Just passing through.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I feel like a lot of what “Free Our Feeds” is trying to achieve has already been done by @[email protected] with @[email protected]. Supporting Bridgy in order to make all Bluesky accounts open for bridging by default would leap us pretty fast towards achieving these goals, by making any microblogging platform on the fediverse a genuine alternative.

    Instead they need $30 million to develop yet another thing.

    If Bluesky users want to fund this, it should at least safeguard that Bluesky remains committed to leaving AT Proto running. As long as they keep that running, a bridge between the Fediverse and Bluesky remains possible. Which is all I personally need, so it’s all fine by me.

    But what a waste of $30 million it would be.


  • I make the same mistake all the time for some reason, though I know which is which. I have a theory the reason is that the X axis is often used to plot years (Y), which messes with my brain ever so slightly.

    That said, I don’t think the Y axis should necessarily start in zero in a graph that seeks to show the pattern of growth rather than the number of users in absolute terms. If anything, a longer X axis would have been more useful, in order to show how unusual such a growth pattern is.




  • Just to clarify, supply and demand refers here to supply and demand for the stock, not for the product (cars).

    Generally, the two will be related. Sometimes, however, investors see a stock going up and they consider it valuable because they see it performing well, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is how bubbles are made.

    The Tesla stock is keeping afloat exclusively due to the perceived worth of the Tesla stock. It could keep increasing if the perceived value keeps increasing. At some point it will almost certainly fail spectacularly, but if this happens tomorrow or in ten years is anybody’s guess.






  • I think often people find it easier to write their own code than to make changes to other people’s projects, so it’s not necessarily very easy to change the Bluesky app to work with the Mastodon API rather than the Bluesky one.

    That said, I don’t think it’s a dumb idea. Bluesky has a lot of money to pump into UX development, so making sure Mastodon users could benefit from this wouldn’t be a bad thing. Personally I am perfectly happy with the alternatives already out there (Phanpy is better than anything else that has ever existed), but it’s all about choice. :)



  • Nobody wants to spend money on legal work, but at a certain point it becomes necessary. It’s not like they met up in a board meeting, discussed where money could best be spent, and decided that lawyers should be a priority.

    However, if Mastodon goes down this path and does it well, they can create legal precedence that might benefit all open/federated social media organizations that follow. Especially in the current climate we could benefit a lot from having a strong social media actor representing the interests of an open web, in opposition to the armies of lawyers hired by the fascists of commercial social media.

    Of course, when I donate to Mastodon I imagine all my money goes to developers. But rationally I’m aware that this might be a bit utopian.


  • Social media platforms were always badly positioned - they are failing by design. They have been able to grow in order to outrun their problems, but this cannot be sustainable because the flaw is fundamental.

    I think the idea is effectively conveyed in the intro:

    In the game of Go, bad shape is the term for configurations of stones on the game board that are inefficient in achieving their offensive goal (territory capture) and unlikely to achieve their defensive goal (the state of “life”). You can extend a bad shape in a fruitless attempt to make it better, but you’ll generally be wasting your time.

    The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet. Not because they’re been abandoned by users (yet) but because they’re structurally incapable of governing the systems they made, and most of the things they try to do about it introduce more and weirder problems.