Kichae

you're not going to live to tell this tale

You say that as if that isn't exactly the goal. The useful idiot is handing the world to Putin, at least in Putin's mind

Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn't change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.

The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that's simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they're not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.

Mastodon is web server software. "Mastodon" doesn't exist. It's an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.

I think you wildly misunderstand the average person's motivations and how they weigh decisions.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Public figures tend to not know how things work, and politicians tend to be optimistic about things that big businesses are spending a lot of money on.

AI sounds great in an elevator pitch, and that's all most politicians and execuitive-level business folks are working with. And they're all very susceptible to "everyone else is doing it" type arguments.

The server selection problem goes away if people stop treating their hosting website as an after thought or dumb terminal. People really have to stop promoting web server software as if it's a platform, and start finding reasons to recommend actual websites to people.

Ain't nobody ever recommended phpBB to anyone who wasn't looking to host a forum.

You have misread their comment and understood it backwards. AP's saying people on Mastodon are engaging in Lemmy discussions.

There is no way to follow Mastodon users from Lemmy. Lemmy simply does not work that way.

You could spin one up this evening if you wanted. Or go use catodon.social.

That's not the point. The point is, there are reasons Mastodon is being rejected, just like there are reasons you seemingly cannot pay people to use a Misskey-based or Hubzilla-based website.

It's not where the people are going, and the public or semi-public figures are going to follow the people.

Open source options exist. We just need more people using OpenStreetMaps and shit.

No, no. Let him pace this out. The more it's drip fed, the worse PP's chances are.

So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.

You have five communities covering the same topic. There's, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They're all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.

What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?

They treat it as if they're all one community. As if they're all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they're met with the consequences of this).

Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community's posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that's easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they're interchangeable, but as if they're all one.

This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.

We don't need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.

Parliament also is not "we the people". And yet, it is Parliament that elects the Prime Minister. The they are under no obligation to elect someone who is a sitting MP. They never have been.

Yeah. The ones holding the cables started shouting Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things. And when that worked, they figured out how to make us stop talking and start buying.