Would be very interested to know if Meta (listed as a "partner" organization) is providing financial support, like how fellow partner the Ford Foundation lists a $50k grant[1] in February 2024 to the Exchange Point Institute, which is the "fiscal sponsor" of the Social Web Foundation[2]

[1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/our-grants/awarded-grants/grants-database/exchange-point-institute-149412/

[2] https://socialwebfoundation.org/donate/

You may want to double-check that math ;)

The people stalking our neighbourhoods preying on people’s success

Interesting phrase there. Whole piece was definitely overblown, but this kinda gives away the game.

I recently read a super weird essay written in ~~2017~~ 2007 by the other Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, called 'The Straussian Moment' - and it's wild how they're still talking about some of the exact same things.

For anyone wanting insight into the particular brand of fascism coming out of silicon valley these days, it's worth a read.

Thanks, yeah admittedly I hadn't read the entire article before posting - and quickly realized the answer to my question when I did! I should really know better than to do that :)

Anyway, maybe the question I should have asked is more like, "why the heck did they give arbitrators so much latitude" - which it sounds like we agree on!

Ok yeah that's super interesting, and maybe kinda sums up the whole thing: the devs make tech that reduces the opportunity for thought and engagement, and that frictionless experience results in worse outcomes for users, but better outcomes for profits.

And yet, paradoxically, there are probably plenty more folks like yourself that would prefer to use a different kind of app!

I think there's a bit of irony in that the most 'frictionless' (and dehumanizing) way to interact on Lemmy might be to hit the downvote button. It's the thing that rewards the knee-jerk, un-considered reaction.

In a way, the downvote button is the thing that perfectly expresses the demand that one's experience confirm to pre-conceived notions of comfort - without having to face a response from the person being downvoted - and denies the downvoter the potential for growth.

I like this essay too :)

Thanks. Although to be honest I'm not sure what their edit was - does Lemmy not have a way to view a post's edit history?? Seems like a problem...

I feel bad saying it but a lot of them probably aren't vaccinated, so

I hear you on this - Akkoma does this by default, but the issue there is, let's say someone on a tiny server posts an image, even a relatively small one - if it gets boosted by an account with 10k followers, that small server will effectively get DDOSed, assuming enough of those clients are online.

That's a good question. The best answer is, I don't know!

But if I had to guess, based on the small amount I've learned:

larger servers most likely benefit from economies of scale. They'll be using CDNs, and will often have several people on their server following any given remote account, rather than just one. So the per-client energy use is almost certainly lower than for small servers.

But it's still tough to know whether it's the client or server using more energy. IIRC with video streaming, the end user's device was a big factor in overall consumption - but it's not like the server is chugging away 24/7 fetching media for you like a Fediverse server is.

For single-user servers, or servers with only a few accounts, I expect the server (and all the network infrastructure in between two servers) is doing a lot more work than the client(s) - unless it's like, the server is on a raspberry Pi and the client is running on a powerful desktop for a lot of the day, or something. Again, many factors at play.

Really though, the question I start to ask in all this is more about, which parts of the system are the most difficult to justify?~~___~~

Nice. Yeah Gemini is pretty cool, and that actually reminds me, I have to publish this piece on my gemlog as well ;)

Haven't tried tootik either but thanks for pointing me to it, will check it out!