Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • There have been many systems developed over the years for handling decentralized data storage, decentralized user identities, and decentralized decision-making. There are excellent options out there for all this stuff.

    IMO the problem is that there’s a huge “not invented here” problem, combined with a popular “ew, I don’t want to be associated with that technology (or more accurately with the group behind that technology)” reflex that has nothing to do with the technology itself. So projects like the Fediverse keep reinventing the wheel over and over, and whenever a project manages to do something right it’s rare for the other projects to abandon their own implementations to borrow from the best.




  • I think it’s generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn’t harm Reddit itself, the “value” of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you’re deleting it is because you don’t want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.

    So I wouldn’t bother.


  • Seems like lemmy.ml is really collapsing in on itself. Overall not good for the general health of the fediverse.

    I’d argue that a biased overly-centralized instance like that collapsing in on itself is good for the general health of the Fediverse.

    there needs to be some kind of accountability/ redress if open & free communities are going to be a long term project.

    The redress is having lots of servers to switch to, much like how on Reddit the redress was “start your own subreddit if the one you’re on is moderated poorly.” I can’t imagine any system that would let you “take control” of some other instance without that being ridiculously abusable.


  • One thing that might be nice is if there could be a standard for user IDs that would allow multiple systems to work seamlessly together.

    You could have Mastodon continue to focus solely on being a completely open media aggregator and social network, but also have some other completely independent and secure private messaging system that uses the same user ID system. Then if you want to send a private message to someone who’s made a Mastodon post you can use that and it “just works.”

    Creating a universal user ID system that would work across all of this is challenging, of course.


  • One of the important features of Mastodon is that you can choose what your feed is. Everyone’s feed has an algorithm determining what’s in it even if it’s just a simple “list the posts of everyone I’ve subscribed to in chronological order.”

    If someone else wants to see a feed of content that is curated and sorted in a different way, why get angry at them? They’re not forcing you to see that feed.


  • It sounds like they weren’t “being fed into an AI model” as in being used as training material, they were just being evaluated by an AI model. However…

    Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI?

    Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn’t matter what you’re actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.

    It sounds like Maven wants to play nice, but if the “general attitude” means that playing nice is impossible why should they even bother to try?



  • Looks like it.

    In addition to pulling in posts, the import process seems to be running AI sentiment analysis to add tags and relational data after content reaches Maven’s servers. This is a core part of Maven’s product: instead of follows or likes, a model trains itself on its own data in an attempt to surface unique content algorithmically.

    But of course, that news doesn’t give the reader those lovely rage endorphins or draw clicks.

    This is the Fediverse, having the content we post get spread around to other servers is the whole point of all this. Is this a face-eating leopard situation? People are genuinely surprised and upset that the stuff we post here is ending up being shown in other places?

    There is one thing I see here that raises my eyebrows:

    Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.

    But that sounds to me like a hackers.town problem, it shouldn’t be sending out private DMs to begin with.