Rob
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.It’s never not going to be funny that after years of hype about crypto-metaverse-subscriptions disrupting web2 incumbents, the backstop to Twitter’s sudden implosion was volunteers recreating Usenet with RSS.
How many years of yellow peril “TikTok AI feeds will steal our children if we don’t surveillance capitalism hard enough” did we have to endure before it turns out a reverse chron is maybe the least bad option for giving us social media that looks more like Wikipedia and less like 4Chan.
benx@bkeegan
pubhubsubbub even has a better name
pubhubsubbub even has a better name
Max@bkeegan Though the 4chan-like sections of the Fediverse *exist*. Don’t also underestimate the power of moderation and especially the power of labor. I think that’s the other lesson in this. Social media spent decades thinking labor didn’t “scale” and trying to replace labor with technology. The Fediverse remembered that decentralized labor scales with the network. (Just like Usenet and RSS.) The modern need is moderation tools that enhance labor efforts and not get in their way.
Roger Moore@VATVSLPR @bkeegan Nah, that’s the same problem in different words: labor doesn’t “scale” because you have to pay for it (and train it and manage it and…). Scale, to social media, is just another word for “profit margins at large centralized size”.
The Fediverse still sees moderation labor as something worth paying for, even discounting how much of it is “volunteer”. But it also scales it differently: more moderators per instance/user.
@VATVSLPR @bkeegan The real trick to Fediverse model scaling of moderators has nothing to do with volunteers being that much cheaper and everything to do with spreading the work around. Even if we paid every Fediverse moderator (and we should!) for that labor, there’s a vast difference in quantity/quality between needing to moderate the bounds of one instance (and interacting with neighbors) than trying to manage the firehose of centralized social media with few clear boundaries.
Max Riethmuller (TechLife)@max @bkeegan I think this is important, as machines can't do fair and consistent moderation, especially not without an accessible human appeal process. I came here mostly (apart from a small foray several months ago) because of what was happening with twitter, but actually it was because of facebook moderation that I was looking elsewhere. The twitter exodus just made me take a second look at the fediverse.
@max @bkeegan I got suspended for quoting Asterix "These Romans must be crazy" as hate speech. I asked admins of a group to delete a spambot that was using the profile name Troy Smith and spamming every thread and comment in the group with the same ad. I said "admins, please nuke this Troy spambot". Hate speech. Apparently I was calling for the nuclear annilation of the people of Troy. Yet you can't get an actual hate speech commented successfully reported for love nor money.
Adam R. Wood@bkeegan Part of me hates that I actually understood every word of these toots. Most of me does, to be honest.
ploum@bkeegan : I plead guilty.
Bradley@bkeegan 4chan notably displays posts in the order they happened, and all at once, unlike Reddit and a lot of other places. I actually think the way Pleroma displays posts is fairly 4chan-like. (Mastodon does it slightly differently, hiding adjacent posts when you click on a reply so it's hard to see a whole thread at times)
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound@bkeegan The funny thing is I can *maybe* see some narrow usecase for crypto in making sidestepping horrible payment services for a more decentralised web if you squint just right. But the focus is all wrong if anyone starts out with worrying about the monetisation mechanism instead of worrying about figuring out how to solve all the human/social problems first...
Ashton@vidar @bkeegan I used to think that, and I’ve changed my mind.
A lot of the friction with payments comes the moment you hit the traditional banking system, because preventing access to USD is a big part of America’s anti-crime and foreign policy apparatus. And unfortunately, a lot of people want to use USD. The way around that is to make a whole new currency, but people don’t want a new currency, they just want to send small amounts of the currency that they have.
@Ashton @bkeegan The thing is, from having done multiple startups, the hardest thing about even far less challenging things than social networks, is getting a product fit. Even *with* all of those payment issues - and it's gotten far simpler since I did my first startups - figuring out payments is much simpler for most startups than getting a product fit.
