- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse as well and I’m not feeling quite as optimistic as the author here. But they’re absolutely right about the corporate side of the internet. The mainstream that is controlled by the rich and driven by greed. You need FOSS to have at least a good base you can build on top of. Profit oriented platforms have failed us as a society.
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I’m glad someone’s into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There’s no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That’s why it was written and that’s what it does. End of story.
So refreshing to see someone call out Bluesky for what it is.
It is, but it also sucks that it is. I don’t know why people continue to have such blind spots, but given who and what is behind bluesky, why would anyone, ever think it was ever going to be open or anything but twitter 2.0?
I’m really baffled at why people are so unwilling to learn from history.
Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a … different read on things than I do.
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.
IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.
Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.
My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.
If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.
I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.
I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.
My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.
Well it’s a bit more complicated. A really significant reason search isn’t that comprehensive even on a big instance like mastodon.social is that Mastodon prioritizes privacy and has made it optional to be included in the search results with mastodon.social also opting to make it disabled by default when they added it.
A second problem is that if you’re on a smaller instance you may not be seeing enough posts because they don’t propagate there. This also affects hashtags. There’s projects like Holos Discover fediverse search engine and Fediscovery that are addressing this problem but they won’t change the fact that many users simply have indexing their posts for full text search disabled.
This article would have been better without the ableist slur against people with NPD.
Y’all will find something else to screech at. It’s just a never ending loop off finding something to be pissed at.
I have NPD, and I don’t like it when My disorder is shortened and used as the word to identify Me. I’m not a “N*rcissist”, I’m a person with NPD. Call Me a person, not a disorder.
Serious question: isn’t the word separate from the disorder though?
We can describe people doing antisocial, paranoid, or dependent things even when they don’t have the associated personality disorders. We can also describe someone generally as antisocial or paranoid if they display those traits regularly, regardless of any underlying diagnosis. Is it different with NPD?
The word “autism” originally came from psychiatrists’ perceptions that autistic people are preoccupied with ourselves. So if I say “My boss is so autistic, it’s disgusting”, is that okay? Etymologically, it’s valid. I’m not talking about a disorder. But I don’t think it’s an okay thing to say.
When psychiatrists made narcissism a label to apply to vulnerable people, I think they made it off limits for casual comments. I’m careful about labelling people as antisocial or paranoid too. Those are serious words used for serious conversations about mental health. That means they can be dangerous in untrained hands. Think of those words like power tools. You don’t pick up an angle grinder and start waving it around without the proper training and carefulness. That’s going to get someone hurt. These words have just as much destructive potential, so we need to treat them the same way.
I appreciate the example and I think I see your point. I agree with the underlying logic, in general, but applying it to the N in NPD seems an over extension.
Dictionary definitions for the two terms, as records of common usage, are notably different. Autism refers solely to the condition so your example sentence would be an inappropriate use. Acceptable and understandable in the language, but an uncommon application of the word. On the other hand, narcissism is used for general egoism and self importance first and for NPD second.
This of course doesn’t invalidate your feelings when hearing the word or desire to protect others from the same, but maybe this can offer some comfort if the most common usage is not intended or even understood as a slur or even a reference to folks with NPD.
But if we go even further back in history, to the very origins of the term, it’s not good. There’s an ancient Greek myth about this teenage boy, Narcissus. He was 16 years old and very beautiful, so everyone wanted to marry him. But he just wanted to be alone in the woods and be a hunter. Bring back food for his community. But every time he returned to civilisation, he was inundated with marriage proposals. And he was just a boy. So he loses his temper and tells one of the people sexually harassing him, Ameinias, to go kill himself. Ameinias actually does if, because he’s genuinely obsessed with Narcissus, and as he does it, he prays to the goddess Nemesis for revenge. So Nemesis curses Narcissus to be capable of beholding his own beauty. Next time the kid comes across a pond, he sees his reflection in it, becomes obsessed with staring at himself, and dies of thirst because he can’t tend to his basic needs.
So this is an aro/ace child in an aphobic society who was sexually harassed, lost his temper, and sentenced to death by a god.
A lot of people perceive Narcissus as some kind of abuser, and I think these readings of the myth come from just how aphobic Greek society was at the time. They thought if you’re pretty, then you owe people sex, and if you don’t want to have sex, then you’re stuck up and full of yourself. It’s disgusting. And I’m not comfortable with the way our society has spent 3000 years mocking a queer child. Even a fictional one.
So no, I’m not going to become okay with hearing the word used as an insult. I’ve genuinely done a lot of research on this issue and I’m convinced it’s bad. As an asexual, I relate to Narcissus. As someone who suffered child abuse and now has a harmful relationship with My self-image, I relate to Narcissus. Our society hates people like him and people like Me because its values are all twisted up, same as the ancient Greeks.
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.
What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it’s disappointing in lots of ways too.
Added: the article is mostly about Mastodon which is more pleasant than Twitter because it lets you listen to just your own selected coterie, also not entirely good.
Those are very basic algorithms and they are public. You can see exactly how they work.
