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Important reminder. I bet Facebook would look like a jumbled mess to new users without help, compared to any of the open source offerings I've seen.


twitter et al are « easy to use » now because we have been using them for years and years.

have you ever seen someone use twitter or facebook for the very first time? it’s fucking confounding.

« what am i supposed to do »
« following? why would i do that? »
« why can’t i get to your uncle’s photos »

usability isn’t a secret UX sauce. it’s years of acclimation and the formation of communities that can bootstrap that acclimation for each other.

in reply to JB Carroll

"Easy" really just means "familiar." But to a newbie, neither Facebook nor Microsoft Windows is easy! I find both Diaspora and Linux to be simpler as a newbie to learn.
Unknown parent

JB Carroll
By the way, I really love the hospital bill comparison, haha. Double burn!


Seems like #facebook , surprise, still has no plan. Publicly defending InfoWars and Holocaust deniers; what the hell?


"Mr. Huang points out that the established tech industry is mainly funding the most immediately applicable technologies. “Life science and software get a lot of money,” he said.

More speculative technologies that don’t offer any obvious payoff aren’t as lucky. “Everything else is underfunded,” Mr. Huang said, noting that as a percentage of the overall economy, federal spending on research and development has fallen since the 1970s."



What a great article. Sums up many of the challenges regarding decentralization. I also like it's discussion of a modern corporation as a "Slow AI" designed to do one thing at the expense of everything else: generate profit. This explains why modern large internet companies probably won't ever change their business model. It goes against their slow AI and to do differently for such large businesses would be too costly and difficult.

If that's how slow AIs operate, I shudder to think about what actual AI will do once it's integrated fully into business decisions.


This excerpt makes me act after having considered to distance my communication from corporately developed social networking sites (i.e., #Facebook) learning from my research.

"Facebook has 1.37*109 daily users, so it is about 22,800 times bigger than Diaspora. Even assuming Diaspora was as good as Facebook, an impossible goal for a small group of Eben Moglen's students, no-one had any idea how to motivate the other 99.996% of Facebook users to abandon the network where all their friends were and restart building their social graph from scratch. The fact that after 6 years Diaspora has 60K active users is impressive for an open source project, but it is orders of magnitude away from the scale needed to be a threat to Facebook. We can see this because Facebook hasn't bothered to react to it."

This quotation from Rosenthal's blog blog.dshr.org/2018/01/it-isnt-… makes me both discontent and dissatisfied with how powerless most users succumb to media conglomerates and states. #politicaleconomyofcommunication #decentralisation #onlineprivacy #surveillance #civilsociety #newhere




Work trip may have been a bit of a wash, but at least I got see some sites while in Philly!




Can anyone on Friendica or Hubzilla find my friend's hubzilla? max@hub.malicious.technology. He can't find anything. #hubzilla




Not so much surprising but still somewhat shocking how some have already detached rhemselves from the rest of the world...

Doug #Rushkoff on:

Survival of the Richest – Future Human – Medium medium.com/s/futurehuman/survi…

#future


Tags: #dandelíon

via dandelion* client (Source)



Another Blog Post


Another one posted. This was quite a bit longer because I've talked about installing #nginx , installing and configuring #php , as well as #mariadb
in reply to JB Carroll

Thanks for the clear instructions. You strike a nice balance between educating and just getting the job done.
in reply to alysonsee (D*)

Thanks! I tried to be as verbose as I reasonably could. A lot of tutorials assume a lot of prior knowledge, and I know that was frustrating for me when I was getting started.



Moar Self-Hosting


Just added a blog to the stable of things I'm #self-hosting . Downloaded #ghost to document my self-hosting journey. Hope to document the configurations I made to get #friendica and #nextcloud running shortly. Check it out!