metaphor as close as possible to a very real scenario with a dangerous pregnancy. The only difference is - the doctor is performing an action here, but withholding one with the pregnancy.

    You’re not though - pregnancy is not a lack of action. It’s an enormous commitment, especially when it’s atypical. It can even be a practically guaranteed death sentence - if the fetus implants in the fallopian tubes, it’s already not viable - at best you’re waiting for the fetus to grow big enough to rupture them, and hoping the bleed that causes doesn’t do too much damage before you can get help.

    Not to mention if a fetus dies in the womb after it gets to a certain size, it rots and leads to sepsis - unclear laws and harsh punishments have already led to situations where doctors refused care for both of these life threatening cases, and in both these cases the odds aren’t slim, they’re none. In the second the fetus was already gone… Sometimes when they induce labor the fetus isn’t even in one piece… It’s pretty grisly

    I don’t agree with your belief that a potential life is the same as a life, but let’s set that aside - I can respect that as a belief

    So… My root question to you is - Should you be able to force someone to risk their own for someone else?

    If so, how sure do you have to be that the other person will die no matter what you do before you’re released from the compulsion to put your own health on the line?

    There’s always at least some risk of pregnancy turning fatal for the mother. How much danger do you have to be in for the math to check out?

    And also, to what point should politicians with little understanding of medicine be able to deny you care?


  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”


  • By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

    Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

    They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

    Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

    Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

    Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

    And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

    They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

    We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible


  • Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

    Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

    Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

    Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals


  • Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

    They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

    Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

    Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it

    And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

    They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society

    It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…


  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot


  • I’m totally on board with this. Most of this stuff is random culture crap I could take or leave, but common use of /s is practically an excuse not to make an effort to understand the other person’s POV.

    Being a charitable reader and trying to understand the other person is everything.

    Sure, without it there will be misunderstandings… But coming back and clarifying “I thought that was obviously sarcastic” is the kind of little nudge that makes both people reread what they wrote, and introspection keeps a community healthy.

    It’s embarrassing when you misunderstand someone or if you didn’t get your basic position across - and frankly it should be.

    And if people get nasty the second they see a bad take, that’s a symptom of being in an echo chamber (or at least a very polarized community)


  • I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

    But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media



  • It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

    Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

    At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

    Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter


  • Nah, that’s not quite right.

    Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue

    Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.

    Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem… For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don’t see most of the stuff from huge

    So generally, it’s not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along




  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further q


  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further


  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further