underline960 @ underline960 @sh.itjust.works

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I don't understand the purpose of the letter.

Bluesky is, in practice, not decentralized.

It has the potential to decentralize, but if the community stops calling bullshit when Bluesky claims to already be decentralized, it would lose the one incentive it has to actually follow through.

What are you talking about? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. all have "subscription fees generating recurring revenue" and are famously "exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market."

Uber took 15 years to become profitable, and Spotify took 18 years.

Again, I'm not defending any of them (they all exploit the people who make their service work), but so far AI seems to be going down the same road.

Isn't that the case with a lot of modern tech?

I vaguely recall Spotify and Uber being criticized relying on the "get big first and figure out how to monetize later" model.

(Not defending them, just wondering what's different about AI.)

WKUK: It's Illegal To Say

13.5%, slipping to about 12%

I know that 1.5% could mean hundreds of businesses, but this still seems like such a nothing burger.

Technically, nothing.

In practice, who do you know that's using it and doesn't run Arch, by the way?

My point isn't that IRC/XMPP aren't technically capable.

It's that they're not designed for non-technical users.

I want corporate social media to die. Mastodon and Piefed are far from killing the beast, but they've made the more progress than most projects have seen in a long time.

I want corporate messaging to die. Matrix is far from killing the beast, but for a little while, at least it was trying.

I wouldn't mind going back to IRC roots if it could be made more user friendly and integrate voice and video chat.

Good UX/UI goes a long way to make it so non-technical people can join and strengthen the network.

I just need Plex to survive until I can replace it with Jellyfin.

Watch Space King and Space King 2 if you want to see independent animation targeted at mentally ill teenage boys and 30 year old men.

Seems untenable.

If I live in Europe and run a mastodon instance open to anyone, it's not like I or my server fall under a Mississippi law.

What are they going to do, sue my Serbian ass? Serve a restraining order to my Norwegian server?

Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)

I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but... they're not Discord replacements.

That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but a significant part of a network's resilience is the number of nodes and users.

Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.

Emergence: Happy End?

Reviews: Goodreads | Hardcover | Storygraph

I smell survivorship bias.

I have a 20% hit rate on this (literally 1 out of 5). It was okay; we caught up, chatted for a couple of weeks and then realized there wasn't much left to go on.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn't.

::: spoiler Edit: non-paywall link was added below.

It's exactly what you think.

This is why, at the end of the day, even amidst my anger and frustration… I do have empathy for people who don’t understand solarpunk. Because they are falling prey to the actual critique I have of the genre. That we simply need more of it. That there’s not enough out there that really delves into the nuts and seeds. At least not enough to overpower the AI slop and greenwashing and capitalization of these concepts.

It feels like solarpunk is suffering from the same problem that communism and socialism have for decades: the people who are trying to build a real movement under that name are getting drowned out out tourists and haters, to the point that the strawman version is more recognisable than the "real" version.

When I first learned about the movement, I was excited and started building my own project under the banner. As I explored more, I was disappointed by how much AI slop and pie-in-the-sky roleplay there was.

I'm still building my project, but I may not publish it as a solarpunk work because I don't want it to be tainted by association with the strawman.

I remember seeing these in malls, and I didn't think they were a game back then, either.

I mean, maybe this one actually is a game somehow, but... what a thing to take your inspiration from.

Israeli leadership is treating Gaza like a war crime buffet at this point.

"I mean, if genocide's on the menu, why not sprinkle in a little murder-children-by-starvation and robot warfare? It's my cheat day year and a half, after all."

users are left with far fewer community options

Where is the fediverse in this analysis?

Edit: The article references Bluesky fleeing Mississippi due to risk of fines. Do admins running fediverse instances run similar risks?

Bluesky was the first platform to make the announcement. In a public blogpost, Bluesky condemned H.B. 1126’s broad scope, barriers to innovation, and privacy implications, explaining that the law forces platforms to “make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines.” As Bluesky noted, “This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.” Instead, Bluesky made the decision to cut off Mississippians entirely until the courts consider whether to overturn the law.