Traces of the Rust work gets merged in every version. They come in small pieces, and now the next version has even more abstractions that are needed for the M1 GPU driver to eventually get there.
I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it’s complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it’s that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you’re using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.
They’re not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the “dream” that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:
In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.
Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.
None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don’t see why we should expect that to be the trend.
3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.
Definitely there’s a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn’t mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What’s important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there’s always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.
Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there’s something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to “the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal” in the sense of having the same number of users.
I’m fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some ‘dream’ of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author’s own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn’t necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the “does three equal one” question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.
Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that’s not big enough to impose their will on the whole.
It really depends. If you’re in a smaller instance and you look at the global view, you’re going to see more of Mr. 16.5% than one of the smaller ones.
Though I suspect usage patterns and the way users interact with instances beyond theirs will play a role. But, in an immediate sense, I could see larger instances having a bigger voice (so to speak).
And now I’ll waffle and say it’s all a crapshoot because people are unpredictable and social media platforms even more so.
I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don’t think that’s really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.
if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom
I also seem to recall that you need to know how to drive a car in order to operate one safely? Where does this entitlement come from that you shouldn't need to know anything in order to benefit from the hard work of others?
Anyway, how hard is it to heat up pizza in an oven, to assemble a cake/cookies/etc. from a pre-made mix, or to follow any set of simple instructions really? The bare minimum requirements to get an instance off the ground probably are not all that high, and if there was a demand for such then people could even make installer packages (I would guess that the complexities come from configuration options and such, like which OS are you running, and from maintenance operations, etc., but those too could be streamlined, much easier than making cars self-driving).
Anything is possible, if there is interest in making it happen.
I actually do think it’s messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don’t do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.
There are no "thoughts" behind that, and anything other than that would be "communism" (actually the word used would be socialism, but that exactly and precisely equals communism by those who would say that, leaving no room at all for interpretation, nuance, or subtlety, most especially how the most revered USA institutions are socialist i.e. sharing like schools, the post office prior to it being crippled 40 some odd years ago, police, firefighters, etc.).
I find it ironic that the situation with Reddit is starting to parallel the decline of US democracy - it's crumbling, but nobody cares. Sorry, I didn't mean to get all political - but it's hard not to when you talk about things like this, b/c that's what governs our laws, at any scale.
On the one hand, this is indeed what is happening now, the largest instances for lemmy and kbin are taking the vast majority of the new users. I think though that this is because people are signing up before they know what they are signing up for.
I think the point stands that while these large servers can handle the load while still federating fully, it's not a real problem. The problem with classic centralised systems can be seen with reddit right now. People are leaving because they are enforcing changes on people and there is no alternative. Whereas here, if these larger instances decided to place some draconian measures, people could simply say "no thanks" and sign up elsewhere. That is not compromised by having huge instances. I don't think these things can end the fediverse though.
what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.
Not sure how that works. With emails, if I move from [email protected] to [email protected] I lose my old emails and people trying to contact me there, but I can just start over. If I remember peoples’ emails I can also tell them I moved to protonmail and to talk to me there. With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities; but I can just start over. If I remember people’s usernames and subscribed communities I can tell the people I moved and to talk to me there, and re-subscribe on the new account. Unlike with email I can still see my old account’s comments and posts, but otherwise I’m not sure how moving accounts in the Fediverse is different from changing emails.
With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities
That is in no way an inherent limitation. It's just a current limitation with Lemmy and kbin.
You can move from one Mastodon instance to another and take your followers and follows with you. And if you move to a Calckey-bases instance, you can even import your old posts.
You can actually move your email between services. But that rarely applies to private accounts. Moving business accounts between providers is not a big deal, just takes time to import/export data, which is kinda slow over IMAP.
Uh, no, because women are underrepresented in the software industry and there’s a clear bias against non-males in this area. Only 5% of developers identify as female[1].
I only meant to celebrate diversity, and give a fuck you to this techbro society. I hope more non-males tune in to Asahi Lina’s livestreams and realize to not give up an interest in programming because of their gender.
Exactly this. And it shows a good example for other underrepresented genders that there are others too in the field and they are absolutely amazing; seriously in the top 1% of the devs.
There is no proof to be a bias against non-male in the programming world. As far as I know, any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming. Worse, countries that are less egalitarian are a more equal ratio of women and men, like India, as opposed to a lot of western countries. It’ll never change unless you manage to brainwash a good amount of women into thinking they like programming, despite them not liking it.
any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming.
Sexism is not constrained to a single nationality, and the patriarchy is international.
Maybe you’re not aware, but what you just posted was a misogynistic screed. Do better.
I would love to see Apple go down the route of actually supporting modern OpenGL and Vulkan on their hardware. The hardware is amazing but forcing software to rely on Metal just holding it back especially when it comes to games.
Because people treat apple as if it's the pinnacle of design, performance, and usability. People who want to game on their hardware should have it so hard that they will take anything they can to make that possible on that hardware. If Linux becomes that thing that makes it all possible, so much so that it becomes common knowledge "if you want to game on a mac, install linux", then finally some fruit worshippers could possibly see what surrounds them instead of their myopic view of their fruit god.
Mac missed the gaming train two decades ago.
It's never too late for a corporation of their size to wake up one day and decide "well, now there's some kind of a reason to make gaming on mac possible". I can only hope that if they're pushed to that, that linux is so far ahead that it becomes difficult to get back their followers. If by some miracle Valve decides to invest in making linux work on mac, there would be two giants in the game.
Well, they sort of support Vulkan via a translation layer called MoltenVK. This is how the Dolphin emulator was able to get GameCube games running on M1, for example.
