mii

I honestly thought that when they published an article about Yud in Times Magazine last year would be that moment. It should have had enough reach to trigger something, at least, and it was crazy enough as well. It was certainly the moment where I thought, holy shit, the weirdos have hit mainstream.

They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

Fair points, I guess. When I speak of advertising, I meant specifically that "ad-tech-driven surveillance economy", not the ability to post (or spam) your product down any given channel. I should have said targeted advertising specifically.

People who remember Usenet fondly either only hung out in the good parts (heavily moderated technical newsgroups) or are perfectly fine with defining online discourse as being text-only and gated by access.

I guess I am in that bubble, yes. I remember Usenet mostly as being rather heavily moderated as I mostly stayed away from the scary parts of the alt. hierarchy (esp. alt.binaries), and most of my interactions were with creative communities in the form of writing and fan-fiction on rec, as well as what I perceived as early safe spaces for discussions of LGBTQ issues on soc (especially SSYGLB). There were also some groups in my native language that catered to both of these interests in some of the language hierarchies outside of the Big 8.

But I suppose it's the same romanticized idea that Gemini follows and only appeals to me because I have somewhat positive memories. Idk, I guess I'm just kinda fed up with the modern internet, especially because I also see a lot of that ad-tech crap at work which doesn't leave me with a lot of hope that it won't get worse.

I’m probably gonna show my age by saying this, but in my opinion we already had the near-perfect federated discussion platform over 40 years ago, and that was Usenet.

On a philosophical level it’s not too different from what the Fediverse is trying to achieve. However, because it is a protocol and not a software, you aren’t bound to specific implementations. Everyone can implement the NNTP protocol because it operates on the same principle idea as email. And just as not one organization “owns” email or HTTP, no organization can own Usenet.

It’s also more of a “verse” than the Fediverse because it’s really fundamentally a different thing than the internet (as in the HTTP internet), and not a software layer on top of it. By that virtue, you don’t even have to bother with shit like tracking, advertising, or even large-scale data scraping because the protocol just doesn’t allow for it. (Doesn’t mean it couldn’t, of course. I’m sure a Google would come up with NNTP2 and enshittify it if it gained enough traction, but hey.)

In terms of moderation, on Usenet a mod is really someone who pre-reads messages and either approves them or not. You can implement the same tech that powers email junk filtering for that, and it works generally pretty well. It’s way more hands-off than anything Reddit or Lemmy or forums offer. Sure, for large enough groups this becomes a chore too, but I’d still rather work through a bunch of what basically amounts to emails than some convoluted mod interface on a website.

The only downside is that it’s not as easy to use, at least not for people who’re used to modern apps. On the other hand, everyone who’s ever written an email im Outlook or Thunderbird shouldn’t have a problem, and I’m sure someone could cook up a pretty smartphone app, too.

Really? Most I’m seeing lately is obvious bot spam with content that’s not only blatantly against the rules but outright disgusting.

CW: mentions of animal abuse, violence, and racial slurs

And that’s not even the worst ones. I’ve seen some which mention and promote CSAM. Reporting these seemingly does nothing.

I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.

And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.

Hell, I really hope it’s scraping the comments too.

With what an absolute fucking trash fire YouTube comments are at the moment and Google being suspiciously silent about it, I'm sure that won't cause any issues at all.

Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we're trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that "Usually there's no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT."

Usually.

Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it’s hard to unbake a cake and begin again.

I think the biggest problem is either the lack of active moderation or, if present, moderators which are too lenient. Not that I blame anyone who thinks that removing the fifteenth racist asshat for the day is not the best use of their time, but the best communities are the ones that to make the effort to keep it clean.

This has been true since the days of Usenet. The good groups were completely moderated to the point where some person had to manually approve every single posted article. It worked (as long as the mods weren't racist asshats themselves, which is a different problem), but in contrast, almost the entire alt. hierarchy was an unmoderated cesspit and to anyone who doesn't know how that turned out long-term: good for you.

Luckily I think we are seeing a rise in moderated communities again. After Usenet and dedicated forums it somehow fell out of fashion (with 4chan and Reddit being the pinnacle of using but muh free speech! to give bigots a platform). Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I do see many fedi instances who have stricter rules again and seem to enforce them in an attempt to create welcoming communities for everyone. I hope this trend continues.

(So this also means a large percentage of the people now left in sneerclub will be the worst, so it might finally morph into the boogyman the Rationalists always made it out to be).

Some people seem to be genuinely happy it's back, but that could just be the honeymoon phase, so let's see. I might even post there now and then since I still use my Reddit account because I stuck around thanks to discoverability in the Fediverse being just awful which means I haven't found a good replacement for a bunch of communities I like.

There are many good reasons to be critical of copyright, especially because it has been abused so much. Allowing big tech grifters unlimited access to everything everyone ever puts online because they promise to “democratize art” when all they really do it feed it into their spicy autocomplete engines which then flood the internet with AI sludge is not one of them.

Especially when the same fucking people then do a 180 and want protection for the shit their roided Clippy puked out.

Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn't it?

At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)