this is a problem with fediverse in general imho.

the tools admins and users have are blunt (defederate or block). with all sorts of content moderation policies and opinions you will inevitably end up either alienated from everyone or surrounded by people that think and talk just like you.

fediverse does offer many advantages… creating a better online “town square” is just not going to be one of them.

i do not control mozilla leadership or their mishandling my data. the most influence i can exert as an individual is by not being a willing participant to their mischief. i’ll be happy to come back if the leadership changes and i get some guarantees.

yeah, the moderation there is getting insane. at this point i don’t even believe it is done by humans any more.

i got a permaban after responding to a comment that said bombing a hospital in gaza that killed over 30 children was a legitimate military target. i just politely wrote that maybe bombing hospitals full of kids is not a good idea even if a terrist is hiding inside…

maybe i am naive, maybe you are cynical.

some people do somerimes start business cause they have a good product in mind…

thinking google is about offering you a quality search at this point is like thinking facebook is about improving your social experience. they both started like that and that’s how they hooked people up. but they have their own interests now. those interests revolve around affecting how people act and think. one central thing they need to do to fulfil those interests is controlling what people see and know… and that’s very hard to do when this pesky external content generated by other that is hard to control gets into way…

what exactly is the management cost here?

at my old company they simply ordered a yubikey for you amd forgot about it. nobody kept track of it. i didn’t even need to return mine when i was leaving. the part they manage is the user account. the hardware you get once and use for added security…

thing is lot of that is on purpose. mastodon and fediverse are more of an attempt to come back to the state where there is no algorithm picking for you… but too many people nowdays are simply too lazy to search and actively choose what they want to see.

what we really need is to separate content (keep that in fediverse) and content access and presentation (the interface people use to access the content). if you want a bot feeding you content whole day and for your internet to become a tv you nobody can stop you. but if you want to think amd search nobody should stop you either

what’s the rationale for IT not wanting to pay for the fobs?

People who casually dismiss conspiracy theories are exactly as bad as those who unquestioningly believe them.

the occams razor is a crucial part of scientific thinking for a reason.

the space of all possibilities is infinite. the space of what people believe and say is enormous. the space of what is actually truth is comparatively smaller, unrelated and uncaring about either of those.

you can’t possibly consider everything everyone says - especially if what they are saying keeps changing as they see fit. you’ll just burn out if you try and end up in endless “discussions” with the people who are “just asking questions”…

that doesn’t mean i should dismiss or ridicule people, but it does mean i will not spend a single heartbeat thinking about another “proof” that the earth is flat or controlled by lizard prople or something.

yes, you do it yoursef, but you always need some external inputs and inspiration before you try something new. and where you get that inspiration and what you try matters a lot.

sometimes the research you are able do yourself is not enough because of hype. the hype alone can trigger “scientific studies” that get approved just because they are about a visible topic and the results get cherry-picked by “journalists” creating a false sense of consensus to everyone who didn’t spend their life studying the topic in detail.

see books like 80/20 running (based on a “study” done by the author on members of a single running club with n<=5 participants per group) or baby led weaning (based on the ability of the author to bullshit parents with baby brain) that created whole movements behind them and claimed to be based on strict scientific research.

sometimes even researchers themselves can get swiped away by the collective delusion (hype) even in otherwise very rigorous fields (e.g. string theory in physics or all the “AI” research going on right now).

the only way to be sure that what you are learning is right is if it can show past results. someone (many someones) took the risk before you and went with it. and they came up with predictions that panned out and applications that were useful and are well known.

you can be adventurous and try new promising things, but be aware of what you are doing, why and what the cost and consequences are.

yes. whether i asked my mom for one of her recipes she would readily tell me the ingredients… but whenever i asked how much of the thing to put she would get really confused. like, about 🤏 this much…

written like a true teenager with no life experience whatsoever!

why is everyone in this thread acting like girls (or boys) are this mythical perfect beings who always know perfectly what they know and it’s just a question of figuring out the puzzle and finding the best reaction…

maaaan! you must come from a country where the laws actually protect customers from the corporations rather than the other way around… otherwise you could never come up with such a naive statement.

this! the megacorporation receives 500k donations, which they transfer to CEO’s son’s “charity” that spends 99% of it on the said son’s salary. he buys another ferrari and the charity sends some flowers to a children cancer hospital.

yup. how is that not obvious to anyone is beyond me… some of those workers have contracts that would require amazon paying severance in case they would just fire them like so many other companies do. better make them leave on their own.

that is an interesting idea. still… you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts… you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn’t help much.

you are right - it doesn’t have to be one or the other… I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don’t know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.

I was thinking about something like this but I think it’s ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:

1. you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.

2. you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots…) so that wouldn’t work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.

i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.

I went through depression before and I got out successfully. I know where I am and I know what I need to do to get out. I recognise that the biggest problem is self-delusion and all the cognitive biases that make me feel miserable and powerless… there is also a difference between subjective and objective reality.

I also tried a few dead ends on my journey and I can confidently tell you that the thing you wrote above is not only not helpful, but can be harmful to people that are in a bad place and cannot see through it. People that don’t know any better and spew bullshit like this (or worse, drank their own kool aid) are one of the reasons why it is so hard to get better in a world we have… so cool T-shirt bro, have a nice day!