kemuri 🦀 @kemuri@social.cleverlibre.org

@monad_cat
Thank you so much for the link to UPU, that explains so much more than the "explainer". So if I am the head of government of a new country, I can create a new postal service and operate according to the UPU standard, which enables me to interoperate with other national postal services. My citizens may emigrate and others may immigrate. That indeed then is a federated network. Great! If the "explainer" explains like that, I'd praise its clarity.

But it goes on with "federated networks have been the default for human communications from the earliest days". That threw me way off, and now I know why. UPU is only established in 1874, and UPU Standards for interoperation seem to be only 20 some years old. The oldest such international organization being the International Telecommunication Union, it really only started with the advent of telegraph.

Federated network doesn't go back all the way "from the earliest days". It is a modern innovation, and I love it for that. If I discard the second paragraph, the first paragraph makes all the sense it needs already. Thank you again for this revelation.

@merc248@hachyderm.io @ridt
I agree Mastodon is definitely federated. But if an "explainer" of federated explains it so vaguely that I can say YouTube is partly federated and partly not, I don't think it explains much. I say it is a "promoter", since it tries to make people feel good about joining and using fediverse.

@therealfrozensummers A problem with the YouTube algorithm, and a lot of recommendation algorithms, is that they know about relatedness, but not the direction of relatedness. So someone watching videos debunking Nazi stuff may be recommended videos promoting Nazi stuff. I know I had to manually tell YouTube to stop recommending a dozen channels before my feed cleared up.

@monad_cat @ridt Where is the protocol for opening a USPS post office? Do DHL, UPS, FedEx, USPS interconnect with each other? If they do, where and how?

These questions prevent me from seeing a postal network as analogous to a Fediverse network.

Pardon me for the US-centric formulation of the questions, but if you know about similar situations in other countries, I am all ears. USPS is the US state-owned postal service, while DHL, UPS, FedEx are private shipping companies.

@kkomaitis The reason I was, I guess kind of "triggered" by the wording "competition" is that, I remember a number of cool SNS products which have ceased to exist in competition, e.g. Path, Yik Yak. I understand Ben's Aggregator model that Aggregators, despite anti-competitive behaviors, are actually superior in UX in the end due to network effect.

Users have ample alternatives even if Mastodon doesn't exist. For closer circles they may go to Discord. For image sharing and celebrities, Instagram or Snapchat. For news, trends and analysis, Reddit. Yet many would just go back to Facebook. And I think a lot of users have been doing that already. "Users" as content consumers, that is.

It's also not like Twitter would cease to exist. I do think Twitter has occupies a special place relative to the alternatives I listed above. If Mastodon doesn't exist, people could just begrudgingly stay on Twitter. To that end, I still don't think this Mastodon wave would last very long. I respect the work of Mastodon, I have just seen three supposed "decentralization" waves come and go, and prefer to wait and see now.

@trinsec Thanks for the correction!

@rickmans Reminds me of the Patreon x Discord arrangement, where the creator can make Patreon invite Discord accounts of patrons above a certain tier to their server.

There are also services like Pixiv Fanbox, where creators may publish posts only visible to subscribers above a certain tier.

Curious how a Mastodon version would pan out, but the exclusivity requirement doesn't seem to fit the federation culture.

TIL on #mastodon

You can both subscribe to and follow someone. Sometimes your follow needs to be approved by them.

Subscribing to someone would make their Public (and Unlisted? not sure) posts show up in your Home feed.

Following someone would make their Followers-only posts show up in your Home feed.

Keep in mind where your post would appear when you press the Publish button!

> Should not the individual user control his own algorithms?

To the extent a user is capable of using different curation algorithms, the meaningful practical control they have over every one of those algorithms is in terms of how well they can understand the learned parameters and query the algorithm. I mentioned improvement in granularity; replacing one algorithm with entire another is too coarse a control for my ideal.

Case in point, Twitter allows two options: "top tweets" and "latest tweets". We probably agree that's not a lot of control. How many algorithms is enough control? How much should the algorithms differ each other? How do you describe those differences? You end up with the same problem.

Learning based algorithms are costly to train, in all of labor, money and time. I prefer one big algorithm which can produce different feeds by complex queries, than many algorithms which you still have to pick which one by complex queries.

To that end, for example, I consider the "Topic" feature of Twitter a step towards more complex query. You can choose to subscribe to a topic, you can also choose to exclude a topic. I agree with complaints that the topics are not precise or not granular enough.

@rocks_cola どのSQLサーバーですか？MySQL8 ならINNER JOINとJOINの違いはありません。

> In MySQL, JOIN, CROSS JOIN, and INNER JOIN are syntactic equivalents (they can replace each other).

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/join.html