The #fediverse is one of the most hopeful aspects of the internet, since it tries to bring it back to its decentralized, federated roots. In my opinion, there is no other way to guarantee free communication.

However, it is not without its challenges. Looking ahead, it's easy to identify some of them:

1. Centralization is an emergent phenomenon. We can see this happening with the distribution of instance sizes, and the clear “rich get richer” dynamics that take place. This is not due to bad actors, it is simply how people tend to behave.

2. Commercialization is yet to hit this platform, but if it becomes popular, it will undoubtedly happen. Instances that serve ads, promote content, etc, will appear at some point.

3. Related to point 2, it is possible that Google and/or Microsoft will seize the opportunity to try once more to move into the social media domain, and make services that connect to the #fediverse. This will be sold as an adoption of the federation, and hence progress. But to see how that goes, we need only to remember what happened with google chat and the open Jabber protocol — they abandoned it as soon as their service became popular enough. Bait and switch.

4. Legal intimidation of smaller instances is a real menace. The push to force Facebook/Twitter/etc to be liable for what users post will backfire, and render every instance admin responsible for what every single user posts. Note that it does not matter one bit if the content is actually problematic — a single cease and desist letter from a lawyer will terrify most admins out there.

These are not problems without solution, but it's unclear how things will unfold.

Just one of the death threats I received on Mastodon this morning. Some were even more direct ("I'm coming to kill you"). Most used the N-word, which (especially given that I'm a white man) indicates the ideology of the senders.

People in marginalized communities have suffered this far worse than I have. Many left, which is a tremendous loss.

I'm sad because I want Mastodon to succeed. We have to find a way to fix this immediately.

Dear 🐘,
we are pleased to inform you that the Call For Abstracts and Call For Tutorials of the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science are open for submission!

https://www.ic2s2.org/index.html

IC2S2'23 - Important dates

Abstract submission: February 24, 2023
Notification of abstract acceptance: April 14, 2023
Tutorial proposals submission: January 20, 2023
Notification of tutorial acceptance: January 30, 2023

1/ Excited to share our new paper "Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities" in @ScienceAdvances with @hneutr @danlarremore @aaronclauset

Why do faculty publication rates increase so much with prestige? Let’s go!: 🧵

https://scim.ag/AV

Facebook (sorry: Meta) AI: Check out our "AI" that lets you access all of humanity's knowledge.

Also Facebook AI: Be careful though, it just makes shit up.

This isn't even "they were so busy asking if they could" --- but rather they failed to spend 5 minutes asking if they could.

#AL #ML #MathyMath #Bullshit #NLP #NLProc #AIhype

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