Worked for a VC for ~5 years, and when people focus on payment tech it tends to suggest they're focusing on the wrong thing; few exceptions.
falun@bkeegan ah see it's just that "few understand" how "it's still early days for crypto" and if only there had been 3 months, 6 at the most, web3/5 would've been there
Ville Vainio
Ziggy the Hamster ☎️ 4ZTH
Dwight's Survival Food Plan - The Office US
suldrew 🚲🏳️🌈@bkeegan yeah "web3" didn't do shit when we needed a place to go, huh
Steve Pepple
volkrisIt doesn’t help that “web3” was/is a marketing term with a hundred different meanings, most without any engine under the hood.
Larry Yudelson
Sir J Mastodon
Kingsley Uyi Idehen
Galo Navarro@bkeegan are we also getting IRC back?
Robin Shipton
@robinshipton @bkeegan I shall dust my irsii config!
Johann Uhrmann
Geoffrey Adams@bkeegan "An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age."
Jae Bochs@bkeegan Well played. You, sir, have earned my Follow.
JohanVanCamp 
@bkeegan At least it's Usenet without the alt.binaries 😜
Zate 🦘🇦🇺@bkeegan I see more SMTP with HTTP. But, yes.. lol
As I understand it, you’ve just described QUIC
🏳️🌈 Lucy Wildboots 
Uncle Mikey@bkeegan But will ActivityPub work over UUCP?
Jenxi Seow 萧晨熙@bkeegan guess it’s great that we stuck to RSS @chungliwen
Matt Chung
Rob Landley@bkeegan Cooking with knives and fire, like programming in c, do not go out of style.
Joanna Bryson, blathering
coberscheidUsenet was my first thought when I learned how this works
Layne Ainsworth@bkeegan can a rec.humor server be in our future? No mouse balls please.
Bridget Clinch@bkeegan maybe we should properly utilise web 1.0 before stuffing around with 2 and 3?
Count Regal Inkwell@bkeegan I'll never forgive cryptobros for dirtying the term 'decentralized'
toolbear#🪧@vinesnfluff @bkeegan Indeed. I would like to reclaim the word "crypto" and the prefix "crypto-" someday, too.
Dave Friedel ℠@bkeegan BBS’s in ‘83 with a 300baud modem using X protocol to grab pheaker docs to make a Blue box likely will never be topped, my friend.
People have little understanding how seriously cool that was and the internet just felt like a watered-down version of that dopamine hit.
QBAS81- learn #degrowth@bkeegan
Can't wait!
Can't wait!
jensho (she/her)@bkeegan hahahah perfect
Nick Vella 🏳️🌈@bkeegan @shanselman On a related note, how are we supposed to believe that #Mastodon is ‘too complex’ for the average person, as countless naysayers parrot, when seemingly every second person had a Bitcoin wallet some time over the past two years? 🫠
Aral Balkan@bkeegan Funny or tragic or both? To think of all the money, time, and human effort that’s wasted on an unending stream of utter bollocks because our socioeconomic system cannot imagine that something that doesn’t turn a profit can have value.
rodlux
Alexander The 1st@bkeegan Now that you say that, I can't not see it - when I was seeing the threads about the "Mastodon norms" (Implying they're standardized) and artists promoting their stuff on their accounts (Which should be fine in my opinion), part of me was thinking "So they're acting like it's Eternal September again based on what I heard about it from others?".
Course, I had to check that Eternal September was a Usenet thing, but...it checks out.
msgbi
terawatt@bkeegan this is the Internet I remember.
Coach Pāṇini ®
jollyrogue
Justin Sanders@bkeegan funny thing is even Nostr which is heavily populated with crypto people is the same RSS / Usenet model.
Michael Sean Becker@bkeegan this!!!!!!!
bitomule@bkeegan I love it. I believe in blockchain tecnology but have been fighting with crypto bros that associate decentralization with crypto for years.
Jonah Stein@bkeegan Did Usenet have moderation?