Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@joelving I guess a more succinct summary of my point would be that "decentralization" is a catch-all mechanism for a pretty broad set of social and technical properties, and often people want some but not necessarily all of them.

@joelving That's true to a degree, but not entirely - for example, enabling reply controls on a post means you centralize the control over who can participate in that conversation, but it doesn't imply that it is therefore acceptable for the conversation to become inaccessible to everyone if the OP's server has an outage.

There's a distinction to be made here between whether something should be *conceptually* decentralized versus whether it should be *technically* decentralized, and those aren't always going to have the same answer. In the cases where they don't, the challenge is precisely in finding a way that gets you both answers. (At which point "centralized control on a decentralized system" is usually easier to implement than "decentralized control on a centralized system".)

@joelving There are some pretty severe accessibility implications in this, unfortunately, unless you are *extremely* careful about how you approach it (at which point it starts looking more like what we have now).

Likewise, you lose a lot of technical resilience - which isn't actually that important on a technical level, but *is* important in terms of making it Not A Big Deal when something goes down, which is in turn a big factor in making decentralized things sustainable at *any* degree of decentralization.

That's not to say that these can never be acceptable tradeoffs, but they are tradeoffs that need to be made very deliberately, compensated where possible, and with a very good understanding of what it gives and takes to and from whom.

There are some things for which the model you're suggesting makes much more sense than the AP model; code forges and community platforms, for example. These usually have a distinct 'home' and so decentralization on a protocol level doesn't matter much, and identity is really the only relevant factor. I don't think AP is that useful in Forgejo for example.

But for something that's trying to basically do emergent communities in a global shared Twitter-esque space, like Mastodon, I'm not sure that centralizing interactions onto servers would still be worth it once you reason through all the less obvious implications that it has.

@silvermoon82 The only annoyance is that I do not enjoy time arithmetic, but I've concluded that it's a small price to pay for never having to deal with Software(tm) to get paid

@silvermoon82 (Have been using this for like 4-5 years by now, clients who want timelogs seem to be happy with just receiving a .txt in this format as an attachment, and it gives me arbitrary space for adding notes and inventing new notation as needed for weird cases)

@silvermoon82 Literally a text file as a ledger 🙃

hours.txt, three-line entries with a date, starting time, end time, and the second line contains a comma-separated list of stuff I've done, then afterwards I tally up the hours worked and make that the third line, stating '$workedTime -> $runningTotal'.

Only option I've found that doesn't actively frustrate me about people's bad UI design while trying to get work done.

@virtulis For the hash thing I have a specific concern: wouldn't this be a problem for *partial* partitions? If node C partitions from node A but not from node B, then node B might have a dfiferent idea about what node C's last mutation was, even though it was a legitimate partition, right?

This could presumably be solved by sharing a *log* of hashes but that seems like it would get pretty bandwidth-intensive pretty quickly.

For the vector clock scenario: that seems like a possibly viable avenue to explore with some modifications (like enforcing sequential submission of mutations from any given server, though that rules out mesh routing of mutations as a resilience improvement), but it does seem pretty complex to implement in a scenario where the set of participants can change significantly over time, and in this scenario it's actually credible that one might burn a node on a single backdating event 😐

@azonenberg (What complaints about Electron usually overlook is that Electron doesn't actually use any meaningfully large amount of resources, and the resource use of Electron applications likely has much more to do with the background of the developers working on them than with the tech stack)

@azonenberg The first step would be to verify whether an application rewritten in a 'native framework' by, crucially, the same kind of developer, *would* actually be more efficient.

I think you're going to find some very interesting results there.

@alda 🤦‍♂️

@matty A related problem exists for the "curing autism" research, by the way. I know that there are some autistic folks who would actually want this; but any kind of research into it in the current political/social environment is ethically irresponsible, because *in practice* it's going to be used for eugenics practices and not for opt-in treatment, simply because the agency of autistic folks is too often not recognized.

@matty There's one part I can actually comment on here, and that's the "why some Autistic hates it as to get diagnose as Autistic". My perspective of that is someone who was formally diagnosed as a kid, for a very long time could not accept the diagnosis, and then much later in my life I ended up essentially self-diagnosing *afterwards*.

The issue when you get diagnosed eg. as a kid is that it is usually not by your own choice, nor do you control the circumstances; most of the time, the diagnosis is made on request of a parent, with the intention to find 'evidence' that there is something 'wrong' with you. They may not phrase it like that, but that's often the underlying drive.

The result is that the diagnosis then gets weaponized against you, long before you've had any chance to understand yourself and how you work and what you need, and with absolutely no genuine support being provided. It's just used to "other" you, to place you out of home, to socially isolate you, to try and "treat" (ie. remove) it, and generally only serves the interests of your parents, school, and so on, and not those of yourself.

Basically, being diagnosed as autistic without your consent or agency over the process, more often than not, only makes life *worse* for you. This has been my experience and I've heard the same thing from many others who have gone through the same thing.

This is different if you have already had time to learn how your brain works, and come to accept who you are, and what you need. Then a formal diagnosis can actually *help* you, because by that point you understand how it can be used to find accommodations, and you know when and how to tell people to fuck off if they try to weaponize it against you.

(There are exceptions, of course. Some parents really do the research and genuinely intend to support their kids, and to use the diagnosis as a tool for doing so. These cases seem to be rare, from what I've seen.)

@eniko I'm seeing the same thing in the other direction in various parts of fedi as well, honestly. Here the comments range from "don't complain about Bluesky, it's fine" to "Bluesky must die at any cost". A part of those comments definitely cross into "toxic and unnecessarily hostile", and at times are also racist, unfortunately.

I'm kind of somewhere inbetween; I am not hoping for Bluesky to fail, so much as I am *expecting* it to fail (because it chooses short-term impressions over long-term sustainability, and eventually the runway will run out, as it always does), and I'm hoping that enough people will realize this and have a chance to find better options before things are actually on fire.

Whether fedi is that better option, I'm honestly not sure. On paper, yes, it is, but in practice there's this big elephant in the room (no pun intended) that's called Mastodon and its horrible governance around things like moderation features. That's fine for a subset of people but definitely not for everyone.