VeeSilverball

Coming soon: rebranding /r/piracy to "pirate cosplay"

What always helped centralized social was an environment of rapid growth. For the majority of people there wasn't a "before" to compare to whatever they signed up to, so a play like the one Reddit made, which isn't about the quality of the content but "whatever gets people in the door", worked - focusing all your energy on hypergrowth was the Web 2.0 strategy. But my own "before" goes back to browsing Usenet over a dial-up shell account(terminal access only). The technology used then was primarily characterized by being efficient to store and process, which led to a federated model that shared text threads.

The reason people switched from Usenet to early web forums was also a combination of not having a "before", plus some new conveniences. Usenet moderation tools were very limited, ensuring that spam and derangement were common. Because the design was made just for text, you didn't have image-focused content, but you also didn't experience the things images get moderated for now - you could post a UU-encoded file that contained an image, or a link to an image, but you couldn't shove it in people's face. And tree quoting replies was normalized, if rather disorganized - long-running threads often got "forked".

The model of web forums that became most popular - flat topic threads, more images, centralized moderation - caused as many issues as it solved. Flat threading with no post ranking makes people reply "first" at the top of the thread, images create a whole attack surface, and centralized mods have more power to trip on. But they could provide a better experience along the narrow set of things they wanted the forum to be about, and that made all the difference. That's how the centralized model works. When I think of places like Something Awful or Newgrounds in their original heyday - it's really gatekeepy stuff. There were tastemakers and you followed their lead or else.

Reddit started with a lot of link aggregation, which was also Digg's thing - that model "pushes" more content than a regular forum, so it helps build broad-audience engagement. But Reddit added more Usenet-like elements, and those gradually took over a lot of the niches as more people started using Reddit to ask questions and make statements addressing a specific community.

Something that I think defines the federated space is that there is less "push". The power is more distributed, fewer gates to keep. Reddit represented those values for a while, and now it obviously doesn't, so the users who were there for that are going to drift this way very quickly.

The url from kbin is https://kbin.social/m/main@sh.itjust.works/t/37881/Unhappy-with-Lemmy

So it's federated, you just have to check the url. It's already confused me once - something kbin could improve on.

One direction to take this conversation is to legitimize a formal ads platform and move the technology in that direction. It's not a concept that has had airtime in federated social(open source, anti-corporate and all) but it fits into the model of enthusiast communities to have a magazine that is "both articles and ads".

Pinball Deluxe Reloaded for action
Patience Revisited for solitaire

And that's about it.

It will never show an consistent number. The way Activitypub operates is "you see what you're subscribed to", and that occurs in a technical/political sense of "these instances have agreed to federate", and in many cases they don't federate everything that happens. So if someone on instance A upvotes something posted on instance B, but instance C is not subscribed to instance A, A and B will see the upvote, C won't.

You don't have to give up on your clout-chasing dreams, but the numbers won't tell the whole story.

What makes it hard isn't really about the federation, but that there are many internet users that haven't dealt with how the internet works outside of a top sites experience, but have an expectation set. The complaint is literally "I am illiterate about this and it's your fault".

This is something you will see a lot of in gaming Let's Plays as the first time player bitches for the first 5-10 minutes about how nothing makes sense. Then they run into an interaction they like and shut up for the rest of the playthrough.

Some arcade experiences worth trying:

• Final Fight
• Osman
• Street Fighter II(really, any version. World Warrior is the one that blew minds at release)
• Puzzle Bobble
• Magical Drop III
• Tank Force (most obscure one on the list)
• Outrun (the first one, but Outrunners is cool too)
• Metal Slug (any of them, really)
• Dodonpachi

Part of what propelled Digg to stardom was the desire for a central "town square" that didn't yet exist in the 2000's, Web-centric internet. (never mind that Usenet existed - it didn't have a lot of the conveniences of web forums and had gotten overrun with spam, so it just wasn't part of the discussion). There were a few larger, topic-centric sites like Slashdot, Something Awful, Fark, Newgrounds, etc. These older sites had various limits on user submissions and barriers to entry, in part because it was out of their scope to try to do more than that.

Digg hit on the combination of user-submitted content, simple voting interface, and secret algorithm that has defined most of Web 2.0 - but spam, moderation and power users were always an issue, and the best answer anyone seems to have had to it is "decentralize more", which Reddit did some of by splitting things out into topical feeds again, but unifying the login and access to all of them and letting users self-appoint as moderators - in essence, give power users their own fiefdoms to keep the peace. Twitter likewise absorbed some Digg users because it relied a lot on user self-moderation of their feed. Other platforms went down the path of having the algorithm do more of the moderation and becoming more TV-like, which is more profitable but volatile since that makes the platform blameworthy for everything that slips through.

So, what I feel has happened since is mostly intensification brought on by being for-profit and taking investment capital, unlike some of those older sites which are still around and kicking. It's hard to resist changing your business model towards profit maximization when you've taken a lot of investment. But then, the useful service that Reddit was providing when it launched is a commodity now, and with federated social media, the power dynamics are even more diffused.

But every time this happens, there are people who want to stay behind, and that's because power dynamics aren't uniformly agreed upon. Some people don't want it to be objectively challenging to hold power, they just want a game they can win.

I've had some thoughts on, essentially, doing more of what historically worked; a mix of "archival quality materials" and "incentives for enthusiasts". If we only focus on accumulating data like IA does, it is valuable, but we soak up a lot of spam in the process, and that creates some overwhelming costs.

The materials aspect generally means pushing for lower fidelity, uncomplicated formats, but this runs up against what I call the "terrarium problem": to preserve a precious rare flower exactly as is, you can't just take a picture, you have to package up the entire jungle. Like, we have emulators for old computing platforms, and they work, but someone has to maintain them, and if you wanted to write something new for those platforms, you are most likely dealing with a "rest of the software ecosystem" that is decades out of date. So I believe there's an element to that of encoding valuable information in such a way that it can be meaningful without requiring the jungle - e.g. viewing text outside of its original presentation. That tracks with humanity's oldest stories and how they contain some facts that survived generations of retellings.

The incentives part is tricky. I am crypto and NFT adjacent, and use this identity to participate in that unabashedly. But my view on what it's good for has shifted from the market framing towards examination of historical art markets, curation and communal memory. Having a story be retold is our primary way of preserving it - and putting information on-chain(like, actually on-chain. The state of the art in this can secure a few megabytes) creates a long-term incentive for the chain to "retell its stories" as a way of justifying its valuation. It's the same reason as why museums are more than "boring old stuff".

When you go to a museum you're experiencing a combination of incentives: the circumstances that built the collection, the business behind exhibiting it to the public, and the careers of the staff and curators. A blockchain's data is a huge collection - essentially a museum in the making, with the market element as a social construct that incentivizes preservation. So I believe archival is a thing blockchains could be very good at, given the right framing. If you like something and want it to stay around, that's a medium that will be happy to take payment to do so.

M E G A / upload to me today / send me a file / Megaupload

Ask anyone of the popular reputation of philosophers and it's basically the same as programmers. Socrates would definitely piss a few people off in code review meetings. Programming as a pursuit is very prone to sophistry because it's unclear even how to start defining the problem space, and there are always categories of problem where, when encountered, everyone either solves it with the exact same falsehood, or uses the one dependency that actually solves the problem. And then in the end, the software ends up not being used, so the wrong problem was solved.