I’ll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person’s, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.

(Obviously these days the word “harmful” is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)

Freedom of speech as an absolute

Of course it’s not absolute, where did I say otherwise? Straw man.

paradox of tolerance

This just feels like a fancy reference deployed to back up intolerance.

Exactly my point. The virtual equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you happen not to agree with what they say.

Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.

Similar to: chough

It’s a type of bird but good luck knowing how to pronounce it. Ahh, English.

A few years ago I considered learning Greek. Abandoned the plan because Greek has the triple whammy:

• quite a hard language, with tricky grammar and different alphabet (phonetics easy tho)
• only spoken in one small country - not very useful (tho good for general culture - 6% of English lexicon comes from Greek)
• the locals all speak English (coz tourism) so you’ll have trouble getting a chance to progress

So: good luck.

Rigth - and downvotes fixes it? This is lunacy and detrimental to discussion/sharing.

Thank you. But anecdotally, it seems there are few of us who think this. I still don’t understand why.

Midnight Run (1988) but it was a VHS. Possibly the only movie I have watched more than twice, and I have watched a lot of movies. Very random.

I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

Interesting. Years ago I moved from an 18in desktop setup to something like your eeePC. Unexpectedly, I also found it fine. These days I have a 14in and it feels unnecessarily big and heavy.

If you’re happy doing things one window at a time (i.e. monocle view, or basically as on mobile OSs), turns out the floor’s the limit!

Also, if you don’t want to be part of the discussion, you are free to stay out. other people are participating and enjoying themselves.

In future then I’ll try to remember your handy advice and not say anything that might challenge anyone’s views or otherwise spoil your enjoyment. Cheers.

Since karma isn’t tracked, I don’t think it’s a real big deal having a negative score comment.

I agree this is an important counter-argument. My other points stand.

I’m not contradicting myself. You are not reading the question asked.

This particular alternative history is uninteresting because its premises mean you have to invent a whole parallel universe. In plain English: it could not have happened and would not have happened, for essentially economic reasons.

The interesting alternative histories are ones that turn on a single fortuitous event.

PS: I am saying that OP’s question is boring because it is unanswerable. It just invites a hundred other questions. If you want to ask THOSE questions, then ask them.

This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!

The downvote button. It’s a hobby horse of mine. Slashdot got it right: if you’re going to tell someone to shut up, there should be a small price to pay.

PS: to the inevitable downvoters. Let’s be clear that you are not just saying “I disagree”. You are helping to hide my comment; you’re literally telling me to shut up. Would you do that in person, without so much as lifting a finger to justify yourself ? Of course you wouldn’t. In person you would have manners. This is the problem I have with the downvote button. It incites people to behave like uncivilized infants.

Agreed on all counts.

The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It’s a phenomenon I still don’t understand.

Yes, good parallel, didn’t think of that. Perhaps there’s just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, […] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let’s say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there’s generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won’t go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a “good guy”, akin to Mozilla’s historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

For what it’s worth, I am one of those letters and it is somewhat irrelevant to my identity. My identity is the following: human being.

I consider the identity obsession of Gen Z to be mostly narcissistic self-regard. It reflects our society’s rampant individualism, where kids have become a lifestyle choice and pampered like fragile consumer objects. I don’t have any answers about how to fix any of this. Indeed I’m something of an individualist myself.

Be nice to people, but don’t feel the need to indulge their whims if it feels unreasonable.