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.
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.
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.
it could and did happen. I remember reading about 6 year old kid getting lost at the airport gate (i think it was in germany) only to be discovered when they finally looked for their parents in italy. just went away while parents were preoccupied with something else and looked like someone else’s kid while boarding the plane. as a parent travelling with small kid I can totally see that happening anywhere - kids can just walk anywhere with no questions asked as long as they are next to an adult who looks like they could be their parent.
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:
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.
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.
opens a post with question in the title that is lamenting that news don’t give any real answers and focus just on “trump bad” story.
all top comments are just “trump bad” and “all bad government” and has to scroll deep down to find an actual answer to the question posted.
leaves understanding much better why news don’t focus on context and give just emotional side stories.