As someone who’s in the tech space I would say I’m very influenced by materialism. Arts don’t do much. Not that I don’t enjoy operas or paintings, but it’s not something would make feel like there is a new world as technology would.
Technology these days tends all to have the same flavour, because the tech bros behind it tend unreflectively to share the same kind of outlook on the world. Sometimes engineers can be overly confident that they are dealing with the most important things, but the unexamined outlooks and philosophies by which they live end up shaping our world through the technologies they implement.
As someone working in tech who studied arts and continues to be active in the arts, the experiences in life that have transformed how I perceive and understand the world have never come from technology, but often from arts. Arts can change your perceptions, can open you up to ways of perceiving that you didn’t know were there, and can reveal that your assumptions about the world were just assumptions.
That’s not to say that technology can’t be innovative and world-changing. A number of technologies around today have the potential to transform society, but the ways in which they can transform it will be dictated not just by the technologies but by the people who realize them. I don’t think it has always been the case that technologists are uninterested in the arts, but I suspect it’s no coincidence that today’s crop of tech leaders are both uninterested in the arts and conspicuously blinkered in their vision.
A lot of what you mention is pretty accurate. Take the internet and websites. I made a website a year ago for my portfolio.
It doesn’t have a landing page, its purposely difficult to navigate and I used zero seo when designing it. I showed it to the CTO at the company I worked at and he thought it was great, but every other person at the company was saying the website is shit, I dont know how to use it.
Its literally just a menu, which has clickable menu links at the bottom in case you’re really that dim. But because it involves hunting and clicking instead of just scrolling downwards mindlessly its “wrong.” These same people see nothing wrong with ad copy laden seo articles.
I haven’t changed my website and instead moved from working in tech to working in the arts full time now. I’m sorry, but IT people mostly fucking suck and they’re just never going to appreciate anything that doesn’t fit their parameters of tolerance.
As a hard materialist, I don’t see art as separate from materialism. What art does is materially express immaterial things - a good piece of art isn’t just an image or description of events, it’s an idea or concept that has been made into a material form.
Art isn’t just a description of the world. The point of art is to change it.
I’ve heard that adage about the porn industry pushing innovation, but I’m not sure it’s entirely true. Like, I believe “the world standardized on VHS because the porn industry did” is outright false.
Hosting porn brings down a whole load of legal scrutiny onto your service. In some places in the world it’s outright illegal or the effort it takes to do it within the law is so great that it’s not worth doing. Several instances don’t want to even attempt it. Instances that do probably need to specialize in the kind of attention that sort of hosting requires.
You want to say porn is what allowed Blu-ray to beat out HD-DVD?
I doubt it. By the time that format war arrived the internet was well and truly established, so I reckon the vast majority of NSFW content was consumed with no physical media.
Another reason would have been Xbox Vs PlayStation. The Xbox 360 had an HD-DVD as an optional extra, compared to the PS3 including Blu-ray as standard. Which was going to win?
The porn industry’s influence is vastly overrated.
I thought about that too, but I also can see a scenario where as the userbase grows, one instance’s community is seen as the “default”. I suppose the upside is that if something happens to one instance, there will be a backup of sorts on another instance - which in a way is sort one of the points of decentralisation.
Yes, that’s a risk, but it also gives communities the opportunity to migrate to a new server in case they get captured by hostile mods.
For example, my government will have presidential elections next year, and it’s trying very hard to preemptively co-opt the corresponding subreddit with propaganda. If the sub had joined the protests and their mods removed, today it would likely be captured by government people. That won’t stop them, for example, from trying to offer money to some mods in exchange for preferential treatment, or even mod privileges, but here the competition means they won’t control the sole community with the country name.
I live in Liverpool but I’m down south at my mum’s, and it’s not much better here. Feels chilly in the mornings. I was down on the South coast at the weekend and it was much better there, they really do get all the good weather compared to the rest of the country. It’s just a shame it’s full of boring people.
The way I see it, the fediverse itself is the conversational arena, not any particular community within the fediverse. Communities limited to a single instance shouldn’t have primacy, because some of those instances don’t even want their communities open to certain other instances on the fediverse. Since some of the biggest communities keep defederating each other over petty moderator politics, it’s absolutely a good thing that the the fediverse has multiple communities for the same topic, or even with the same name. As long as you’re on an instance that doesn’t defederate other instances, you’ll see them all and can interact on them from a single account. More than that though, people wielding too much centralized power always turn out to be dicks, so anything that maintains decentralization of power is good.
This is how it is supposed to work, yes. However. i will say one suggestion going forward might be some sort of voluntary community sub-federating. The idea is that communities from different instances that are considered similar in topic enough to be under the same umbrella would federate or group with each other. A person who subscribes to one might see content from other communities that have voluntarily opted into this feature. It would connect the scattered communities of topics while also allowing these communities to “defederate” on their own from other communities of the same topic, in the event that malicious communities attempt to joing where they do not belong.
This could also be given to the user, the ability for users to group their own subscriptions together, but this would put way more work on the end user and may not be as intuitive.
For example, I am subscribed to one Silent Hill community, and I think I am the only member beside the mod, with no posts. It would be nice if I could see content from other Silent Hill communities in that feed.
This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there’s enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don’t see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It’ll start slow but if the trend continues, it’s inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they’ll use affiliate links for merch and promos?
Some hearing aids have bluetooth integration. He might have somehow paired and is actively listening, or he is just cranking the volume to eleven while sitting in front of a plastic cone to amp the sounds :P
I know the fact that it doesn’t have one is kind of a feature, but I do wish Mastodon had some sort of algorithm feed. I liked that after I liked a couple of football/soccer tweets, Twitter started surfacing popular football tweets, even if they didn’t have any hashtags.
This is the huge problem with Masrodon imo. Twitter has all kinds of crazy algorithms, often bad and leaning towards hate/fear. Mastodon seems to be on the far other end with very little to drive engagement.
This is why a Reddit-type use (Lemmy) is perfect. The algorithm is mostly human driven with upvotes/downvotes.
This a huge benefit of federated content. I have never been force-fed content from an AlGoRiThYm that was remotely relevant to my interests.
That said, if someone does successfully develop a bot that does take into consideration my eclectic tastes, it can be easily implemented due to the open nature of ActivityPub. It is unlikely be corrupted by commercial interests to manipulate me, and if it does, I have the ability to ignore it.
I mean I’ve found plenty of cool content, creators, and other accounts that completely align with my interests through algorithms. Right now the only way to find content that matches your interests on something like Mastodon is searching hashtags and hoping that people actually use them.
The problem with algorithms is that they drive you into silos without you even realizing it. They always start out as very helpful but then turn against the user unintentionally. In all honesty the best thing FB, Twitter, etc could do is allow you to completely turn it off. That way you can take a break from the silo to see the normal world. It’s why services like Reddit and Lemmy are working so well. You can go to a community and see similar stuff posted or go to the all pages and see shit you didn’t even know existed.
Its very easy for people to just camp on identically names communities on Lemmy.world, wait for confused newbies to their community because they’re also on lemmy.world and then the community is split (potentially no longer having mods on the new instance).
The potential lack of modding/mod engagement in the future is what concerns me most.
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