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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

    There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

    The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

    I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.




  • Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They’ve sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.

    Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.

    Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.



  • Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.

    Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.

    Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.

    I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.

    Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.