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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • This series of articles and replies has really made me think about the structure of the Fediverse (as a casual user, though in the software biz), and for that I am very thankful. It makes me think, though, that just as open source developers got around the “free as in speech vs. free as in beer” issue by using the word libre, if the Fediverse needs another term – or even just call it “capital-F federation” – to distinguish the kind of first-class federation that Christine and ActivityPub represent vs. the definition that ATProto has suggested (and even vs what lots of regular software/service companies mean when they describe a system of microservices as federated).


  • will_a113@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.mlWhy are we not banning algorithms?
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    19 days ago

    Algorithm is just a fancy word for rules to sort by. “New” is an algorithm that says “sort by the timestamp of the submissions”. That one is pretty innocuous, I think. Likewise “Active” which just says “sort by the last time someone commented” (or whatever). “Hot” and “Scaled”, though, involve business logic – rules that don’t have one technically correct solution, but involve decisions and preferences made by people to accomplish a certain aim. Again in Lemmy’s case I don’t think either the “Hot” or “Scaled” algorithms should be too controversial – and if they are, you can review the source code, make comments or a PR for changes, or stand up your own Lemmy instance that does it the way you want to. For walled-garden SM sites like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter/X, though, we don’t know what the logic behind the algorithm says. We can speculate that it’s optimized to keep people using the service for longer, or encouraging them to come back more frequently, but for all intents and purposes those algorithms are black boxes and we have to assume that they’re working only for the benefits of the companies, and not the users.



  • Algorithms can be useful - and at a certain scale they’re necessary. Just look at Lemmy - even as small as it is there’s already some utility in algorithms like “Active”, “Hot” and “Scaled”, and as the number of communities and instances grows they’ll be even more useful. The trouble starts when there are perverse incentives to drive users toward one type of content or another, which I think is one of the fediverse’s key strengths.







  • will_a113@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.

    Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).

    If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast





  • I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

    Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.