Interesting article, and I definitely agree I prefer clear instructions when those are possible.
I only have an objection. When it's said that no matter how well chatbots behave, it's bad design, and that they're being used to substitute expensive people; well, expensive people's interface is chatting too. So in that regard I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference. Obviously there is if the chatbot is badly behaved, but the article says that it's a problem even setting that aside.
Get your DeepSeek3 and r1 weights before it's illegal!
Advertising, cryptocoin shit, pay to play... This is an awful idea.
Interesting article. I knew a bit about the split between the covenants of civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights, but for example I didn't know the right to self-determination was introduced thanks to the Soviet Union.
A funny thing about the article is that it is not especially favourable to the Soviet Union--it reproduces the usual uncritical clichés--but even that makes liberals really annoyed.
I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.
Not so concerned on that--people being able to establish their tolerances for whom they want to talk to is fine with me. But if the system goes towards allowlists, it becomes more cliquish and finding a way in is more difficult. It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they're not handled another way.
It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.
I run my instance and that's definitely not my experience. Which is of course not to say it can't be someone else's. But something, in my opinion not unimportant, is lost when it becomes harder to find a way in.
I'm concerned that people are already eager to bury the fediverse and unwilling to consider what would be lost. The solutions I keep hearing in this space all seem to hinge on making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.
How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?
Same thing with reply policies. I can see the reason why people want them, but a major advantage on the fedi is the sense that there is little difference between posters. I think a lot of this would just recreate structures of power and influence, just without doing so formally--after all the nature of scale-free networks is large inequality.
It's possible FF wouldn't get away with something like integrating ad blocking by default, but in no reasonable universe were they required to do the PPA stuff and turn it on by default. Nor is it clear that it will lead to websites caring about FF compatibility--unfortunately many already don't.
The usual pro-advertising take. "It's ok that we're going to experiment without your consent on how to manipulate you, because we only use aggregated data so it's not personal, it's business."
Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.
IMO bridging or translation isn't federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it's hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.
I wouldn't really count Mastodon/Bluesky bridging as federation. They're incompatible protocols that were never intended to work together (arguably Bluesky was explicitly designed to avoid using AP).
I'm not very convinced by this article. A lot of the "realities" are not, they're policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.