It turns out that Meta’s Threads.net platform is building a groups feature that they curiously named Loops, and we feel the need to polish the app and Loops platform further so we can maintain the communities expectations.

Ugh. Already being bad neighbors in the fediverse.

That was actually why I was initially so active on Lemmy as well. I have been a bit dispirited by pro-Russian trolls arguing in bad faith and ingratiating themselves with frequent article posting, getting a pass from Lemmy admins. So I’ve been a bit disappointed lately. And I expect they will push into federated short form video. I’m not sure what the solution is other than to hope for better admins.

But that said, it’s all in the backdrop, and in the foreground is the fact that the fediverse can be built out over the internet to handle social media and rebalance it away from all-or-nothing death star level control of individual companies. That, to me, is a win. And the only way it wouldn’t be a win is if, I think, companies show they are up to the task of containing trolls, and that a fediverse wild west is exposed to coordinated inauthetic activity in a way that can’t be controlled.

I think this one is especially tricky because it seems to be all about The Algorithm (I hate that “the algorithm” has become a thing people say, but you probably know what I mean when I say it). The secret sauce that makes it work is the algo, which is very data driven, and how that works on a federated platform I’m not sure.

I desperately want something like this to succeed though, it’s exciting seeing major projects taking off. I’ve been on Lemmy since the beginning, and it is quite big now. Mastodon had a surge, probably the surge that federation needed. But I think Loops could potentially prove to be the most significant one yet. I can’t say this model of content consuming is ideal, necessarily, but I think the important thing is showing that it can be federated.

I don’t know who remembers the dog days of friendica and diaspora being our only hopes. Those were dark times, and now things are really taking off.

What’s an AP messenger? (This better not be the setup for a punchline).

Remindme works on lemmy?

I agree that the steam machine was too early.

I don’t know how it could ever start from zero without having to go through a growing stage. I think it was just necessary to have modest expectations, and so far as I can tell, valve partnered with third party vendors and didn’t lose $$$ on it.

Moreover, the downstream effect has been to set the foundation for the Steam Deck, which has been a smashing success. It just takes time to build up a mature ecosystem.

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?

I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

I literally just searched “p03locke” from mastodon.social and found them in one step.

I don’t know how privacy respecting it is but one well done AI search engine is:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

…What?

I think this is an excellent idea, a worthy project, and I applaud you for putting some real thinking into practical steps!

My federated X wishlist had social media, reddit-like thing, instagram-like thing, and a youtube-like thing. A federated IMDB alternative would be awesome.