Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.

I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…

What… are you talking about?

Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that’s probably way less for many people.

Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn’t happen, I’m betting it’ll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days…

So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users… I’m glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I’m sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.

Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.

🫂

Yeah, that’s fair, for sure, to some degree. For instance large fractions of policing funding should be redirected into various social services, and military spending can get fuck off all together.

But also, wealthier people paying more than an equal share of tax is a good thing too, and provides lots of intangible benefits (e.g. better education systems and fewer people in extreme poverty and desperation leads to lower crime rates)

I think they probably appear in different types of situations, not all at once. And maybe different types of people/thinking are more prone to some than to others.

Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).

The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.

Less tax is better.

No saying that taxation as it currently exists it optimal, but any decent assessment of how to improve things requires a lot of nuance that is nearly never considered by most people.

OK, that would be funny

I think the answer is some kind of cynical optimism. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. You never know, they might all die tomorrow in a plane crash or something.

The sky isn’t blue in many cultures. It’s been shown that words for blue only occur in a language after that culture has discovered a blue dye. And that limitation in available words also constrains how you see and think about the world.

This is covered in Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language, which is an excellent read.

One of my favourite pages on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Not saying it’s not dumb, but it’s definitely not unprecedented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews

I suspect they just know their model is shitter than the other corporate ones, and want to reap the benefits of the FOSS community hacking it

You might be right. I’m not a lurker. I’m not a heavy poster either though.

It sounds like you should just try it out, and find out if your assumptions are true

I never saw a post from him on Facebook, I was wondering if he even posted…

Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…

I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.

I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.

I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.

I think you’re making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.

Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a “please boost and follow for federation” post to get them kick started.

But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.