That’s probably the most that Mac users will get, unfortunately - the only games that Apple will care about are the ones exclusive to their Apple Arcade service, which will therefore use the Metal API anyway…
Those people are legendary. A bunch of nerds singlehandedly defeating a multi-billions dollars business. I have an M1 for work, if they can manage for Asahi Linux to take advantage of the GPU, I will do 90% of my work on Linux.
if they can manage for Asahi Linux to take advantage of the GPU
Umm, it already does for quite a while now (at least for regular usage). The work they’re currently doing will enable people to play games and other GPU-intensive work.
Yeah. And I find myself vacillating between agreeing with and disagreeing with the idea of defederation or partial defederation.
I think it requires enlightened admins to walk the line, which is a challenge. Not knocking the folks that run their respective instances, but they are humans who have their own motivations.
There's a lot less angst to be had if people could migrate accounts here. Once you have that freedom, it just becomes about respecting freedom of association for admins as well as for users.
If an admin doesn't want to host content coming from another site, that's really their choice. If you want access to it, you have the choice to move to another site.
And that choice becomes a lot more palatable if you can move easily with minimal losses.
So you find an instance you love, with a federation philosophy you agree with, and build up a brand (for lack of a better word) there.
What happens when that philosophy either changes or allows the instance to become something different than what originally appealed to you? Do you suck it up and stay or try to create a new presence elsewhere with minimal damage?
Wow what a neat project, I have spent a lot of time recently working around vulkan on m1 machines with compatibility layers and while it’s not a huge pain it does suck to miss out on some of the more powerful features of vulkan that the hardware is certainly capable of. I’m not keen on learning metal to bridge the gap and this is just what the doctor ordered.
It’s certainly a great read and is worthwhile, however I fundamentally disagree with the base premise that the goal of a federated system is to be uniformly distributed.
Why should an instance focused on a niche topic have the same representation as a general instance? Why should either have the same representation as one with abhorrent content?
Choosing your instance is effectively a statement that you agree with the mission of the particular instance. The number of low user instances demonstrates that there are a great number of people that share the author’s vision of federation.
Because small instances tend to die out in the long run. You can see this with OpenID. OpenID promised us, the users, a way to have one set of credentials to login everywhere. But years later you go to a new site and all you can set are just three options: Facebook, Google and Apple.
Choosing your instance which is not a top dog means that some day you’ll have to migrate. So if you’re smart enough you just sign up for the biggest instance from the start. And that will only speed up the decline of small instances.
Hard to imagine a Linux user would want to run anything on hardware that costs a fortune and is also completely and intentionally unupgradeable and irreparable…
Much less that they would go to such great lengths to bring such software into existence.
Easy to imagine when you understand that this is developed to support hardware that is widely popular and that will be sold by a lot less in the second-hand market in a couple of years, and that this makes far easier for people that are currently stuck in this walled garden to experiment with free software.
True, but the M1 MacBooks have really taken a beating in price. And the Airs were already quite a good deal to start with, so they do still seem competitive (8GB RAM notwithstanding). Been using a base model air since launch, and unless I hit swap super hard (I rarely do) it’s still great :)
There’s not a whole lot of good options for decent ARM PCs and the M1s are legitimately pretty good machines, repairability aside.
Even if you can’t repair them at least it’s pretty much guaranteed they can at least have their OS upgraded to a libre one. There’s going to be millions of them on the used market in a few years for cheap.
I have zero complaints about the hardware of my work provided MacBook Pro, very nice machine to use overall.
Are they the best bang for the buck? No. But Linux isn’t just about getting as much as possible for as little money as possible. Not everyone wants to daily drive an old bulky ThinkPad because it’s free-er. I’m happy with my framework but the battery life, keyboard and touchpad are quite inferior compared to my work MacBook. I wouldn’t buy one for myself, but I can recognize it’s still a nice machine and it’s much better than whatever crap Microsoft is pushing out with its Surface line.
Meh, if just wanting a lightweight laptop that’s fast even when unplugged there’s people who would be OK paying $700 for a M1 MBAir or a bit more for a 16GB version. They’re great laptops, the Rust compiler is very fast on M1/2 and with no fan noise. If buying Apple Refurbished they’re like new.
I’m on a refurb M2 Air that I picked up from Apple for peanuts. It took me about 15m to get NixOS running on the thing, and it’s going to last me for 10 years, if my old MBP is anything to go by.
Also, regardless of the hardware politics, I’m not sure I’ve been in awe of a project as much as I have the Asahi team. They’re just doing so much so quickly and with such command of the subject … and they’re so young. It’s a joy to watch them work.
The author seems to be injecting their own version of what they want federated software to be on top of what the fediverse is.
It’s not the panacea that will break the capitalist oligopoly and bring about The Revolution.
It doesn’t require an idealized future where ever person is tech literate enough to host their own email server.
It’s not a system for close friends to congregate in small social circles.
It could be a lot of those things, but the author is projecting. It’s software that is decentralized, can be connected to willing partners, and each instance has the freedom to set their own rules about who they do and don’t communicate with. The author seems to be adding their ideal goal of what the software should be to what it is.
I don’t really agree with this article. The argument seems to rest on the idea that a representative democracy is a compromise on direct democracy. In reality, even though I have the ability to meaningfully participate in every election a direct democracy would entail, I have no desire to because I have other things I would rather spend my time doing.
Similarly, even if I have the ability to run my own instance (admittedly I do not, but many of us early adopters do), I do not want to. I’m happy to let other people do it as long as those people seem like broadly agree with my morals. I don’t need an close relationship, just a trustful one. This digital forum inherently has even better benefits than real life; if I realize I dislike my current instance, I have the option to move to another instance or create my own. In real life I can only move to another district or hope to vote out my current rep.
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