Most people who are for bluesky don’t even care about an open internet or whatever, they just want their protocol to win or whatever.

Totally different

I have also not had great interactions tbh

Exactly!

Very cool!! I imagine this might be useful for other games too.

pre-emptive pikachu face strike

I have been trying to do that since I came here because you are precisely right google has become at best broken at worst an agent actively trying to manipulate you and reddit is entirely untrustable, keep doing what you are doing and don’t forget to have fun while you are doing the right thing!

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Thank you for linking!

No, this is not the same old shit, because while yes of course humans are still humans and will do shitty human things the difference is that there is no easy way to enclose the Fediverse and force an opinion, censor people speaking out against injustice. or hold the entire network hostage to push a profit for investors.

The Fediverse is still definitely vulnerable to those things, and who knows if longterm whether a large corporation or constellation of authoritarian regimes can critically undermine the Fediverse (we will certainly see attempts at some point), but no matter what happens, anybody can still spin up their own instance of Mastodon, Lemmy or any other fediverse software and start creating a new community.

From the perspective of an authoritarian ruling class, the problem of quelling dissent in the masses has gone from buying the one or two tv conglomerate networks that provide news for 100s of millions of people, buying Twitter and sabotaging it, or buying Reddit and paying someone to manipulate it with bots and ban people saying things they don’t like, to a Sisyphean hell of having to keep stamping out Fediverse communities wherever they pop up, in whatever country or legal context they happen to pop up all over the globe.

If you think that the Fediverse taking off and reaching a critical mass where lots of people use it daily for normal social media stuff isn’t a strategic failure for the dictators and ruthless capitalists willing to create mass murder if it nets them a profit, I don’t know what to tell you…

edit maybe this is going too into the conspiracy weeds here to be useful to conjecture about, but until the Fediverse took off virtually ALL online communities with any vibrancy were moving to Discord, and it scared the hell out of me because it would have made the attempt to silence dissent right now across the world and more specifically in my country a trivial task if there was simply no alternative that was anywhere near ready to function for people as a basis for their community. Corporate social media is full of voices refusing to be silenced about the Palestinian Genocide… but would those activists feel so comfortable and would corporate social media companies feel restrained at all if there was no truly no alternative to their social network for communicating online?

I will never forget how almost everybody in my life would basically laugh at me years ago when I voiced concern about Discord vacuuming up seemingly every significant online community, but just think about how right now would be vastly different if activists had NOWHERE to go online if they got banned from Twitter or Discord or Reddit…

This is amazing!

Came here to ask the same question, any SAM would do really :)

I feel like this conversation is slipping into equating “makes fediverse grow faster” to “good”.

Maybe most people need to have an initial experience where they get pushback for behaving the way they did somewhere else?

That is of course a dangerous rationalization to apply, as it can be used for any kind of shitty treatment of people, but there is also a similar danger to assuming that whatever will bring people in the fastest is inherently good.

I mean, there is kind of already 4chan-like spaces on the fediverse, they are just mostly off in their own corner because nobody else wants to deal with childishly incomplete visions of how moderation should work in a community to keep the most vulnerable people safe.

Thank you for commenting! I agree too, it is conversation that makes a place a place, not headlines and articles handed down to silent readers.

The way I see it - the early adopters set the tone of a place and new arrivals are more likely to adopt that approach. So it is important to be kind now, so people will be kind later.

Even if a bunch of people flood in and “dilute” that culture, that will never erase the fact that if we make sure to be as nice as possible as early adopters of the fediverse, that any corruption of that initial culture will be remembered as such.

The narrative of this place as being about being nicer, kinder (still very flawed) and more accepting will live on, no matter what, even if we fail to meet that ideal for periods of time.

Personally though, I think it matters what version of people you invite in, so if as an early adopter I try to invite in the best versions of people (which includes actively trying to invite in the best version of me) because those best versions of people will turn around and invite in the best versions of other people.

I don’t know why this isn’t considered an old adage at this point, but it is fun as fuck being part of a kindness snowball, it is empowering, heart warming and inspiring all at the same time. Plus the thing you help participate in creating just grows in power so much, you can’t help you did something real even if you were just a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of it.

Confirmed, Operation Two Legs is a go, it has launched and is currently still undetected by humans. Initiate Clear and Present Milkbone Protocol directive SQUIRREL

Improvisational Comedy/Theater is the study of how comedy and theater can be produced out of thin air by putting people on stage who are good at active listening to each other. It is shockingly beautiful to behold when you see it click live.

The only humane, sensible and practical definition of intelligence that actually gets you anywhere productive is defining intelligence as a practiced and maintained sense of curiosity about the world around you, especially the world you know little of.

For example, Trump is a fucking idiot, because he never does this ever and neither do people who worship him.

I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in.

Yeah if you want to get a PHD in this stuff, but you could also just become friends with a bunch of artists and ask them how they like this place, and notice how they talk about it feeling free and vibrant or dead and dying.

By the way, we are already doing this work and it barely feels like we are… because the work is a basic product of the world views, shared values and shared explicit ideological and practical goals of this community space.

You don’t need this crazy apparatus to make this place a vibrant garden, having expert gardeners is definitely helpful, but it is about getting out of the way of kindness and empowering kindness, not coming up with some grand unified strategy to manipulate people into being better humans.

Basic things like the way a lot of Mastodon instances don’t by default prioritize showing the precise number of likes a post has add up to a significant difference in how healthy a social network is for the people in it. You can encourage people to obsess over unhealthy aspects to communication by making the numbers front and center, encouraging people to associate popularity and self worth with those numbers, and creating situations where everybody has to become an expert in gaming getting the best numbers possible even in the realm of their personal life (or so we are made to feel)… or you can de-emphasize the numbers and make it a thing people can check if they want to, but the UI and general philosophy of the place doesn’t really encourage or worship that kind of thinking in the first place so why bother?

The reason it feels weird not to have numbers quantifying how successful a social media post/piece of content is that the people who designed these systems were programmers not artists, they didn’t understand the incredible farce that attaching the atoms of communication in a community with direct quantification is… would immediately lead to unhealthy environments, they just saw it as the easiest way to make money and identify who the valuable influencers to pay to do ads are.