byron @byronalley@mastodon.social

A next step for the #fediverse is #DNS so that #activitypub/etc. works a bit like email does with MX records or the web with www.

Right now instances are often like {social}.{domain.com} where {domain.com} is some existing domain and {social} is an arbitrary subdomain for mastodon/etc.

But really it should work like email, where you just need to know the user's name and domain name, not the subdomain: you could toot to user@example.com.

#Hashtags are great. They're not "cool" anymore, and idiots abuse them; but they enable platforms to be self-organized by the users without much tech skill.

With all of the anarchists etc. here, that kind of grass-roots understanding should be implicit.

#Trending #tags are BOTH crucial and dangerous. #Trends bring people into conversations, help onboard new users, and keep people coming back.

But harassment and abuse need to be fought at the platform level.

How can we have BOTH?

The best way to fight the power of Facebook is probably not to just #deletefacebook, but to subvert it.

Facebook works by letting you use it for free, in exchange for using your data commercially.

It survives because people keep using it for personal purposes, which it can then sell.

If you want to fight that, use your personal Facebook account for exclusively commercial purposes, without buying advertising. Promote your business, post affiliate links, and avoid it for anything personal.

What I first learned from a club DJ was that it's valuable to get some people off the floor and others back on it: don't always play what everyone "kind of likes" but mix in "episodes" or "chapters." In a club that helps get people drinking.

But it highlights a common algorithmic mistake due to how people use #metrics, which is basically overusing greedy algorithms.

It's a mistake focusing on avoiding misses rather than looking for massive payoffs. Essentially black swan blindness.

This is in part a result of how I see people using algorithms and machine learning wrong: being too linear.

You end up with this feedback loop -- which also results in eg. "racist" algorithms that really just start by reflecting existing social biases and inequalities and then amplifying them.

I think it's partly because programmers are used to thinking linearly and these problems require non-linear, often non-deterministic and complex thinking.

Product recommendations are broken.

I noticed this especially on Steam: I get a lot of "you might like this, because you liked other similar stuff."

That's a false assumption. I *don't* need many recommendations for the types of music, books, movies & games I already like, because those are the genres I'm overly plugged into.

What I'd like is: "Maybe you should try Z, it would be a nice change from the X and Y you usually go for." And then I could click on "OK try it" or "ick hell no!"

Free should be about freedom. We should coin a different word for things you don't pay for in money: my vote is zerocheap. Then we can say, "is it ACTUALLY free, or just zerocheap?" As in, so cheap it's zero dollars.

After years of the software freedom and open source communities trying to explain "free as in beer" versus "free as in freedom" and even using a Latin-rooted loan word like "libre" that's so obscure, it's like preaching to the choir; maybe it should be turned around.