Honestly probably a good thing long-term, lots of platforms have been dragging their heels in adopting better newer codecs, so maybe this will finally give the justification required to put in the engineering hours.

Ultimately Email is old technology, all the web frontends just get in the way more or less.

I use an email host that has roadmapped switching their frontend to one I don’t really like, so figured I’d get ahead of the curve and switch to a client that was open source and compatible with the typical standards — so I could learn it and never have to deal with another client again.

Ended up using Thunderbird, even for my old inboxes at the typical web companies

One client, all my emails in one spot, don’t have to deal with stupid UX changes being forced on users.

Not a fan of this model broadly. It discourages diverse membership and promotes cliques.

And what about when the AI owning class introduce intended bias?

It’s one the scariest outcomes possible. If people forego their reasoning and critical faculties for chat-bots. If you aren’t even the one thinking your own thoughts, who is?

It’s almost necessary at this point. At least some form of AI scraper prevention.

I had to take my public repos down a couple days ago, individuals and belligerents using botnets make blocking scrapers via normal means (user-agent/CIDR block) ineffective. So things like CloudFlare or Anubis are becoming necessary.

I think it’s a perspective thing.

Men are less likely to perceive themselves as potential SA victims (regardless of actual numbers): so the relative subjective “chance” of false accusations against them vs being victims themselves impacts their priorities.

Yeah, I mean that’s true of any social space though, if you say something agreeable (definitionally) you’re going to get agreement. If you view upvoting as consensus building (i.e “I like this” / “I agree”) it’s just a more concise representation of a reply saying as much.

But that is scrutable.

What becomes a problem is content getting surfaced/buried on non-scrutable metrics (typically engagement) — ragebait isn’t anything new, online or in societies. But when algorithms target content that gets engagement, ragebait is naturally surfaced in higher proportions. Often time such platforms completely bury content or make it impossible to find something not explicitly surfaced (YouTube search for example is widely known to be terrible here, FB rabidly buries comments on posts).

WRT communities, there definitely are instances and communities with very different rules, values and expected behaviors. Federation allows communities to pick and choose what other communities they think they’ll get along with. This includes banning individual remote users if they don’t follow local rules, or defederating entirely if other instances have drastically different values.

The federation model as described does well by my metrics. I can pick an instance that shares my values, participate in communities (in the Lemmy technical sense) that share them as well — and largely avoid or choose not to engage with people from communities (in the instance sense) that I don’t share values with. This is extending “freedom of association” to online spaces in a way that large platforms largely cannot and willingly do not enable.

I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

This is mostly getting into normative vs descriptive philosophy. If it’s scrutable that a site/instance is demoting everything non-aligned with a worldview; then on the Fediverse it’s users’ choice to leave (and part of ‘community values’).

In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

To some degree, yes. New Reddit is particularly bad about this, it actively buries unpopular replies (but it goes further, and doesn’t just use upvotes) — Software like Lemmy is better, you can easily set Sort by New or sort by Top as the default. There’s also no ‘Karma’ system that propagates across the site.

Sycophancy is a human trait, so it’ll always emerge in social systems; but normatively, our systems should not cater to these negative traits (e.g. Twitter).

For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.

Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.

We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.

It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.

Same.

I was sure the emotional manipulation tactic would be extremely effective. Guess it was a little too blatant, even for the general public.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Because people want fancy animations, images, videos, stylized text, etc. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to just use a browser under the hood.

With respect to CSS, there’s already several projects that recreate the Win 7 and Vista look.

https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/

https://github.com/Avayy/Windows-Vista-HTML-Clone-WIP

Not a requirement, but a preference.

Onlyoffice looks like it might be good, I’ll give it a try.

Can’t stand libreoffice, it feels much like Office 2007 which was the worst version I ever had to use — fixed with 2013 and 2016, but libre hasn’t caught up.

E: Found freeoffice which looks to have much closer parity to MS Office. I don’t have a problem buying perpetual software licenses in these situations. I’d prefer FOSS, but for productivity software it has to be conducive to getting work done.

There’s really only two programs that make moving to Linux very problematic for me, that’s Photoshop, and Word.

At least with word I can ultimately just sequester that into a VM, or learn a different document program if push comes to shove (RIP all my workflows for citations and templates).

But PS is pretty much non-negotiable, it needs GPU acceleration of a native environment to run well, and there just aren’t any alternatives that can do what PS does — I need real channel support (painting on channels, copying between them per layer, actual alpha support instead of naive transparency) and more. As much as I hate Adobe, PS is one of those tools that I just know intuitively, all the texture or photo manipulation work feels entirely natural, and I just don’t think I’m going to find that ever again.

So, if Linux people can get it working through Wine, it’s a huge relief that I can finally leave the Microslop ecosystem.

Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.