I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.

Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.

You’re just saying I should practice what I preach and get off LW, is that it? Can’t be bothered, but fair enough. My proposal here concerns new users.

Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.

Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.

People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.

You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?

Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.

Yes and I answered that argument

There’s only one mexican instance

Join it and make it better.

it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad

Change that fact, or accept it, or use blocking features (which are not lacking).

Sure, these won’t be popular suggestions, but IMO social media should not be just another form of shopping, where we pick exactly what agrees with us best, and annoys us least, and then lock the door to keep everything else out.

Some interesting thoughts - and questions - here. Seems you posted them in the wrong place, given the paltry response. Or possibly at the wrong time (i.e. 6 hours after the herd had moved on, a perennial problem with social media).

It isn’t based in XML, and modern devs don’t want to use XML. As I’m not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

XML is space-inefficient with lots of redundancy, and therefore considered to be ugly. Coders tend to have tidy minds so these things take on an importance that they don’t really merit. It’s also just fashion: markup, like XML and HTML, is a thing of the 90s, so using them is the coder equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants.

This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

A nuanced take in response to casually lobbed accusations of Nazism? How come you haven’t been banned?

Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it’s not worth the trouble. If you’ve had a difference experience then good for you.

Try expressing a centrist or - heaven forbid (I haven’t actually tried this one) moderate conservative - position on a hot-button subject and see if you still feel that way.

Just don’t try to debate politics unless you already subscribe to the prevailing groupthink. In fairness, that’s true of any social-media forum, and the corporate ones have other problems on top.

Pretty convincing arguments. Thanx.

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

I generally agree but I still feel it’s important to keep some perspective. Bluesky is not the solution but it’s definitely progress compared to existing corporate platforms (because it has real fundamental differences - several articles posted here went into detail about this).

IMO the best argument against Bluesky is that it will suck up the oxygen for other, better, solutions. That’s a fair theory but it seems to me that there’s plenty of market share to go round right now. Everyone is still on the evil corporate platforms.

RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Agree, I use it every day.

Yes, good parallel, didn’t think of that. Perhaps there’s just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, […] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let’s say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there’s generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won’t go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a “good guy”, akin to Mozilla’s historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

Bubble-dwelling can indeed be a kind of sickness.