• 2 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Expecting every different platform to all move in lockstep is not feasible so a situation where some support downvotes but some do not is going to have to be part of the process. Even if it was just kbin to kbin initially, that’d still be an improvement.

    Yea, that is what i was thinking. I myself am working on some ActivityPub stuff and while compat is important to me, i also plan on potentially exposing new features in this manner. If other software wants to federate with it, cool, if not, whatevs. It’s data propagation, as with everything in ActivityPub it’s optional that consumers use it as desired.




  • Frankly i’d prefer all of it to be private, but there’s merit to both sides.

    re:drama-causing, i’m also removing downvotes from my instance in dev for the same reason. I do think some version of muting has value, though - but kinda feels like it should be a tool earned, similar to HackerNews (they have downvotes, but only after a certain amount of earned “karma”).



  • Yea and i don’t mean to imply this is something everyone needs to see as a problem. Plenty of things are addictive for some and not for others. Even regardless of addiction, i just want (to explore) a set of features that is kind of anti-reddit. Explore anything that can help me feel like i didn’t miss anything, while not needing to visit more than once a day, once a week, etc. That i felt informed but that the random stuff was filtered out. etcetc

    From a developer, often these features don’t scale well either. Either complex to define (if customizable) or too costly to run, but Fediverse tweaks that a bit. We have the potential to have smaller servers with less concern for scale, etc. Fediverse has potential here, for me at least


  • You’re not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?

    Jeez, this feels quite hostile.

    I’m a developer. I’m working on this problem myself. You can craft features which promote a behavior or inhibit it. For example focusing only on live oriented features, making sure that posts show up constantly and with little ability to see what previous came, i would argue, focuses behavior on addictive FOMO. Features that help summarize historical posts to leave you with less of a feeling of FOMO does the opposite. Quite difficult to get FOMO if the summary of posts only changes once every 5 hours, right? You should see the ideas here. All of which i want to explore.

    Features promote behavior. Some drive engagement, some reduce engagement. I seek features which reduce engagement by way of inhibiting FOMO and promoting the feeling of being informed on what it is you were seeking.

    I’m suggesting a platform which focuses on features that help users avoid what i feel are negative outcomes. Which is wholly different than saying that all platforms need to do this. Why is this controversial to you? Should i, and users like me, not be able to use a platform which tries to eradicate (as best able) FOMO? Is FOMO other people experience somehow essential to you?

    You can have whatever platforms you like. Just because an option exists does not mean it is hostile to your preferences. To me your reply seems short sighted, entirely focused on your individual use case and ignorant of a wide array of methods people want to use to interact with these products.

    I am focused on my slice and my pie. You can have yours too, it’s okay.









  • Good link. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. I think this really comes down to a question of “Does the Fediverse even have to capability of federating user actions without indicating what user did the action?”

    Plus, if you can muster up some solution, is that solution then easily falsifiable? Ie could a server send thousands of automated fake downvotes that don’t actually tie to a specific handle? How would a receiving server know that some anonymous vote is a real vote? etc

    Challenging problems.


  • I’m (as a dev experimenting with the fedi) more interested in the features each platform adds to the fedi and ensuring we have consistency. Which is probably included in what you said, i’m just being explicit.

    Ie regardless of if it’s an upvote or a star, hypothetically it should have a similar effect in all platforms that federate with that value. If it modulates score in an algorithm, it should “mean” the same thing to the fediverse so that it has similar outcomes in all platforms. A silly but extreme example of this failing would be one site upvotes and downvotes meaning opposite things on two implementations - it would be chaos hah.

    I hope (but don’t yet know until my implementation is further along) that Like and Boost are functionally different. I also hope no ones implementation is conflating them.

    Either way interesting times and i’m excited to see where we take it :)




  • I’m on mastodon.art and donate $1/m, same story. It’s only a handful of people that donate (hundreds, but still - much smaller than the thousands of users) and we cover the bill.

    Though, this is also why i’m experimenting with custom Fediverse instance software that prioritizes low cost operation. I think Fedi would be better off if it wasn’t a huge lift to figure out hosting. There’s enough challenges in hosting instances, it would be nice to reduce as many as possible.