Yea I got the general or vague impression that this was reminiscent of their initial maps roll out.

Are any heads gonna roll for this?

I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!

Yep. And it’s a point well made.

To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.

That is interesting! Thanks for the tip!

Also, it’s their icon a community reference?

Could be a pretty easy flag to be displayed on any community. Basically last time the mod logged in or was active (should be available).

Tech monopolies must be held to account, the outsized influence of some tech billionaires must be held in check, and competition must be allowed to thrive. We may also need to consider the protection of both consumers themselves and human-created works (including our history) as part of a conservation effort before extractive models permanently pollute our shared cultural resources.

Honestly feels like the main and perhaps only thing to do. Sure we can all do our own individualistic things, such as what we’re doing here on the Fedi.

But the whole AI thing reveals I think just how big of a problem this all is … big tech would rather consume and replace the whole internet with some fuzzy hype tech than empower its users in any way.

Awesome to see TBH. Friendica is kinda the platform that the Fedi forgot and it might be a better place if it got more love.

AFAICT, this is the story of centre left politics over the past recent years (decades? Since Reagan/thatcher?).

There’s likely a whole story to be told, but I personally suspect modern academia is actually a big but easy to ignore component.

As a nerd, I don’t like the end of the article where she says we need to get revenge on the nerds.

I hear you, as many would I think. But realistically, I think calling tech culture into question, even beyond its manifestation in the psychotic tech CEO types, is worth while. It’s really had a dominant run both materially and culturally (a revenge as many would see it), and I think it’s worthwhile questioning the value of a lot of it, in a way I don’t think many nerds and tech people are capable of (sadly IMO).

There may be an inclination to separate the capitalism and nerdy parts. But as an industry/profession/whatever that generally tends to care a lot about itself in various ways … I think tech is disturbingly uninterested in caring about the quality of its profession beyond the bike shedding stuff let alone acting on it in any collective way. There are reasons for this, but given the dominance tech now has in the world, pushing back in the culture wholesale is justified I think.

Ha. Thanks … I guess! It was right there and I just happened to notice. It was definitely weird to see people using a word you made up though.

And yea, I stand by the idea of giving us forum like platforms a name against the weird Twitter obsession decentralised platforms have

Well I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse needs to move on from Mastodon in order to grow, so this is a good sign. Though this is total users, not active users AFAICT.

Appreciated my friend!

Well I’m not talking about general conditions or labour rights, which certainly make any historical comparisons in this particular issue difficult or meaningless. But rather how an ordinary office job was managed and conceived. And the nature of work too.

Edit: specifically “knowledge” work, which has always been around. Generally though, I’m probably thinking of mainly boomer knowledge work, probably 60s-90s, as a historical comparison. I’ve just heard a few too many stories of someone totally checking out of their job, due to personal difficulties or whatever, and it being fine on a way that feels difficult to fit into todays “hustle culture” world.

Any one with insight on how this compares with recent or even not too recent times?

My immediate thoughts on this are that business may have become simply more active and noisier. That is, there’s always something to tend to, whether it be an immediate demand or working towards something in the future. Basically business practice growing and accelerating without accounting for what limitations people may have. I’d also wager it’s also noisier, as in full of meaningless stuff. Communications that mostly fluff, planning that isn’t actually thought through but closer to empty ambitions, requests for help or explanation due to not trying hard enough to work out them selves.

But then they get into a positive feedback loop. Too distracted to do anything well? Then just forward the cruft and minimally viable product down the line, or, produce an easy to make communication or plan that looks like productivity but really isn’t.

In the end, we run into Kessler syndrome, but for time and concentration rather than space. Everyone is burnt out and so passes along some distraction to the next person and so on until no one can get anything meaningful done as that would require uninterrupted time and concentration. What’s more, people adapt to their environment. If you expect to be interrupted, then you’ll never bother to work in a way conducive to longer periods of work. Instead, to seem productive, you’ll come up with our look for small and easy pieces.

Which gets to productivity culture. How mindful are we all of having to constantly prove our worth and productivity? If so, and given the above, how much are them inclined to do something that signals productivity rather than something that actually is productive? And much distraction is that likely to cause for others, both short term and long term? How much is that then going to encourage others to signal? Seems like Kessler syndrome again to me.

I’d wonder if in the recent past there was more of a sense that you had your job and that was that. It was fine. Don’t fuck it up and everything will be fine. Nothing urgent to do right now, go to the doctor it will be fine.

The problem with this answer is that you go from your anecdata to a sweeping statement about the relevance of public health information.

Plenty of people would really prefer to not get covid and for very good reasons. If you’re having basic cold symptoms, great, not everyone finds it that minimal. Just like how some have bad hay fever and some don’t get the news sometimes reports on pollen levels.

Eh, shifts on the stock market and pretty random political moments make the news all the time. Not to mention the weather and sports.

A little, “hey, contagions are about at the moment, if you’re vulnerable or just not keen, act accordingly” wouldn’t be misplaced at all.

Bottom line is we have a cultural problem with general illness. Something something capitalism something something.

The down votes on this is interesting …?

It’s not BlueSky making the Reddit alternative, it’s third party devs. There are a few alternative apps being built on BlueSky architecture and ATProto right now.

And yea, it definitely could overtake and harm lemmy, if there are people here into the BlueSky approach (which likely suits Reddit-like apps, I think I’ve seen some say BlueSky has a Reddit flavour to it).

Honestly, given the dominance Mastodon has in AP and the shitty interop it has with lemmy, migrating to ATProto wouldn’t be the most insane idea for Lemmy IMO. Relying on BlurSky’s relay wouldn’t be for everyone. But some sort of multi-relay set up seems plausible and might be cool to see.

The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.

Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.

BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.

This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d

He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.