I think there’s a lot of nuance here. I mean the Fediverse isn’t super efficient. But it manages to do what it’s supposed to do. And it really depends. Which Fediverse software. How many people are on those servers, how are they distributed. Do groups of people mingle on certain servers. Do they all subscribe to all the same content out there. Are there really big groups on servers with happen to have a slow internet connection… And then of course can we come up with improvements if we need to.
I think we’re going to find out once (or if) the Fediverse grows substantially. Some design decisions of the Fediverse are indeed a bit of a challenge for unlimited growth. Oftentimes technical challenges can be overcome, though. With clever solutions. Or things turn ot differently than we anticipated. So I don’t think there’s a good practical and straightforward answer to the question.

Sure. I’m not entirely sure how PCIE works these days. But in it good old days we had methods to read pretty much arbitrary memory regions via PCIE or early Thunderbolt(?).

I just figured it’d be massively complicated to wait for the user to pull something on the screen, do computationally expensive OCR, some AI image detection to puzzle documents back together, and then you’d only get a fraction of what’s really stored on the computer and you’d still need a way to send that information home… When you could just pick a plethora of easy options like read all the files from the harddisk and send just them somewhere. I think it’s far more likely they do some easy and straightforward solution. And it’d be more effective as well.

Open-weight AND Open-Source??

And why the Chinese ones? Are the Americans losing the AI race?

Yes. I wouldn’t focus too much on someone being able to tell which map you’re playing, and which color your car has in Need For Speed. It’s way more unsettling what’s in networking equipment. Or inside an Intel Management Engine, and the firmware blobs of all the computer chips. Or the software running on it.

Yes. I’m not very educated on the Worpress side of things… Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don’t want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!

Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.

I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it’s all one big network anyway. So you don’t have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We’re fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they’ll provide a seemless migration. So if you’re patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I’ll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I’m unhappy with Mozilla’s decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there’s almost no effort involved.

Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.

For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.

Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.

Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.

I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.

2. PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider

I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)

I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.

It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.

Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

I’d expect at least the authors who do talks about the Fediverse to be here: Cory Doctorow… Marc-Uwe Kling… There are some webcomic authors as well. And we have some journalists. Heise Online comes to mind, they have their own Peertube instance. Then some other known activists, bloggers… And some people share drawings, fanart etc, not sure if that counts.

Edit: I forgot George Takei, and several other people.
Here’s some list of noteworthy accounts including some celebrities: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

I’m not sure if this translates to the content creators. There’s many of them whom I really like to watch who do (or did) Youtube as a business model. Tom Scott being one example or Derek Muller (Veritasium). I’m subscribed to many more. Simplicissimus and their yet better second channel (in German). We wouldn’t have those without monetization. The platform of course went shit over time. Fortunately my Ad blocker still works and thanks to Sponsorblock my experience is fairly alright… But personally - I’m split on this question. We had quite the amount of entertainment before monetization but I think a large amount of quality content also arrived after that, and because of it. Those people would be working some office job today if it wasn’t to Youtube. And I (and the world) would miss out… On the other hand we got MrBeast, a lot of fake cooking videos…

Lol. I think FIFA demand a pile of money from people integrating the live streams into their platforms. We should start the fundraiser soon.

And I think I’m going to boycott the world cup 2026, so make this the women’s world cup in 2027.

Yes. And I’ve seen people do really weird (and worse) stuff, like re-post questions. And if you’re unaware of that, you’re bound to take 10mins out of your day to answer the product or Linux or life question and later find out you were ripped off. At least that’s how it feels to me if people fabricate that kind of activity. And it kills the mood to write comments for a while.

Alright. And for your information, the Peertube function is a bit broken. I think the Peertube developers did their best. But Youtube has a lot of datacenter IP address ranges blocked. And they do rate-limiting and force people to sign in after downloading a few videos. Plus yt-dlp (which it relies upon) and Youtube are playing this cat and mouse game… So it’s disabled on most instances because it doesn’t really work. I was able to make it work on my instance, but I had to jump through several hoops. Configure a SOCKS proxy and tunnel it over my home, residential internet connection. And I think I transferred my login cookies because some videos would be age restricted.

PeerTube has that built in. You can set up a channel and have it import or mirror a Youtube channel. For Lemmy there’s several bots and scripts. As other people said that’s what lemmit.online is about.

Be a bit careful when rolling this out. Several people don’t like it. They’ve left Reddit for a reason and this is drowning them in bot activity. And usually these posts are low engagement, Reddit users can’t see the comments, so you’re not getting a lot of answers. I think it’s good practice how we here have separated that to dedicated instances, so users can just have genuine conversations everywhere else.

Wow, is that better or worse than a president making up tariffs with Grok AI? And police force experimenting with these predictive policing technology and contracting with Palantir? Probably fits with the military, as war is often not very humane to begin with… But all of this aligns in a very dystopian way.

I think there’s more low quality than just the basic print with all the wrinkles and creases in it. For once the head is “painted” realistically, the shirt is a slightly different style and then the hands and legs are yet another style. There’s some obvious AI artifacts and it didn’t fool people, seems they were able to tell.

And then with real art there’s some layers to it. It’d have a deeper meaning, tell us something about the people depicted, or society at times or how they’d like to portray it. Or there’s an entire interesting story about the artist, what kind of struggles they had… At least it’d invoke some astonishment in somebody. And I don’t think there’s any of that with this picture. That’s just the “empty plate” in-your-face meaning. Some children don’t have food. But doesn’t seem to me, the picture in itself tells more to the audience, or makes them think about what the statement might be, wonder what it’s trying to express, or make them question anything. And that’d be what turns art into art.

At least that’s my take on the definition of quality in art. I mean people put a bathtub out there along with some butter and it’s art. Or paint a canvas black and be done with it. On the other hand I can take a visually appealing photo of me with my smartphone and it wouldn’t be art. So in this case I don’t think quality is concerned with the visual aspect of it in the first place.

Could be performance art. But people did that before. Sneak into a museum and put something up. So it’s not an original idea.

“The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

And I think the “without permission” holds true on several levels. I mean on the one hand they just put it up. And doing it with AI adds another level on top. I mean the AI companies are known for not asking for permission when they train their generative AI models. But I don’t see this being discussed in the article. It’d probably be the only thing turning this into some form of art. An AI picture in itself certainly isn’t art. Also like how the paper is wrinkled and it doesn’t look good at all and “empty plate” is just a shallow in your face meaning and even I can tell how there isn’t any art or deeper meaning to it. And most people I know who are close to art, and they’re musicians or properly draw stuff as a hobby aren’t really pro AI, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them use AI or mix it into their works.