My friends! I wrote about my experiences on the Fediverse so far :)
https://robek.world/internet/a-newcomer-to-the-fediverse/
"I don't accept the assumption that my placement on the political compass should determine who I'm allowed to communicate with."
thanks @rw / @rwdigest for having me, and for creating the cool header
Fascinating dynamic unfolding across Mastodon: instances are dividing into two ideological factions: safe speech, and free speech.
The safe speech instances are likely to start sharing domain-level blocklists (like Adblock but for speech) in the near future, to "curb harassment".
The free speech instances legitimately don't seem to care, and so far, have held much more interesting, substantive and intellectual conversations than the safe speech zones.
What can you expect from me? Free speech.
I need a captcha on my computer, but for cats. When someone starts entering gibberish on my keyboard I need it to be like "You appear to be a cat's butt, please enter the following to prove you're human".
#catpcha :cat2:
We're now observing the emergence of local instances, e.g. https://toot.berlin/ Interesting potential, but it seems to suggest the weakness of the community == instance == administrative policy == source of identity model. There are *many* possible communities I might participate in simultaneously, and even be interested in seeing, e.g., the local TL for that particular community.
Why should my identity and social graph position be tied to one, though?
Rebelling against your cognitive enculturation, by Venkat Rao https://www.facebook.com/vgururao/posts/10155307993211907?_fb_noscript=1
By showing new targets, unexpectedly worth hitting, you create new meaning in the world:
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=ca1167c0e1&e=6bc208bc1b
Most of my successes have come from finding, defining, and solving significant problems other people didn't notice, not from solving known ones.
Much easier! (For me, anyway—cognitive styles differ.)
🆕 "Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness": a positive vision for the future of society, culture, and our selves. https://meaningness.com/fluidity-desiderata
The turning point of _Meaningness and Time_: extracting lessons from its history of meaning, and sketching its conception of a possible, desirable future.
“Yes, We Have Noticed The Skulls” : how the rationality movement is growing up. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
I agree that it *is* growing up, and I'm glad to see that.
OTOH, many of the "new mistakes" SSC mentions aren't new, and have known fixes.
Those who don't know intellectual history are doomed to repeat it. And the rationalism movement continues to do exactly that.
Growing out of utilitarianism, by Kaj Sotala: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ouy/brief_update_on_the_consequences_of_my_two/
Also, he connects this with adult developmental stages, at https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/#comment-10071
“Are Adult Developmental Stages Real?” by Sarah Constantin (with discussion from me and others in the comments): https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/are-adult-developmental-stages-real/comment-page-1/
Remember when #Twitter had #RSS / #Atom feeds for all users? Wasn't that great? Well, #Mastodon and any other #Fediverse server has that too. And it's here to stay, since the protocol is based on this.
Here's mine, for example: https://mastodon.social/users/rysiek.atom
Now you can use your favorite RSS reader to read my toots. I know, right?
@junglestrike @lambadalambda @sonya Yeah, but the whole social model embedded in the technical model is that you migrate to an instance that shares your value, freedom of association style. But when migrating servers means rebuilding your entire social graph.... that doesn't really work.
Curious to see how this #mastodon instance holds up with scaling.
I'm also bummed that it isn't easy to transfer your account between instances. I think that discourages people from creating new instances as they're already investing in one profile that's stuck on an instance. Would also probably help a lot with decentralized scaling. An instance gets slow and you start a new one or join a more stable one. These are some serious problems imo.
@Meaningness @puellavulnerata "lack of a better alternative" has been the reason many of us stayed on Twitter for so long as well. Interesting how trying this service has revealed how unnecessary some of Twitter's limitations are, made me realize how much time I wasted grappling with shorter character limits. (assuming that you ignore their artificial value/significance within Twitter's network.)
@Meaningness @puellavulnerata
> everyone got used to "the web is free" and thinks it's a moral affront to be asked to pay for it.
IMO this is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's more that if someone can be offered for free and monetized through advertising, it will be, and social networking needs super low friction to scale.
@Meaningness subscription-model services are conceivable; the alternative to advertisers paying for platforms is users paying for them
Author of the book Meaningness, and other stuff: https://meaningness.com/about-my-sites