HN

Comments (116)

• boriskourt
  I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
• dgellow
  Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era
• skybrian
  I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.
• Menu

  AreShoesFeet000
  > If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
• Menu

  Synaesthesia
  >I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
• Menu

  darqis
  The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
• Menu

  jonathanstrange
  This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
• sqrtminusone
  Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.Besides:> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
• PKop
  > I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?
• Menu

  tamad
  > We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
• Menu

  trentnix
  > So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamineAnd I'm out. The undisputed fact that Twitter was literally and prolifically coordinating with the government to suppress speech prior to Elon's purchase destroys your polemic narrative.
• kkfx
  Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored.But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people.Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ...It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades...The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...
• Menu

  amelius
  > If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.Wow.
• Menu

  satisfice
  I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
• zaps
  Holy shit that’s a lot of windows
• smitty1e
  > See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle.Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.
• Menu

  j3th9n
  Tldr: some dude totally brainwashed by the media.
• sn0n
  [flagged]
• Menu

  _wire_
  Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.To get a sense of this skimsfba.socialwhich is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
• Menu

  znpy
  > So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses.I stopped reading here.This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases.Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.
• Menu

  DeathArrow
  Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
• ArchieScrivener
  Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes.Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,...Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome.Vent. Move on.