Attempting solidarity pragmatically.

Also @cakeistheanswer@lemmy.world @cakeisthenanswer@lemmy.fmhy.ml

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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • This is my one of my favorites for exactly this reason. Agreed, other than the triumph of what little humanity Ted has at the end there’s not much in the story.

    But despite being a famous asshole it always seemed Ellison loved this story, right down to actually re writing a happy end to the “I have no mouth…” adventure game in the early 90s.

    Speculation on my part, but I always thought for a famous pessimist he thought his warning might make a difference, which is its own kind of hopeful.



  • I’m a bigger defender than most of Consider Phlebas than most, but it’s a product of age.

    If you grew up with Star Trek and Neuromancer, the first book kind of splits those wickets on utopia/dystopia neatly in a way I don’t think holds up as well afterwards.

    Player of games is a much neater intro, but the ambiguity of the first book felt intentional, and it’s always interesting to me to see peoples reactions to that called shot.

    I must have read that description of ‘damage’ a dozen times.



  • I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

    On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

    If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

    If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.



  • We still haven’t really sussed out whether the dominant model is going to be general or specific focus instances, or even brought whether niche boards want to just be in charge of the content and not the users, since your credentials are good everywhere you’re federated.

    Right now your ‘all’ feed is a combination of all the various places users on your instance have trawled, but they’re not totally the same everywhere.

    We could see curated instance feeds with some instance muting from admins that make it function like a public RSS, per user even if it gets that granular. Skies kind of the limit once you understand it’s limited to insecure communication, the most anonymity you have here is in a crowd.



  • I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.

    What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There’s not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.

    If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn’t matter we’ll see some growth by enticing other users because it’ll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there’s no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.




  • Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.

    With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.

    It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.